Waterproofing Basement Walls | Finished & UnFinished Basement

we're here in middlebury connecticut and once again we found a waterproofing system that's been installed by another company that's the wrong system for this particular type of foundation on top of that you're going to see really bad ideas caused enormous amount of damage enormous amount of deterioration to the walls and all with genuine attempts in order to stop the water from coming through the walls [Music] so [Music] what i'm sweeping up is actually the deterioration of the wall as you saw when we were tearing it down and we were hitting the hammer and taking off uh the wood that was holding the the studs in all of this white powder that's the deterioration of the wall this lime the ingredients of concrete is sandstone and lime lime's the glue it's the adhesive that holds the sand and stone together and this is actually deteriorating and causing uh efflorescence the definition of efflorescence is chemically unfolding so all of this white powder is actually the breaking down of the concrete wall because of how they sealed it it created a situation where the wall expedited and increased the amount of deterioration and deterioration is actually rotting the lime out of the wall the less lime and a concrete wall the weaker the wall is and there's an enormous amount of lime that's just fallen out of this wall the reason you have a water problem is water fills up on the outside of your concrete wall your concrete foundation the area on the outside of this wall is probably six to eight feet wide when they originally were building the wall that was how much was dug down it was empty then they backfilled it in the soil they backfilled in had already been dug up rolled over bulldozed piled up and then brought back in put out filled that hole in the outside of the wall tamp down but you'll never get it as dense as the existing soil when you get a good heavy rain water follows the path of least resistance that area that six foot to eight foot wide area on the outside of the wall fills up with water creates an enormous amount of pressure is exposed to the concrete wall now concrete's porous by nature so water absorbs into the wall if if this wall were not sealed and water was allowed to evaporate through the deterioration level would be drastically lower than what you're looking at here this is a major deterioration level because of the type of sealing that they did concrete should breathe you should never seal it like this locking water into the wall with a tar based uh sealer like this is the worst idea you could ever had and you can see as we had removed the wall just how much damage has been done to this wall and looking at it and it's pitted concrete getting right into the wall with your hand that's weakening in the wall if you look here you can see the type of waterproofing system that's in here it's a gutter system that's where the water has to come up and fill up to and i'm gonna show you we're gonna be taking it out in a second and it's a little gutter it's about this big by about that big and it sits about an inch and a half below the floor water's got to fill up underneath the floor go over to it as we had said before but it's such a low volume system it does nothing to reduce that buildup of water on the outside of the wall the type of system that we use our super dry system puts in this much drainage this deep and it actually facilitates and speeds up the drop of the water buildup outside the wall and so it's there for a very little bit of time and and actually compared to this system never gets anywhere near as high so we're going to be able to manage that water table in heavier storms that it's only going to get about this high on the outside of the wall if we can do that we've fixed several different problems one we're not letting that water build up and create a ton of pressure pushing on the wall two the amount of absorption is going to be limited to this area here and we use proprietary products that we treat the bottom part of the wall that turns it from being porous concrete to non-porous concrete turns it into a concrete waterproof membrane and actually repairs the concrete as this product crystallizes and grows through the wall i mean it's really a a complete total fix not addressing a symptom sealing the wall addressing a symptom putting in a little gutter system within an inch of the top of the floor that's trying to address the symptom building code states that if you remove part of your basement floor if you replace it you have to replace it with a minimum of three and a half inches check your with your building inspector if you're ever gonna have somebody waterproof your basement call and tell them what the specs are ask the company hey how much concrete am i are you gonna replace if you're gonna put drainage in you have to move part of my basement floor ask him how much you're gonna put back if he doesn't understand the three and a half inch thing you got the wrong company he's probably going to give you the wrong system for your particular type of foundation the way a foundation is put together is is underneath this wall there's a footing footings are traditionally 16 inches wide walls are eight inches 16 inches they take the eight inches they put it in the center so it's stable leaves a four inch ledge on the outside four inch ledge on the inside the floor comes over and it sits on that ledge that's the idea the the footing holds the floor up you've got four inches of floor the basement we're in right now probably has around 70 000 pounds of concrete floor that's being held up by that ledge that's a really good thing it also butts up and holds the walls out so when water does fill up as high as we've seen here it pushes in that floor holds the wall in place they support each other it's three big pieces of concrete your footing your floor and your wall they all fit together and they support each other this particular system takes the floor entirely off the footing as you're about to see so you have the whole floor sitting on what's ever underneath you couldn't possibly have good support for 70 000 pounds of concrete floor but if you could keep that floor on top of the footing that's the way you want to install a waterproofing system a pretty clear comparison is if we look at the wall here where we have the sealer this and the the tar that's been on there that's been pushed off and all the duration behind it we're going to go over and take a look at at a wall over here that hasn't had tar on it now this wall still has had water absorbed through it because the type of waterproofing system that we have you can see water water has come through it because the type of waterproofing system doesn't drop that false water tape look at the water lines you see here see up here the concrete's perfect right as you go down here you can see that's how high water builds up in that backfill area that six to foot eight foot wide area behind this wall that was empty when they originally built the wall but the difference between what i just showed you over there where the tar was on the wall you've had water through here but you don't have the deterioration like you do over there where the walls literally disintegrating because they put the wrong type of sealer on the wall same effect that dry lock has on a wall is what that that tar does to a wall so you'd rather have a wall left alone and breathe and have some efflorescence come through and for the most part solid as opposed to disintegrating like that one over there with all that [Music] efflorescence you're going to see how well this thing is managing the water this is a high end suppose it's patented just shows you how much a patent means high-end it's called super high-tech basement waterproofing and this is what you have you have water sitting here on top of your footing what i need to have explained to me by the designer of this particular type of system this high-tech system as it's portrayed is how does this water with no pitch on on this on this system and it's sitting like this how does it get all the way around to the other side of the basement and into the sump pump to get pumped up out away from the house that's a mystery i don't think it can happen it obviously can't or else this water wouldn't be sitting here and soaking up into the floor and causing the floor to be damp and rotting out the bottom part of the walls this system that was uh is still here which we're about to tear out what they've done here is they've gone around a hot water tank and in order to protect in case this thing is if this thing blows when these things blow they shoot water out several inches in every direction so this is this is virtually useless as far as to protect against that so we slide this out of the way i can show you so ideally what you want to do is you want to be able to get straight across and have your drainage run continuously through here rather than going around there they have some great products that they have that are much higher have much higher lips on them that you can actually set the tank in and tie right into the type of system that we would be putting in so that that would be all gone now as we move over here this is this is kind of unique and it's it's part of that whole hodgepodge things we call it like the lego approach to to basement waterproofing where they just take pieces and if you look down there's like a little piece here another small piece here and a little piece here a tiny piece here and it's a lego approach do you see the cobwebs that are here all right so it's not like this has been staged or anything like that look where the water is you have standing water at this level and you have a waterproofing system in here and as we remove this you're going to see that the gutter system manages the water about this far down from the top of the floor so this whole area sits in water as you can see where it's exposed that means your floor is going to absorb water it's always going to be damp and you're never ever going to have a completely dry basement this is the wrong system for this particular type of foundation okay so you have this this little great train here that goes down about here and i imagine it's probably going to come out pretty easy so that pops out so here's what you have as far as your access if you look where the standing water is do you see where the water is here well this is the access to get into the drainage which has to go all the way across here to the pump so that's your access in order to this is the only drainage you have because the smallest amount of access is the only access you have because if it can't get through here it's not getting anywhere else think about it if you could get this drainage down around 10 to 12 inches and put a significant amount of drainage in that also would drop that water table that we're talking about on the outside that false water table and keep this from ever getting anywhere near the bottom of the floor let alone the whole floor sitting in it that's how you get your basement dry but look there's this piece here and then this is where the drainage is so let me just i'll just tap it a little bit now the one thing you don't want to be able to do is take a three pound hammer and be able to remove your entire basement floor i'm not usually the one doing the demo but when it comes to removing this type of a system it's not really much of a demo i mean you just look at it if you take a look here look look this is supposed to be moving water over to where the pump is if you see here the whole floor's sitting in water you see here with heavier rains this water would get up to this high and the whole floors is this close to having water overflow on top of it but if you look here how much absorption you're getting up into the floor you just can't get a dry basement with this type of system with this type of foundation we finished up here in middlebury connecticut and look what we found i mean it's amazing that these systems that are just wrong for a particular type of foundation we we broke up the floor we pulled it up there's standing water on every part whether it's the farthest place from the pump to the closest place to the pump the whole floor is sitting in water the floor is off the footing it's lost the support of the footing it's no longer holding the walls out we've got structural issues we've got volume issues we've got flow issues there's pitch issues there's every issue in the book then there's other issues where they tried to seal the wall where it created all kinds of problems expedited all kind of deterioration and disintegration of the walls the moral of the story i guess you'd say is make sure you get the right company to do the right thing for your particular type of foundation give us a call american drive basement systems hey if you like the video hit our like button subscribe so you can get our other videos as we come out and we've been putting them out like crazy and all different kinds of types of great information if you do have a wet basement check us out check our other videos out i think you'll find a lot of great info

Channel: American Dry Basement Systems

Views: 259,348

Rating: 4.8127089 out of 5

Keywords: American Dry Basement Systems, basement waterproofing, french drain, basement waterproofers, basement waterproofing installers, sump pump installers, contractors, Peter OShea, home improvement, wet basement, concrete waterproofing, waterproofing your basement, wet basement walls, basement wall waterproofing, basement wall sealer, basement wall, basement drainage system, drylok, tar waterproofing basement walls, efflorescence, how to waterproof a basement, waterproofing basement

Id: pgA7FqD2IR8

Length: 13min 43sec (823 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021