Thursday, 10 June 2021

Basement Waterproofing a Basement that has Structural Clay Walls Using Weep Holes

Pretty much. Looking at it from the outside, you wouldn't really think it because it doesn't show an obvious bowl landscape but once you see how water behaves during rains, you realize it needs grading but because of the property itself, it's just not very possible. The closest I might be able to do is take down a tree by the city street and then bulldoze the heck out of the land to grade down the street direction, but I'm not convinced it would be impactful enough to merit the money and effort. I've attached 2 images: both basically show the house and the land it sits on. I'll try to find one that shows the rear of the home and lot, but these two might give you an idea of what I'm up against. The South face has the best options where grading is concerned but considering how my perimeter drain sits basically 7-8 feet below the driveway level, it's somewhat moot from what I can tell, which is why we decided to bring the water into the basement to be pumped out to the city rainwater drainage (the 2" discharge pipe currently runs through some crawlspace and travels underground from under the add-on master bedroom on the South side of the home). Both images I was able to grab from Google Maps but neither show the 20' 4" solid PVC downspout extensions I currently have attached to the downspouts, with one being on the South corner of the porch and 2 being behind the home on the East side. The place that I get the most water is right there on the North-West corner: water tends to come in at a corner in the basement where the old wall meets up with new. Some of this is because the contractor made no effort to compact dirt or cement anything where the old block was exposed which runs underneath the porch. Instead, they simply dumped pea gravel down into the trench after putting a thin layer of tar sealer on their new walls whereby their masonry guy tried to seal everything as well as he could from the inside using some cut-to-size CMU along with mortar. So it's no surprise that water comes in right there and I'm currently trying to get a quote about how much it would cost to dig up the pea gravel and redo that as a worst-case approach, but it still wouldn't do anything about the water coming in as there's nothing that I think can be done about it from the outside.

source https://www.inspectorsjournal.com/topic/18931-basement-waterproofing-a-basement-that-has-structural-clay-walls-using-weep-holes/?do=findComment&comment=172774

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