jkrodger

My husband and I have been in our 80 year old house for about 9 months now. We had some pretty hard rains over the summer and were very pleased that there was no water in the basement. Until yesterday when we got hit with 4" in one day. Luckily all the water is finding it's way to the drain on the basement floor. We've also been lucky to locate the majority of the problem sites, which include:

- some seepage where the walls meet the floor but that just leads to some moisture there without much water outside of the actual seepage area - we plan to clean, dry, and paint with dry lock paint and watch to see if further action is needed
- some of the small, "normal" crack in the basement floor are showing "weeping." This isn't causing too much accumulation of water. - we plan to clean, dry, patch with the drylock patch/quick plug concrete, let dry, paint with dry lock paint
- our biggest source that we can see is the area where the sewer lateral pipe was replaced in June. This fresher concrete has a great deal of seepage and around the seals there is a ton of weeping. There are actual mini water spurts coming up and flowing into the drain. - We're hoping we can put the patch all around the seams and just paint over the whole thing with dry lock.
- mystery source. There are 2 built in storage units that are on small platforms and water is coming from under the units, but there's no evidence that it is damaging the units itself (no swelling, water marks, dampness or anything on the floor or interior walls of the storage units). - we plan to demo these over the summer and patch/dry lock the walls and floor they're covering right now.

We also plan to use one of the epoxy floor kits to the basement floor over the summer.

My question - do you think this is going to be sufficient? Should that newer concrete be causing this much of a water problem (meaning, should we call out the contractor that did it in the first place and have him fix it)? Is the drylock paint on the floor redundant since we plan on putting the epoxy coat down?

We don't normally get 4" of rain in a day here and like I said, we've had hard rains without any problems so if the paint on the floor would be redundant we could just patch, probably still paint over the newer concrete where we're seeing seepage and let it be until we can epoxy.

Thanks!

jcalvin

It would be a time consuming job to do, but, you need to dig down beside your home to the foundation and place some drain around it. It sounds like you either don't have a drain or they are clogged up.

I would like to think that I had the water problem fixed before I Dry-Locked it. All the pressure of trapped water behind your foundation could be problematic.

Before I done anything to it, I would try to see if it happens more often than just on a 4" rain. This would tell you more about the size of the problem.

__________________
Cal

You hired WHO?

concretemasonry

Are your downspout extensions long enough to get the water away from your house? Some homes need 10'.

Is the drainage sloping away from the house?

jkrodger

We had hard rains over the summer and in the fall with no signs of moisture in the basement. Apparently a lot of people had problems with this round because about a week ago we had 9" of snow in a day and it melted in 2. Then yesterday we got 4" of rain. So I doubt it's a problem we'd see too often.

jkrodger

The drainage is sloping away from the house except in one corner where the previous owner put in a little concrete area. At least the downspout there goes underground into a drainage system though. And there doesn't appear to be a water problem in that corner of the house. The main problem comes from the middle of the basement, where the sewer line was replaced.

We've been working with the gutters and downspouts for the last couple months. We thought we had them right but we did see yesterday that the roll-out downspout extensions (see picture below) weren't rolling out on 2 of the downspouts.

concretemasonry

You have a lot of water under your slab and around the foundation that is forcing it through every space/crack/joint possible. In time the general water level will go back close to "normal".

The water could be dumped into the area around the foundation at one point and then it will flow laterally through the soil, so it only takes one bad area to collect it.

If you had 4" of rain and the phoney downspout extension did not roll out, the water went somewhere (possibly topping the gutters).

Epoxy on a slab with no vapor barrier may not last long if there is moisture in the underlying soil. Dryvit is totally worthless when it comes to plugging a crack or the joint between a slab and the wall. - Use hydraulic (not portland) cement according to directions and pack it into a joint after you have opened it up and cleaned it out.

so-elitecrete

bsmt as a boat's hull under 2 atmospheres pressure,,, not surprising wtr'll infiltrate it.

doubtful you can stop it w/o installing a sub-floor full perimeter management system,,, some people call 'em ' french drains '