If you have a basement or crawl space prone to flooding, you know the dread that comes with every rain storm. Will there be water? How much time will it take to clean up?
If you have a finished basement, how much will it cost to repair any damage. If these fears sound familiar, it might be time to look into basement waterproofing for your Duluth-area home.
At Alliance Inc., we offer a full array of waterproofing options so we can work with you to choose what is right for your house.
Is the best solution going to be exterior waterproofing to keep water away from your house to begin with?
Or perhaps interior waterproofing, directing any water that enters your basement walls to a sump pump and out of your house without causing any damage or flooding.
If you have a crawl space, encapsulating and waterproofing the crawl space to avoid the types of damage, structural and otherwise, that water can wreak.
Whichever fits your home best, we will work with you to make sure the work is both effective and efficient so you no longer have to feel that dread with every heavy rain.
Depending on the severity of the problem, and what is causing the water problems, there are several different exterior waterproofing options that we can employ.
Chances are, your home already has gutters, but if not, or if they aren’t in good condition, we can have gutters installed.
One of the main goals with exterior waterproofing is to direct water away from your house.
French and channel or trench drains are two of the options. Both of them use perforated or slotted pipe to carry the water away.
How they differ is how the water gets to the slotted pipe.
With a French drain, a ditch is dug and the pipe is inserted at a grade which directs the water away from the house. The pipe is then covered with gravel and the gravel is sometimes covered with soil.
This type of drain is ideal for home where the problem is with water that has been absorbed into the soil gaining entry to the basement walls or other part of the house.
If your issue is with surface water, a channel or trench drain is likely optimal. Unlike with the French drain, gravel isn’t used to help water drain toward the pipe.
Instead, a metal grating is installed at the surface, targeting water as soon as it hits the ground rather than waiting for it to seep into the soil.
Catch basins also allow for the collection and dissipation of water in ways that won’t threaten your basement.
While those methods direct water away from your house, reducing the hydrostatic pressure, a different option is to build up the defenses of your basement walls against water from the outside. That is where waterproofing membranes come in.
After excavations are made to expose the basement walls, drainage board is installed to prevent water from entering through them. It also insulates the basement, which can be helpful if you use your basement as a living space.
Given that they are generally less expensive, and in some ways less intrusive, than exterior waterproofing solutions, an interior drainage system is among the most popular waterproofing solutions.
While it won’t be able to fix an other issues that pooling or improperly draining water is causing the way exterior drainage systems can, a properly-installed drainage system will keep your basement dry.
Outside of perhaps a dehumidifier, a sump pump is probably the product that comes to mind first when you think of basement waterproofing.
Sump pumps take water collected in a sump pit and pump it out of the house. They usually discharge in an area of your yard where the grade will direct it away from the house.
The cover of the sump pit is usually flush with your basement floor.
The question then becomes, how does water get to the sump pit.
One of the most common and effective ways, especially if your basement has block walls, is an interior drainage system.
First, we excavate around the perimeter of the basement, cutting through the basement floor. That provides space to lay drain tile next to the walls.
If you have block walls, we drill holes to drain water in the walls into the tile. The tile is laid in such as way that any water drains into the sump pit.
The drain tile is then covered back up with concrete, leveling the area to the rest of the floor.
Sometimes the best time to waterproof a new home or business is during construction.
Often done in concert with our insulated concrete form installation, Alliance can install a waterproofing system during construction.
This comes with several potential benefits.
First, if the home or business is being built by a developer, waterproofing can be a major selling point.
Second, waterproofing a home will inevitably be disruptive to some degree. Either ditches must be dug outside or portions of the concrete floor will be broken up inside.
If the home is still under construction, no such disruption occurs.
But what about homes that have a crawl space instead of a basement?
They certainly can still have water problems. Damp or wet crawl spaces can lead to mold and mildew. It can also lead to wood rot. If your floor joists start to rot, it will cause “spongy” floors, among other issues.
However, because crawl spaces rarely get used for anything but storage, their waterproof gets done in a different way.
Encapsulating a crawl space basically involves sealing the whole area off so that no moisture can get in. This includes both through the walls or the floor.
As a key portion of this, we will install a vapor barrier that stops water from entering the crawl space. This not only prevents flooding, but also keeps the humidity from rising too high and causing issues on its own.
Does your Duluth-area home have water problems? Are you building a home in an area prone to flooded basements? If so, contact Alliance today for a free estimate. We will lay out your waterproofing options and explain which we believe would best suit your home.