We have been getting a musty smell in our basement and I think I finally fo und a spot in the corner where water is starting to come in. I have to admi t this scared me a bit, but I contacted a guy at http://nocrackfoundationre pair.com in Arkansas area, and he was extremely helpful.
On Thursday, November 12, 2015 at 12:42:48 PM UTC-5, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrot e:
found a spot in the corner where water is starting to come in. I have to ad mit this scared me a bit, but I contacted a guy at http://nocrackfoundation repair.com in Arkansas area, and he was extremely helpful.
you need a interior french drain ideally with a gravity drain to daylight, or a sump pump.
first fix obvious issues like overflowing gutters, clogged drain pipes, gro und sloped wrong way toward home etc etc.
note you cannot seal water out! drylock paint is fine for tiny moisture iss ues but not for real water in basement issues.
I worked ne summer as a laborer on my moms house wet basement. installed ex terior french drain, resloed entire yard, all new downspout underground lin es. i worked hard. spent over 8 grand. new sidewalks etc
had nice dry basement for a couple months. then the water returned coming u p thru floor......
gave up and had interior french drain installed for $3500 bucks, that eded the water problems.
I bet he filled it with SPAM
found a spot in the corner where water is starting to come in. I have to a dmit this scared me a bit, but I contacted a guy at http://spamcrackfoundat ionrepair.com in Arkansas area, and he was extremely helpful.
You may be right. According to the last fact on this page, Arkansans are tied for 3rd in the country for SPAM consumption:
"The average Hawaiian eats twelve cans of SPAM a year, followed by the average Alaskan with six cans, and Texans, Alabamians, and Arkansans with three cans apiece."
Which just means your outer drain was not properly installed. (unless you had an artesian well under the house) An interior drain is "virtually always" a secondary choice and inferior solution to a properly installed and functioning exterior footing drainage system. (and a sump pump system is always a less desireable solution than a "gravity" drain to "daylight" - although unavoidable in too many instances)
rote:
ly found a spot in the corner where water is starting to come in. I have to admit this scared me a bit, but I contacted a guy at http://nocrackfoundat ionrepair.com in Arkansas area, and he was extremely helpful.
t, or a sump pump.
ground sloped wrong way toward home etc etc.
issues but not for real water in basement issues.
exterior french drain, resloed entire yard, all new downspout underground lines. i worked hard. spent over 8 grand. new sidewalks etc
g up thru floor......
ed the water problems.
I live on top of a sandy hill, so drainage is not a problem. As long as the grading is done properly, dry basements are the norm.
However, I work with a number of people who have sump pumps. All I ever hear about is problems. Right now one of my co-workers is using the pump he uses to drain his pool cover down in the basement while he gather the parts to build a dual-pump set-up so he has a back-up.
Another coworker just installed a water powered back-up pump because he lost power during a recent storm and his basement flooded.
I am so glad I don't have to deal with that issue.
On a somewhat similar note, my grandparents didn't have a drainage problem per se, they had storm related sewer problems. Back when Pepe built the house, the storm and waste sewers were one and the same (or were connected in some manner. Overflow? I forget.)
Other houses on his street were having problems with sewage backing up into the house during bad storms, so as part of the build, he installed one of these in the basement floor:
Whenever a storm was predicted or if they were leaving the house for an extended period of time, they would close the valve. Of course, that meant no flushing while the valve was closed so things sometimes got interesting, especially when they had company. Grandma's sister lived on the next street over, but their back yards were connected. Ciocia Josie's house didn't have the same sewer problem and I remember running through the yards in the rain to use her bathroom.
I'm sure the poster is a spammer. But... for the sake of discussion I would just make one point: More often than not a leaky cellar wall can be cured by getting water away from the house. The typical problem is a downspout that's not diverted. Another typical problem is leaky soil. That can often be cured by burying a plastic rubbish bag to act like an underground umbrella over the spot. I wouldn't consider a French drain unless I were certain that the water table is going above the cellar floor level when it rains.
As for the spam post....
The whois for that domain turns up this:
Registrant Email: snipped-for-privacy@seokenosha.com Admin Name: Jim Rigney Admin Organization: SEO Kenosha
SEO, for those who don't know, is search engine optimization. SEO Kenosha is in the business of helping (some would say fleecing) website owners to improve their traffic (some would say cheat) by using various tricks in hopes of increasing Google search rating. (Various things other than having useful webpage content, that is.)
One good way to increase incoming links, which can help with Google ratings, is to put his clients' URLs in newsgroups.
nocrackfoundationrepair.com website is an amateur hack job put together with Wordpress. (Wordpress is a set of free tools for people who don't know how to do webpage coding.) I'm guessing that the foundation repair people are a client of our friend Jim. (At best. It could just be a scam.) Their homepage looks very fishy. They claim to be licensed, but licensed in what? And no license number is provided. They don't even show an address. A search on the first phone number turns up another website -- m-r-po-wer-s-lab.c-o-m. They seem to be listed in Yelp, though with no reviews. So it may be a real company that just had the misfortune to turn over their website management to someone who's more interested in SEO tricks of dubious value than in good web design.
Another solution is a dry well.
I have an addition that was built long before I moved in. My house is on kind of a sloped lot, flat in the front and flat in the back, with about an 8' elevation change handled by slopes on both sides.
When they built the addition, the back door ended up below the grade of the back yard by about 4". There is a small "patio" (~5' x ~5') in front of the door that you step down onto from the yard. The patio is bordered by double landscape timbers on 3 sides, like a short retaining wall.
When we first moved in, we found that during the worst of the worst storms (it happened twice in 4 years) the small patio area would fill with water and once it reached about 3" it would come in under the door.
I solved the problem by digging a hole to fit a 55 gallon poly drum. I lined the bottom of the pit with gravel and cut big holes in the top and bottom of the drum. I then built a 4' x 4' PT "deck" on 2" x 2" joists and laid it in the patio space.
I now have an almost level transition from the yard into the house but more importantly it would take at least 55 gallons of rain to fill the drum then at least another 30 gallons to fill the patio up to the bottom of the door.
In the 25 years since I installed the dry well, I've never seen any standing water in the patio area even during the worst of the worst storms.
snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com posted for all of us...
dat's nize
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