Holy moley! Imagine you're a homeowner with a basement water leak and you spend 10s of thousands of dollars to fix it and it still leaks! You would be scorching mad to have spent so much money on a failed fix action that could’ve been repaired properly for a fraction of the cost. Here’s why you should get a 2nd opinion.
Narrator: Today, the CrackDaddy, Adam Tracy is here to share some keen engineering insight into why it might be a good idea to get a second opinion before spending a ton of money on a foundation crack repair, or basement water leak. So, what do you have for us today, Adam?
Adam: Well we have a really interesting case study that came out of Lexington MA here. We had a call that came in from a homeowner who had two cold joints that were leaking in their foundation wall. Now, a cold joint is where an old section of foundation meets a new section of foundation. Typically it’s done with an expansion or an addition that’s put onto the foundation, and they tie the old foundation into the new foundation. So they went through the process and described to us what was going on, and of course we had a perfect solution for them to be able to repair the issues that they have here. It’s fairly common to see these cold joints leak over time because it’s an imperfect marriage between the old and the new.
So we get to the foundation, and usually we’re expecting to see a big addition that’s poured next to or adjacent to a house. But this is a little strange. So, it was actually a section of a wall of the existing house that had been re-poured. So, we asked the homeowner what happened and what was going on in this, because we wanted to understand why was there a need to have a new section poured. Is there a bad soil issue? Was there impact from an excavator or some other piece of heavy equipment that may have hit it and damaged the foundation? Do they have a fire and it compromised the foundation somehow? So, we wanted to kind of get some background history of it.
The homeowner was very kind, so they were able to kind of go through the story as to what happened. And they described they had a window in the basement, normal height just above the grade there, and they had a crack that came off the corner of the window then went down to the floor. It was probably about a quarter inch wide, and there was really no deflection where one side wasn’t pushed out farther than the other. And so they were concerned, as homeowners should be about seeing a foundation crack, and they called a structural engineer.
And the structural engineer came out and evaluated it, and told the homeowner in a report saying: There’s a crack in the foundation and based on my recommendations it should be cut out and replaced. So, for this homeowner who took the recommendations of this engineer, they had to physically lift and support the house, cut out 12 feet of the foundation, reform it and re-pour it, and then guess what? We had, instead of one foundation crack that was an issue that could have been easily resolved, they had two foundation cold seams that became a leaking issue.
So, for this very big project that cost the homeowner tens of thousands of dollars, it could’ve been resolved very quickly and easily in an afternoon by calling a second opinion and a foundation expert like us. It was just a standard wall crack, could’ve been either filled with a closed cell polymer resin or we could use a carbon fiber material to repair it. Both would have been less than three hours of work and the homeowner would’ve had a warranty in hand about any sort of issues that will come through there.
Narrator: Holy moley! If I was that homeowner, I would be scorching mad that I spent so much money on a failed fix action that could’ve been repaired properly for a fraction of the cost. Here’s your foot stomp, listener. Get a second opinion.
Narrator: If you have a basement water problem and think you need a professional, or, if you’d like more information on foundation crack repair and basement waterproofing topics, please visit A1FoundationCrackRepair.com or call Rich at (866) 929-3171. Or you can email Rich at info@a1foundationcrackrepair.com. Thanks for listening and keep that basement dry.