A1 Foundation Crack Repair has a long history of saving homeowners money on foundation repair jobs simply because they are reputable, experienced, and fair, not to mention the 10-year warranty and long track record of outstanding workmanship. In this episode, Adam shares an interesting case study on how A1 saved homeowners in Leominster Massachusetts bigtime on a block foundation repair job.
Narrator: It’s time once again for the “Crack Man Podcast” hosted by A1 Foundation Crack Repair. I’m Darren Kincaid here with the Crack Daddy himself, Adam Tracy. Adam and The Crack Man Rich have over 30 years’ experience in the construction industry. Rich as over two5 years as the president and founder of A1 Foundation Crack Repair. This podcast provides expert basement waterproofing, concrete repair, and preventative maintenance tips for homeowners and businesses. A1 Foundation’s valuable insight will help avert a disastrous flood within the basement, health problems associated with water infiltration, and protect your biggest investment….your home. The topic of today’s podcast: My contractor is using a crack repair kit from Amazon to fix my basement wall crack. Does that work?
Narrator: So, Adam, you run into unscrupulous contractors who claim to be foundation crack repair specialists, but can it be true? Can they simply use an online crack repair kit to fix a foundation crack?
Adam: Well, they can certainly try. And more often than not, we end up getting the call afterwards that, hey. John, who did this, he's a friend of my friend's, it didn't work, and we're still getting water. So it's not very uncommon to see some contractors claim that they're expert in this field or that they've been doing it for 25 years and really they're only 25 years old, that they use basically a kit.
The problem with the kits is that they're only getting the very surface level of the foundation crack. So, you'll commonly see it looks like a straw that's glued on to the foundation, and they use a caulking gun just with their hands or maybe they'll hook up a compressor to make it look better, a little bit of flash to pump in the materials. But it's only going in at somewhere between 30 to 50 PSI at best. And that pressure is just simply not enough to fully heal the crack and seal it off from the inside out.
These repair kits and the people that use them end up having a pretty high failure rate. And one of the reasons why we do the process that we do is because we've been doing it for over 30 years now. In the early days, we had to learn these things and kind of develop a process that would be both effective in residential, commercial, underground tunnel systems, wastewater treatment plants, things where you never have access to the outside, and just simply sealing the first quarter inch of the crack just isn't enough. So, when we do a repair, especially an injection type repair, you'll see us drill into the foundation to intersect that crack in the middle of the wall.
If your wall is 8 inches or 10 inches thick, in the middle of that crack, we're going to hit that right around 4 to 5 inches deep into the crack. And then what we'll do is then we'll put a mechanical port in the wall that's capable of standing up to 5,000 PSI pressure. And then we use our electric pumps that have a variable speed and a variable pressure that we're able to adjust as we're repairing the foundation crack.
We could use as low as 15 to 20 PSI if that's how the crack is taking the material. But most of the time we're going to be ramping it up because most cracks aren't wide open. They're not going to be half an inch wide, 3 quarters of an inch wide. They could be hairlines. They could be something you can't even stick your fingernail in. So, we need to have a product that has lower viscosity or lower thickness of the material as well as using a high pressure system to find all the micro fissures that come off these main cracks that are basically naked to our eye but are embedded inside the concrete.
If you see a contractor, if you hired somebody and they're using a little handgun to make a repair, you might want to take a pause and maybe see if there's another option there because the reality is that they're not really long standing. They're kind of a home repair kit and they don't really stand the test of time. The reason why we give a warranty is because we know we can back it and we know that the process that we do is going to last 10 years, 20 years and beyond because that's what we're experiencing and that's what our history shows us.
Just make sure that when we're finding contractors, ask them how they do the repairs and ask them how they actually inject the foundation crack. If they're using a hand pump or if they're using a caulking gun, you might want to stay away. Find somebody who knows what they're doing better.
Narrator: Thanks, Adam, for explaining why it's important to select an experienced and fully vetted foundation crack repair company to fix your foundation issues.
Narrator: If you have a basement water problem and think you need a crack repair professional near Leominster, MA, or, if you’d like more information on foundation crack repair and basement waterproofing topics, please visit A1FoundationCrackRepair.com or call (866) 929-3171. Or you can email info@a1foundationcrackrepair.com. Thanks for listening and keep that basement dry.