Are you having issues with your stone foundation leaking water, and you’re not sure what can be done about it? That’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today.
First off, when it comes to stone foundations, the very first thing we want to be concerned with is keeping water away from them, to begin with. Something you can do at your own home takes a walk around and see, how does your yard lay? Is it negative in slope back towards the home itself? If so, that’s obviously going to cause a lot of water to run towards your foundation and then just sit there next to it, which is really going to allow it to come through the stone. With stone, there are just many points of entry where the water can come through because the way it’s built obviously is you have a stone surrounded by mortar and more stones, et cetera. So there are many different places where the water can penetrate through that if it stays next to your foundation long enough.
Something else you can look at is your gutters. We want to make sure that our downspouts are pointed away from the home and that they have at least 10 feet, preferably more, where they run off that. We want that water, again, to get away from the house so as not to stick around next to the walls and be able to penetrate through the stone.
Now, if that still doesn’t help you and you’re still having water come through, there is a solution. What we’ve done here in this home is we’ve installed our interior drain system. That system catches water in many different forms. What we do is we come inside of the foundation itself, inside of your basement, and we take about a foot to a foot and a half of the concrete floor out. Right there next to the foundation itself, we dig down several inches and install a four-inch triple-wall pipe. Now that pipe is perforated, it allows groundwater and water that sits beneath the slab to get up into that pipe. Then that pipe runs on a negative grade to a sump pump that we also install in the basement. That water is then collected inside of the sump pump basin and we pump it out again, at least 10, preferably 20 feet away from your home. That way the water that we collect, again, we’re pumping it far away and it’s not able to come back through the system again.
This system also catches water from your walls themselves because as we discussed, there are many points in the wall itself where water is able to penetrate through and then run down. The way that we handle that situation is after we install that four-inch pipe next to your foundation wall at the bottom, whenever we wrap that pipe in gravel, and then we pour the concrete slab back, we actually leave about a two-inch-wide grate drain on top of that. So what that does is it allows any water that was to come through the foundation walls to find entry into that four-inch pipe that we placed below. And then again, that pipe will run all the way around to your sump pump and will pump water out away from your home.
Waterproof Stone Foundation
So in this instance here with stone, we do have several different ways we can take care of it for you. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
