Combat Hydrostatic Pressure By Installing Drain or Weeping Tile in Springfield Missouri
If you have water in your basement or crawl space on a consistent basis, what’s the first thing that you should do? Hopefully you start off by calling a qualified waterproofing company to assess your situation.
A certified waterproofing specialist can inspect your home around the interior and exterior of your foundation and find out why you’re having problems with water intrusion.
When you get the results of this assessment, you might hear some terms you haven’t heard before. These buzzwords are important to understand if you have a flooded or leaky basement. We’re going to focus on one term specifically: Hydrostatic Pressure.
What Is Hydrostatic Pressure?
Hydrostatic Pressure refers to the water pressure that’s in the soil around your foundation. This water pressure is a major cause in flooded basements, because it can cause leaks, cracking, and the bowing of your foundation.
What Causes Hydrostatic Pressure?
Excess water in the soil around your home. This can be caused by a backed up drainage system, excessive amounts of rain during certain times of year, bad grading around your home, or many other factors.
During dry seasons, the soil and ground around your home stays dry and there is hardly any hydrostatic pressure. But during very wet times of year, the hydrostatic pressure on your foundation can be immense.
One cubic foot of water weighs around 60 pounds. If you multiply that by the surface area of your foundation, for example 2,000 sq ft, then the saturated soil around your home can exert up to 120,000 pounds of pressure against the concrete.
Water pressing against your foundation wall with that kind of pressure can find even the tiniest hole, or crack and flow through into your basement.
Most people don’t think of concrete as a porous material, but it is. It’s not as porous as a sponge, but it is still porous. When there is a lot of water pushing against your concrete foundation, water will find ways to pass through that concrete.
How Do You Combat Hydrostatic Pressure?
The best solution for relieving hydrostatic pressure is an interior waterproofing system, called a drain or weeping tile installation. This hidden drainage system will prevent subsurface water, or underground moisture that has soaked in the soil instead of draining away by channeling that water to a sub-floor sump pump, which will automatically channel that water outside, far away from your foundation.
These weeping tile systems remove the water before it ever rises above the basement floor level, so there is no hydrostatic pressure against the concrete and no basement flooding.
If you talk to your Dog Gone Waterproofing specialist and hear the term hydrostatic pressure, you’ll now know what they are talking about and you’ll understand how important it is to eliminate that problem.
For any water intrusion problems, call the waterproofing experts at Dog Gone Waterproofing to help you determine the root source of your problems and the best way to solve those problems long term.