Drainage

I understand English is not your first language, or your browser has not been set to advise of incorrect spelling..........

If you are using the letter "i" to describe yourself then it is capitalised as I.

I worked out some of the misspelled words, but ceapafe had me puzzled until I realized it meant seepage.

A casement is actually a window, and moisture would often be apparent there, if it is raining at the time..

This may well prove to be expensive to fix.

If you can provide more and correct detail, (use your browser spellcheck, thanks, to make it easier to understand), please reply back here.....

Seepage makes sense.

Perhaps casement should read basement.

...not so sure! I think it's simply that QWERTY is not his/her first finger "language." The syntax resembles English to a substantial degree.

Dig down to foundation on the upper side and around the corners of the house and slope ditch to each end of the house continuing around the sides. Clean walls appropriately and waterproof with local product made for foundation/wall waterproofing. Fill to within several inches of surface ground with gravel and cover with dirt.

Don't forget to add some drain pipe on the down hill side to outlet the water down the slope.

Provision must be taken to prevent overlying soil from washing down, and laterally into the gravel or else you wind up right back where you start.

Landscaping fabric is good for that. Place it over the drain pipe before covering with rock and then cover the rock with it before backfilling with soil.

Mirafi filter fabric usually works to encapsulate interceptor subdrains, or you use a properly graded filter material. Typically however, you encapsulate the rock, not the drain pipe, since the rock will tend to clog with fines and you want to maximize the surface area of the filter fabric. In practice we usually place the fabric in the trench with enough fabric left over to overlap over the top of the drain, fill the bottom of the trench with a minimal amount of pea gravel as pipe bedding, and then fill the trench to a depth of more then a foot bgs, cover the top of the gravel with the wrapped fabric (burrito wrapped) and cover the fabric with landscaping fill. If you have hydrostatic pressure forcing water through the floor slab, you are having issues with shallow groundwater seeping up, i.e. a spring. The drain intercepts the surface of the shallow water and conveys it around the footing to the down hill side. You'll want the drain lower in elevation than your floor slab, and in most cases your footing.

Some good, simple (but not easy on the back) tricks have been mentioned already: specifically tiling along the foundation. But what foundation? Please tell more about your house and the first first floor garage.

Walls made of...blocks?

House supported by walls or stilts?

Garage opens toward (car enters from) uphill or down hill?

Garage is open or enclosed?

Garage floor is paved or unpaved?

Water presently collect in garage/under house, or simply flows away?

Seepage from where? The house? The ground? A septic tank or cesspool? What?

Soil or rock under house?

Where is water seen flowing?

In other words, you need to find out first if you really have a problem. Remember fixing one problem can sometimes lead to worse problems, which leads to.... So take the time you need to carefully describe what your problem actually is: how it is affecting you? What would be better in your opinion? Anything you've already tried to "fix" it.

Capture any water coming down the slope to the house and pipe it around and away from the house.

Check for a well within the hill itself as you may be accessing subterranean water, I have no idea how though.....local land registry? If there are other wells near you on that hill, that could happen.....The ground water level rises anyway when a hill is present.....

My last sentence is difficult to understand, I hope that it gives you a few ideas though, sorry....

Normally, the best way to determine where the water table is would be from a survey of other local wells. Beyond that, the aquifers will tend (somewhat) to follow the topography. I think I understand the poster to indicate he only has problems during heavy rainy periods suggesting surface runoff issues.

How does this explain springs and seeps in hillside. Plus I have found in numerous reviews of wells and shallow aquifers that perched seasonal aquifers are typically not reflected in wells, even monitoring wells, very well. In localized areas, topography tend change signifcantly and the groundwater surface does not reflect this change in topograghic relief, particularly on steeper sloped topographies. In fratured rock formations, you can move a few feet and have nearly no change in topographic while the hydrostatic head changes substantially. However, valley floors where flatter slopes, deep aluvium, and minimal change in topography do reflect in the groundwater table.

It sounds as if all of the posters have good answers for you... One would emphasize the part about run-off... that water that is running downslope toward your house. This is significant and can be quite an amount of water, especially as it is moving (under pressure). In designing any building, it is important to site the structure such that the adjacent finish grade slopes away from the structure. Our general rule of thumb is that the grade must drop six inches (150mm) in the first ten feet (3m) away from the exterior walls. The poster that indicated that you should build up the grade upslope from your house was indicating this.

I have the same problem you do. I'm hoping it's over now, but I won't know until spring.

In a nutshell, I had a trench dug away from the foundations to a depth about 2 feet (0.6m) below footer level. I did this away from the foundation and footer because I didn't want to have the foundation shift. That trench had perforated drain pipe installed on top of 1 foot of coarse gravel with another 2 feet of coarse gravel on top.

I also had drainage installed up to ground level to take the surface water away from the foundation.

There's no guarantee that this is going to be perfect but it's got to be better than 3 inches of water in the basement 2 or 3 times every spring.

The irony is that this work was done in the middle of drought conditions, so the whole time I was thinking "why the @)(*%!! am I paying to have this done?" I hope it works....

There is an alternative to expensive excavation and sealing the outside of the wall and that is to put drainage on the inside of the wall. Basically there is a special drainage channel on the footing which is cemented over with just an edge sticking up next to the wall. A water barrier is hung on the wall which goes behind this edge of the drain so that any water that seeps through the wall will go into the drain and to the sump and not on to the floor.

I just had my basement done and now I can finish my basement knowing that I will never have to worry about water again.

http://www.omnibasementsystems.com/whyus.asp

The quote I received for the work you described was 3X the method I chose. My problem is that it wasn't simply the back wall that was wet. Hydrostatic pressure was forcing the water right up through the concrete slab. In fact, the worst spot of wall weeping was in the front wall in an area that had the concrete garage floor and asphalt driveway around it. So the water was traveling a good distance underground. Just bizarre.

Collecting the water after it has penetrated the wall will allow mold and mildew to thrive.

Try to stop water intrusion by sealing the outer foundation wall and building a French drain as described earlier.

Needless to repeat, the original question doesn't leave much to go on. That said...

"...building a French drain as described earlier."

Actually, Stan the Man's proposal is the closest thing yet described to being a French drain, in the true meaning of the term. What was described before that were (essentially) inclosed, subsurface drains which collect and then remove water under gravity flow. When applied adjacent to a foundation the term tiling has been used; albeit that perforated piping has in large measure taken the place of non-metallic, solid pipe sections laid (unjoined) end to end, the "tiling" usage remains in currency. A true French drain is, indeed, an open, surface drain...originally formed as small, traversing channels in the paving stones in the sidewalks of Paris in order to drain water (and other nastier stuff) towards the streets...to send rainfall (and other) sewage on its way to the river. The use of French drain in the form of open perimeter channels inside buildings--often in slab-underlain garages (where risks of mold and rot are less a factor)--where the idea is to collect water away from walking and driving surfaces, and hopefully have it flow away, is sometimes used even in your part of the world. Use of a perimeter French drain in a subterranean basement could be feasible for draining seepage and condensation to a sump but--and here I agree with you--it might not be the best, primary defense. One thing typically not mentioned in discussions about this topic: in principle (for many locations and situations) there is no water intrusion barrier that cannot be overwhelmed given the right conditions of terrain and weather. The best one can hope is to plan for the averages and be able to manage the extremes. So, if normal basement water exclusion methods are subject to being overwhelmed in extreme conditions (or due to degradation), an interior French drain could be a feasible augmentation. But, like you, I probably would not recommend it as the primary system for a DYIer to try.

The previous post-er's description of a drain incorporated into the footing is something I've not actually seen--and I don't quite see how it could be done as a retrofit. The capturing of seepage behind sheeting (again it's hard to see how the barrier would be installed in the wall as a retrofit), in combination with the French-like footing channel, seems to be an idea which borrows from two drainage approaches: the standard French drain and the subsurface curtain drain (and also the foundation vapor barrier such as is used in the south where basements are not). But, again, this approach does not seem to directly address the original questioner's situation, where he made no mention of a basement under his garage, or that his garage is (in) the basement (ala San Francisco).

OK Guest,

You don't seem to have arrived back here to see the answers.

I have since had my translation engine at work, and conclude that your casement could mean either basement or easement..

As asked by others above, if you could give location along with construction details of your basement or easement, then you may well (awful descriptive word for your present trouble), be assisted.

If your construction method is concrete, please be aware that a high fast-setting cement special paint will do the job from the inside.

I have used this with success for sealing leaking Hospital utilities passages, under Hospitals, also sealing basements in concrete construction.

The special paint is normally white, you must stir well, (with a powered stirrer or you might break your wrist), to ensure the fast-setting cement powder is properly suspended in the liquid, and using a large brush or roller, slurp it on.

In the first coat, you will see the paint dry quickly, (and it changes colour slightly, so you can easily see any continued leaking parts), and perhaps a few leaks will continue, but to a lesser degree.

To complete the waterproof seal, you just keep painting over the leaks, around 1 hour between coats to ensure the earlier coat has fully cured.

The paint in New Zealand was called "Waterstop", available in containers from 5 litres to 44 gallon (imperial gallons) industrial drums, and could seal against a water head of some 20 feet = 6 metres, taking 3 coats over bad leaks to achieve that.

If you get the Industrial quantity in a large drum, ensure you have a powered stirrer, to keep the cement suspended, because of its density it drops to the container bottom within a few minutes

Because I do not know your location, you could use Mr. Google, with his helpful Search Engine, using: paint waterstop as search terms, and I'm sure you should locate a supplier near you.

The "Waterstop" paint had a finish good enough to not require any other paint coat over it, more so if applied by roller.

Please note this type of paint does not "sit on the surface" but is absorbed into the concrete, chemically bonding into it, has anti-fungal/anti-mould additives, and is a cheap and permanent solution.

Hope you return, and read the fount of wisdom here, written especially for your problem.

Please advise further ......

It would seem that the first thing to do is to correctly identify the source(s) the flow. Maybe you should ask your neighbors if they have/had similar problems, and then ask them what they are doing about them. If necessary, someone in the engineering department and/or water department at the nearest (city office) may be willing to help you out. A little selective persistence on your part may help a lot. In any case, good luck.

Question: do you think it is necessary or wise to line the inside wall of a french drain with a continuous plastic sheet? that is, the side of the drain that is closest to the foundation? the reason I have heard is to prevent excessive drying of the soil underneath the slab (that is, you can't maintain a moisture level if you have an open french drain 3' away from slab edge).

Lack of clear context makes preceding guest's post impossible to respond to. Check the link given be StantheMan to see clearly how the system works. Read posts after that to get nomenclatures straight, then try again. Thanks

A really good product for this type of problems is called varicore. You can find it at Varicore.com. It is a system we use for installing drainage where a lot of water is present and this system is often used in draining professional football and soccer fields. It is installed vertically (trench style) and has a multitude of fittings which make it easy to use for the do it yourselfer or first time contractor.

Remember to upsize you final drainage pipe as more section are added to lower head pressure on the drain line.

If you have ever seen a trench dug into the ground you have likely seen the different striations (colors of soil) that exist under the top soil. Some drain well while some are hard and impervious. Often when digging a basement you can dig down quite a way with no water and then one foot later release a torrent. The water from above had penetrated to the impervious layer and then runs along it

Move and build a new house. And install good water drainage in the new home. Good luck.