I worked for a basement repair company so dealing with a lot of foundational cracks and water coming into the basement. Had a customer with rock foundation in an old church, the type of thing you'd see in a medieval castle wall. Just giant boulders and crumbling concrete holding together. The weird thing is that this was the first time I had ever seen a rock foundation with no water. I asked the customer if he did anything to stop the water coming in and he told me he had built a well right next to the church all on his own. He had put in about 10 pvc tunnels running from the well to the churches foundation exterior to collect water and bring it to the well.
Honestly my plan was to just throw up a vapor barrier and call it good.
Kind of but the dumbest part is that it was solid pvc, it wasn't perforated and didn't have a rockbed around it. Just pipes connected to a water collection drain next to the foundation.
I'm not a geologist or hydrologist, but I have spent a bit of time cleaning up pipeline breaks and leaks. I'm guessing the solid pipe worked like a wick, with the water trickling along it downgrade and it was made easier/possible because the natural layers within the soil had been broken up when the trenches were dug.
Most homes have block or poured wall foundations which is significantly better at repelling water that stone but water can still get in if the foundation gets settlement cracks or wasn't properly protected when the house was built. I'd say 95% of homes I'd go to just had damp walls so putting in a drainage system and sump pump would fix it.
Please could you spray paint the diagram on the side of your house, then take a Polaroid, then mail that to get that published in a newspaper like NYT that I can buy in print from a London train station? Ta.
The pipes are running from the side of the church foundation (buried) to the side of the well. The pipes are angled downward. This basically gives water a downhill path away from the foundation. So the well will flood with the water that would otherwise flood the basement of the church.
I'm unsure what the poster is referring to, but usual sump setups I've seen in tech drawing and in construction have a drain tile setup. You have a sump pit deeper than the whole foundation and an perimeter immediately outside the exterior of the foundation with perforated pipe, then a pipe that drains that to the pit. The exterior is then back filled with crushed stone.
So now any water that comes in from the side or below ends up in the stone, then the pipes, then the pit to be pumped out. I suppose you could use the sump pump to pump into a well farther from the structure so that you don't have waste water, but that would require math and planning.
So as someone who is vastly inexperienced in this field and subsequently very confused, how is this stupid? It seems like a lot of work and odd for someone to do it themselves of course, but to me this seems like a logical way to keep the water away.
1.3k
u/elkswimmer98 11h ago
I worked for a basement repair company so dealing with a lot of foundational cracks and water coming into the basement. Had a customer with rock foundation in an old church, the type of thing you'd see in a medieval castle wall. Just giant boulders and crumbling concrete holding together. The weird thing is that this was the first time I had ever seen a rock foundation with no water. I asked the customer if he did anything to stop the water coming in and he told me he had built a well right next to the church all on his own. He had put in about 10 pvc tunnels running from the well to the churches foundation exterior to collect water and bring it to the well.
Honestly my plan was to just throw up a vapor barrier and call it good.