Today we're gonna be using the SikaFix repair kit for leaking foundations
To repair this wall in behind me that has leak in it
We're going to show you how we do it and we're gonna tell you what we think of this product. Stick with us
Hi and welcome to the handy verse where as homeowners
We turn to DIY is a first resort
Whenever we have problems around the house, and we hope to inspire you
To do the same in your own living space. If you've been following along with us, you know
I have a crack in the wall behind me here that needs to get fixed
And you also know that I had to tear out the wall that's behind you as part of our laundry room makeover
Because I needed room to get the drywall in. Since it's already a mess in here, as you can plainly see,
There's no better time to get everything out of here, move the workbench, and fix the crack in the wall
The crack is pretty narrow. It's a very small crack and
It goes up halfway up the wall. And then there's a
Bit of a fix here. Don't get fooled by that though. That is just some
Drywall plaster that is put in there. Thanks, previous homeowner...
We appreciate that... Anyway, it doesn't actually stop the leak. No surprise
What I have to do is to open this up to make sure we have a gap that we can put the mortar into and
allow the
Expanding sealant to fill in behind it
I opened the crack up to about a quarter of an inch deep all along it
From down there up to the top and
now I'm gonna clean it out with the wire brush and then I'm going to
Call it and we'll pick it up in the morning. Which for you I suppose will be about
half a second...
All right next day. You can see I've got this cleared out down into the crack in the foundation
It's very clearly defined. I think this is going to help when I go to inject the repair kit. It should help penetrate
Deeper into the concrete than it would otherwise
You can see it. You can see the line very clearly down to around
Here and this is where I think it starts to...
This is where I think it starts to you come inside and this is only surface on the inside down here
So what this means is I suspect that I will have some difficulty
Injecting very far into here. So I'll keep that in mind when I get to that stage if I do have trouble
I'm not going to worry about it too much
I'm just going to move up to where the crack is more prevalent and start there. I
did have to open this up quite a bit part of the reason is that I was using a
Pointed chisel as opposed to a flat one. This is all I had so I was gonna go buy one just for this
so I make do where I can and
But also because it is so big the gap here
I picked up some extra mortar because I don't believe what's gonna be in the kit is sufficient
So I keep this on hand in case I need it
now the next step will be to
glue in the injection tabs
just using hot glue and
Every four to eight inches after that we can mortar it in and prep for the injection. One of the things that's recommend in this
Is to blow out the crack with an air compressor. I don't have an air compressor
So if you're like me and you don't have one, what I used was a bicycle pump with an air mattress
needle on it and I just
Used that to blow out the dust in in the crack. It works well in a pinch. Here's what the injection T looks like
It comes with a plug you detach that
Plugs the port so it doesn't get plugged accidentally when you're doing the mortar and then we're gonna glue these on over the gap
Spaced out four to eight inches along this here seam
Okay, this probably goes without saying but when you do use the glue gun on these make sure you don't cover the port
That hot-melt has had a few minutes, probably about 20 minutes, to harden
So now we're on to the next part which is this here, the mortar mix. This is kind of a part
I've been dreading because apparently it sets within a minute and a half or two minutes. So I need to move quickly
I'm gonna start... I don't know if there's enough of this stuff...
So I'm gonna start at the middle and work my way up because that's the worst part of it. And that's the part
I'm most concerned about getting right and if I don't have quite the right stuff for the other, the lower half, it's not as critical
Mix this three to one and I'm using half cups here
Looks like it's gonna be about half the bag
And now to add half a cup of water to that
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That was my first pass with the mortar that came in the kit
I got from here all the way up to the ceiling done
So that's about what you can expect to get out of the kit. I did lose a little bit in the first batch
I didn't put enough water in it so it hardened on me quicker than expected and and I lost a bit of it
So I may have gotten another one or two anchors covered but that's about what you can expect. So I
Recommend picking up an extra bag of mortar or a little bit of mortar in case you run into the same thing
And that's what I need to do now to
finish up this
Part of the job. So this is the other mortar I picked up. It's Sika as well. It's "mix and go" repair mortar
Apparently you just open this cap put 200 mils of water in shake it up and
It's ready to go. It even comes with
a putty knife and
The working time on it is 25 minutes. So that's probably gonna be a lot easier to use for this project
The mortar is all in place. That second bag was a lot easier to work with when the stuff that came in the kit
But it's gonna take a lot longer to dry, too
So I need to leave this for about five hours at least right now
And then we'll do the injection and finish up. This all seems pretty set
The next step is to remove all the plugs
here and prepare for the injection repair
So I'm just gonna pull these out and save them
Get ready for the next step. I'm admittedly nervous but this next step, but we're just going to remove the plug
and
install the tip
Tighten this down here
Make sure that's good and tight
I'm going to spray some water into the plugs. This is a water activated
repair, so we need to make sure that
It has some water to activate
I'm apparently a horrible shot with the spray gun...
There's the first few done
Going to spin this up
You can see that this tip
Automatically mixes the two-part epoxy together
And we're ready to go. So I'm not optimistic this is going to work on the bottom here, but we'll try it out and
We should see some water come out here if it works, right if it doesn't... we won't
Now it leaked all around the...
Whatever you call these things... the T's. It pushed it right out. I'm not happy with that. I'm going to do the next one
I did see some come up along the seam here, which is a good sign so I'm gonna plug this bottom one
Because I'm not gonna put any more in there
I did... I did wonder if this would happen because of the way the crack went
It's nothing to be concerned about yet
What I will do is continue to move up the wall
There we go, that's what we're trying to see so... it is working
That's good. And it didn't work so well down below. I kind of expected that but this is what we want to see
so let's just go with it
So at the top here kind of as expected there's nothing to hold it in any longer
So that means it is going through the crack up to the top and then it's coming out the top here
I
Wish I could captivate that somehow but I can't and I'm just gonna have to let that run off and clean it up after
Okay, kind of laughing here because we have a bit of mixed results on this
But let's let's put in some context and we'll go through it from the bottom up to the top and we'll we'll walk through
what happened when I installed the
repair kit and and
let's see the results. So you can see down here that it really popped out of the mortar and
That's... I mean... it looks bad. That looks horrible!
Like I said, it looks bad but
If you recall earlier, I know the crack didn't come down
This far and is more of a surface crack. And it makes sense if this compound goes to expand and it has nowhere to go
It's just going to push out these nozzles. It's going to push up the mortar and you're gonna see something like this
That doesn't mean it didn't work because if you look up here
This is where I had the compound. This was my first take at it where I didn't have enough water
I didn't do a great job, but it did okay
but this is also where the crack actually penetrated into the concrete so that the foam had somewhere to expand too and
If you look up here, it has a spot here
another spot here where it popped through the mortar, but other than that not too bad and
Up here. This is where I got the the mortar mix better and
It worked really well. It worked really well in the installation as well, as I was filling this here
If I was filling this here nozzle, I could see it
Come out up here. Like it's supposed to do once that once I put so a certain amount in here. Does that work?
Well, and then all the way to the top it worked and this here is just overflow from the very top which I can't
Because it wraps around the choice
But that's a good side because all of this means that it came all this here is extra overflow
that came out of the
the concrete and the only way could do that is by being forced up and with this phone filling all the crevices, so
That's a good sign and that there was overflow at the top. So overall I
Think it's okay
I think it's gonna work. The true test will be if is do we see a
Reduction in the amount of water coming in. Obviously. This isn't the
The endgame here, we're gonna have to get outside and fix the drainage make sure that you know
there's not water outside there to start with that's that this is this is step one outside of step two, but
Anyway mixed results overall. I think it's going to work you can see
You can see what can happen depending on your situation and
Hopefully this video gives you a better insight on how it might work for you. So
Try it out, and hopefully it works for you
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