and you are listening to the Ask The Experts Radio Show on talk radio 1190
I'm John Wolf and I have with me our usual guest at this time from Texas
Green Plumbing texasgreenplumbing.com Roger Wakefield we also have Roger
Williamson of Williamson foundation.com Williamson foundation.com the Texas
Green Plumbing phone number their numbers (972)-442-
4101 (972)-442 4101 and rather than give list
of phone numbers while you're driving again Williamsonfoundation.com
is the easy name to remember for Roger Williamson and we're talking both about
foundations and plumbing today and how they work together
Roger Wakefield how how what does it mean if you see cracks
in the wall maybe not giant ones but slight cracks in the wall when you're
taking a look at a house slat cracks little cracks you can see separation you
can see it's almost like a hairline crack that happens that that's just
general movement of a house once I start walking in and I can see that sheetrock
is separating their separation in the tape and bed you you can see a crack big
enough that you can actually see on the wall things like that
I understand then that there are bigger issues than just a little leak under the
house or that little leak has been there a long time and led to more serious
problems I'm more worried about the people than I am
you know the house or me or anything like that so I want to make sure that my
deal is to me looking at it from a plumbers point of view the foundation
probably needs to be taken care of first the reason being is if I go in and fix
the plumbing say I go in like Roger said and I go in and find a sewer leak and I
fix it and we tunnel in or make a hole in the floor we fix everything back up
everything is good they call him have him come out now they've got a stick 24
peers around the house bring it up two inches in one area half an inch in
another then we go back and test it again there's a leak again maybe
we dig right past where we just dug to fix that Lake or maybe we don't go in as
far but my thing is if the foundation is repaired first you only have the plumber
out there one time and everything's fixed right and you don't have to worry
about it what do you think exactly oftentimes we we get that question a lot
from homeowners which one do i do first and we always recommend doing the
foundation first and that's not self-serving it's because if if if Roger
Wakefield goes in and fixes a pipe and then we go and moved the foundation two
and a half inches we may unfix that pipe because we've changed the geometry of
everything under the house at this point so we always recommend that they wait do
the foundation first fix the leak second unless we're looking at a house that we
believe the leak is the predominant problem with the foundation and and
oftentimes will recommend fix the leak let's give it a year to dry out a year
to settle down let's reevaluate it and see if it's going to need any additional
help from a foundation repair standpoint or not oftentimes they don't oftentimes
fixing the leak takes care of the problem
if I could throw in one that I ran into and it's really still an ongoing
situation and behind the house I was living in there was a slab that was not
part of their house slab it was a build on porch and a crack developed it was
about the width of a pencil some days and some days it was a little wider
never the width of five pencils but maybe a pencil and a half thickness yes
and a neighbor who was in the construction field for 40 years said I'd
wait till summer and see if the dryness closes it up or maybe it was wait till
the winter and see if the moisture closed it up and since I didn't feel
like cutting a check for $5,000 not knowing what it was gonna do and since
it wasn't part of the foundation I did nothing which seemed like the thing to
do at the moment yeah any recommendation now maybe was caused by a leak maybe was
also caused by roots of a tree I did bring in a couple of arbologists? or
arborist arborist I'm sorry excuse me and they really gave me no information of use
whatsoever yeah so nothing was done except that I made a lot of appointment
all right well it most likely if it was a patio slab outside the house it most
likely had nothing with plumbing because it's very unlikely
that the plumbing was running under that slab in most cases at least flatwork
concrete such as patios driveways pool decks things like that are much thinner
and much less reinforced than you the slab of your house but they are
subjected to the same amount of soil movements and in some cases more soil
movements because it's a relatively small piece of concrete so it's got the
soil around it kind of in a closer area if it's not very thick if it's not very
well reinforced with steel rebar or post tension cables it's going to crack it's
kind of the nature of concrete which is why you see cracks in your garage floor
in your driveways and sidewalks concrete's very brittle material once it
cures the only thing that gives it any kind of flexibility is the either the
steel rebar or the cable that's inside of it so a little bit of movement and
it's going to crack and that's pretty common the only way to really combat
that is to try to water around it which is what I would have told you is let's
put a soaker hose around this this patio and water pretty heavily and see if we
can swell those soils to push that thing back up together and that's about the
only thing you could have done short of replacing it right you talked about
watering that patio what do you recommend for watering around the
foundation if somebody sees very small cracks in our house is there anything
they can do preventative maintenance absolutely a lot of times we do look at
houses that we're doing inspections and they've got a relatively small degree of
movement half inch maybe a three-quarter inch drop at the perimeter and we'll
often times tell them you know you can probably bring this back yourself with a
heavy watering program where you you place soaker hoses usually around the
entire house if you're just trying to concentrate on one area that has moved
you may only focus on that area but the soaker hoses need to be eight to twelve
inches away from the house not right up against it and we typically water you
know two three times a week for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour if we're
trying to bring an area up we might water that area every day for the first
week or maybe even two we to really try to saturate that soil and
then go back to two or three days a week on our website we have a section called
education and there's some videos there you can also find them on YouTube on
foundation watering and it's a video segment that explains and shows exactly
how to use soaker hoses to water your foundation and yes watering your
foundation is a real thing people it really is if you just moved here from
upstate New York trust me water your foundation it is critical for foundation
stable stability you're probably wondering where the
stairs are down to the basement if you just move yes and this is why we don't
have basements in in North Texas and in most of Texas is because of these soils
it's very expensive to build a basement that isn't going to be destroyed by the
amount of soil movement and the force of the soil movement that we have oh I
thought it was just that the ground was so hard here that nobody wanted to dig
through it because of the cost of having to do that no it's simply the soil
movement you you know a lot of large commercial projects multi-story
commercial office buildings do have basements and usually those basements
are only parking structures because it's very hard to keep them from cracking and
having water from the soils leach into them and everything else you rarely find
finished floor areas below ground here in Texas I actually got to work on the
new Parkland Hospital before I open my own company
and you're right about 30 feet deep you know we're laying pipe and sewer lines
and water distribution system underground the exterior of the building
has a subsurface drainage system yes with rock felt everything like that
helped keep this - you bet and the whole purpose is that it also not only does it
help keep the water away from the building but with all the pea gravel and
stuff there's a little bit of room for movement right if the soil does expand
and contract it squeezes the rocks together a little bit right doesn't
affect the structure it's called a crush zone that's exactly what it's designed
for to allow that soil to a place to move without affecting the structure of
the building but to do that on a residential property
it gets fair you're good you're going to spend way more on
foundation that you spent on the rest of the house and it almost doesn't matter
how much you spend on the rest of the house so now on more expensive
residential homes is there different type of piping different kind of layout
or something than you would see when the I don't have tract home is too low a
term but your typical suburbs house next to house not just a house the plumbing
is not going to be different the the plumbing itself you've got your sewer
line in your sewer line out or your water line in your sewer line out the
the real difference might be that the size of the water line it's not really
that the piping is not any different it's ran the same different plumbers you
know I tell people plumbing is very forgiving we could take like you say a
high-end house in University Park and plumb it if you got 50 different
plumbers they could plumb it 50 different ways it could still all be right it
could still all be legal and it could all still work forever now and I believe
that I've heard you talk before about a foundation watering system you know
don't you have something in place for that yes we actually designed one
because we were asked for years to kind of consult when sprinkler system
companies were putting in foundation watering systems for customers of ours
and they asked us you know is this right is this wrong and and sometimes it was
right and sometimes it wasn't and so we actually did develop our own foundation
watering system that we install and design were licensed irrigators now
because of that is there any is there any advice you would give to someone who
did not have a sprinkler system and was gonna get one put in yes if you're gonna
do a foundation watering system whether it's at in addition to your existing
sprinkler system or a system by itself a couple of problems that we see out there
is is you don't want to use the readily available drip pipe because that's
designed to give excess water for plants plants need more water than the soil can
hold so that they can take the water from the soil we want to go with about a
quarter inch per hour drip line or less because that's how much the soil can
absorb is about a quarter inch per hour and it needs to be buried at least
eighteen inches deep not four or five inches okay I'm I wish
I'd known this before this is why I didn't have the prize-winning roses that
wrong drip system it had nothing to do with my abilities with the soil again we
are speaking with both Roger Wakefield and Roger Williamson Roger Wakefield the
owner/operator/founder of Texas Green Plumbing you can look to the if we
haven't even touched on this although the helpful videos on texasgreen
plumbing.com they've also got Facebook and all sorts of social media they're
number (972)-442-4101 we're also speaking with Roger Williamson of
Williamsonfoundation.com and I'm John Wolf with you on the Ask The Experts
Radio Show on talk radio 1190