Renovation & Design
Renovation & Design
Manage snow runoff to help keep old garage dry
Question: I have a 40-year-old double garage in which water seeps through the bottom of the walls, as the piles of snow outside melt, creating puddles everywhere inside. What do you suggest to remedy this? Thanks very much for any insights, Barb.
Answer: Water leaking into an older garage during the spring thaw may be difficult to address without major, costly upgrades. Replacement of the floor slab and lifting the older building may be possible but will depend on the overall condition, to determine whether it is feasible, or not.
Spring seepage onto the floor of an aging garage is all too common, and may be inevitable, due to several factors. The primary reasons for this are likely due to soil erosion and settlement of the floor and building above. As any homeowner who has lived in our area knows, exterior components will move seasonally, due to our expanding and shrinking soils. These clay soils are affected by moisture content and will push fences, decks, sheds, and even detached garages up and down seasonally. As the moisture in the soil begins to freeze during the late fall, the soil will swell if it is saturated enough. This may temporarily cause your garage slab to rise, but that could change during the freezing cold weather of winter. Over several decades, this will cause the entire garage to settle, or sink, placing the floor below grade.
Once the snow begins to melt in the spring, the runoff may not readily absorb into the soil beneath, which may still be frozen solid as a rock. This water will have to go somewhere, so it will follow the path of least resistance and seek out low lying areas to drain. If your garage slab was built significantly above the surrounding grade, it may be fine. But, over many years of dry weather the garage slab may sink, putting the surface near or even below the surrounding soil. If we have significant snowfall during the preceding winter, the melting snow may easily find its way into your garage, through the walls or between the bottom wall plate and the concrete floor. If you have snow piled near or directly against the garage, which is almost a necessity in many homes, it will make the situation worse. So, the first potential remedy is to shovel the snow as far away from the garage walls as possible, when it begins to melt.
There may also be a possibility of waterproofing the bottom of the outside walls of your garage to prevent easy ingress of runoff. This will require partial excavation to the bottom of the floor slab, around the entire perimeter, and removal of some siding. Both of those are quite labour intensive, and may only be possible if there is minimal vegetation or other structures nearby. Regardless, that effort may not be very effective if the floor slab is too far below the surrounding grade. Soil moisture may still find its way inside the garage by forcing its way through floor cracks, by hydrostatic pressure. It may still be worthwhile to dig drainage swales or small ditches parallel to the garage walls, to help channel the melting snow to your yard, driveway, street, or lane.
An improvement to grading and drainage may be enough to minimize the amount of water leaking into your older garage, so that it is only a nuisance. Otherwise, a major renovation or replacement of the existing structure may be the only permanent solution. If the garage is deteriorated, with rotten walls, sagging rafters, and deteriorated roofing, the choice may be simple. Knocking down and rebuilding a garage with a proper grade beam foundation, or thickened slab raised well above grade, may be the only choices. If the structural integrity of the garage is still reasonable, replacement of the slab-on-grade foundation may be the least costly alternative.
Slab replacement on an existing structure will be more costly than if it is completely demolished. That is because the current garage will have to be detached from the existing concrete floor, and reinforced before lifting off its current foundation. It will have to be temporarily moved, or supported high enough above the old floor to work beneath. Once the new foundation and floor is poured in place, the structure will have to be moved back in place and properly secured. This may require other modifications to ensure the older garage walls, which may be warped or no longer square, conform to the level new concrete. Again, all of these factors should be considered by any contractor prior to committing to this partial replacement strategy.
At this point, I must confess that I have the exact same issue every year, for the same reasons. I have a 60-year-old garage with attached carport, sitting on a cracked, somewhat deteriorated concrete floor slab. The structure is in reasonably good condition, partially due to the extremely durable Douglas fir framing used for its construction. My neighbour’s garage, replaced in the last decade, is only about two metres away, with the space between partially filled each year with snow from our driveways and the nearby back lane. When this melts, as well as the snow in my yard between the house and garage, it runs into the settled old building. While I move the melting snow closer to the lane when the weather warms, and have created small drainage swales on the two problematic sides, the puddles still appear. I typically move yard equipment, bikes, and other storage off the floor, or away from the wet areas. This prevents them from becoming stuck in the ice created at night when the water freezes. Once the snow disappears, the weather improves, and the water dries up, I replace the moved items after ensuring the garage walls are sufficiently dry. While not a solution to the water problem, it makes the situation fairly manageable, until the time I decide to heed the above advice and build an entirely new garage.
Keeping snow away and regrading to make melting snow runoff more manageable may be the only practical way to minimize the amount of water leaking into your older garage. The real solution, however, is complete replacement, or lifting and relocating the current structure to a higher, dryer concrete foundation and floor.
Ari Marantz is the owner of Trained Eye Home Inspection Ltd. and a Registered Home Inspector (RHI)(cahpi.ca). Questions can be emailed to the address below. Ari can be reached at 204-291-5358 or check out his website at trainedeye.ca.
trainedeye@iname.com
Renovation & Design
Improved air quality will tame fetid odours
Question: I am hoping you can help me with a quick question. My son and his friends are around 20 years old and like to hang out at our home, in our basement. The basement is finished, but nothing fancy. I find the basement has an odour, I guess a smell of boys that age, when everyone leaves. Can I use my HRV for the basement in order to remove these odours? Or, do you have any other solutions?
Thanks, Brian.
Answer: Odour control is not one of the primary functions of a heat recovery ventilator (HRV), but it could be an extra benefit, if installed and used accordingly. It would require additional ducting and control installation in your basement, but should be worth the cost and effort, even if it only improves airflow and moisture control in that area.
Odour elimination, especially in a basement, is often not a simple matter. Because that level of our home is typically cooler than the upper floor, condensation on cooler surfaces is much more likely. Also, because the cooler air will settle in the lowest areas in your home, it will take extra effort for the heating, and cooling (HVAC) systems to collect and recirculate that air throughout the home. That can lead to damp, musty odours, and in worse situations to mould growth. Regardless of the effectiveness of my following suggestions for your specific youthful smells, improving air circulation in the finished basement will definitely be beneficial.
I can certainly sympathize with you about the unique odours that often emanate from teenage and young adult males. As a former boy’s hockey coach, I regularly had to leave the dressing room when all the teenage players would arrive and take out their equipment, prior to a game or practice. The offensive smells were not because they forgot to hang out their gear after the last skate, and were barely noticeable when the same kids were younger. When they became teenagers, it was completely different.
I am not sure if the stinky athletes were simply a product of hormone production as they reached puberty, or a combination of that and other factors. Use of colognes and scented soap and shampoo products may have been a contributor, or a change in personal hygiene. In your case, the boys are above the legal age for drinking, so some of the offensive smell may be caused by beer, or legal cannabis, consumption. If they are leaving unwashed food and drink containers in the area, it will only add to the pungency. So, the first suggestion for mitigating the problem is to make sure they clean up after themselves, especially rinsing out used beer cans or bottles, before they are taken back for deposit returns and recycled.
All the blame should not be directly attributed to the young guys, who are simply enjoying a very fun part of life. Part of the issue may be poor air circulation in your finished basement. Too often, homeowners, and some contractors, forget to install sufficient heating ducts and registers in the basement upon building a rec-room. The most common mistake is to forget the return air registers, completely, when building the walls. It is easy enough to cut a few warm air ducts and install ceiling-mounted registers nearby, but return air installation is more complex. Since the return air ducts for the rest of the house are normally located in between the main floor joists, that puts them at ceiling height for the basement. Since the heated air entering the basement from the furnace ducts will settle to the basement floor as it cools, locating any return air registers will require some pre-emptive planning and installation. Return air ducts will have to be installed inside the basement partition walls to allow installation of registers near the floor. If the registers are not located in that area, they may collect the heated air from the ceiling registers before it properly circulates and cools, preventing proper heat distribution. Because cold air moves more slowly than warm air, larger or additional numbers of return air registers may be required. So, ensuring that you have an adequate return air system in the basement will be priority number one and will be critical for proper HRV setup.
Adding registers and ducts for the basement for use by your HRV is a good idea, which will help with overall air movement and moisture management. Unlike the HVAC system, the HRV will only require one set of those in each room, for intake of air to the ventilation unit. Since the HRV already has ducting connected to the return air plenum near the furnace, the presence of return air registers in each room, as recommended above, will suffice. If those are not installed, the HRV will not effectively collect the damp, cool basement air before the furnace replaces it with dryer heated air. That additional air movement should lower the humidity in the basement, preventing condensation and directing some of the odours outside through the HRV exhaust. You will also need to install a timed control switch, just like in the bathrooms and other areas where the HRV registers currently exist, to turn on the unit when the odourous boys are present, or after they have departed.
Adding proper controls, ducts, and registers for your HRV in your finished basement should help prevented unwanted odours, but also improve the overall comfort level of the HVAC system, as well. By improving the air quality through circulation and drying out the air in the basement, a properly set-up HRV intake is worth installing.
Ari Marantz is the owner of Trained Eye Home Inspection Ltd. and a Registered Home Inspector (RHI)(cahpi.ca). Questions can be emailed to the address below. Ari can be reached at 204-291-5358 or check out his website at trainedeye.ca.
trainedeye@iname.com
