Stopping water leaks in a basement can be a very difficult problem especially if there is a crack in the wall where the water in entering.  However, if there are no cracks and your basement still leaks, there is something you can do to eliminate the water running across the floor. Its not pretty but it is effective.

Most of the time when water leaks into a basement it is because there is several feet of water standing against  your basement wall on the outside. One of the very important and effective things you need to do  is to make sure that the rain water that comes off your roof is not allowed to stand next to you house and run down next to your foundation.  This is particularly important and difficult to fix if you have one of those highly sought after level lots or if your house is build on a hill and the rain water running down the hill finds your house to be  an impediment to it getting to the bottom of the hill.

I could and probably should write a post on contouring your lot so that water runs away from your house and does not pool around your house, but that is for another sleepless night.

If you have a concrete block foundation, the water that accumulates next to your foundation  can and often is inside the blocks of the wall.  Even the best sealers will not be able to hold back 4 or 5 feet of water standing next to your foundation wall for very long. I have seen this draining go on for several hours in one of the houses I have done this way.

Footer, wall and floor

There is another situation that is very common as well. When your cellar as  dug out of the ground, the contractor digs out a trench of dirt all the way around where the foundation wall is going to stand. Its called a footer.  It is very important that the bottom and sides of this  trench are UN-disturbed dirt and that the forms used to make the top of the concrete poured into the trench flat and level are in fact level and where the foundation wall is supposed to go.

After the footer has cured, the concrete bricks are put up on the footer and fixed in place with mortar. Because the interior of the cement blocks are largely open and they are not stacked one on top of the other but staggered to improve the strength of the wall, the webs inside the blocks do not line up. So all the mortar is placed on the sides and ends of the block being careful not to leave any gaps in the mortar.

After the wall is finished the area inside the wall is leveled, sewer pipes are installed and often a sump pit is installed where a sump pump will later be installed to keep the water that accumulated under the floor and flooding the basement.  When all the plumbing is finished and tested the concrete floor is pumped in and finished.  If you are lucky the floor drain or the sump pit will be the low spot in the floor and water will naturally flow there.

After a long soaking rain, water will naturally accumulate in the soil around the house and eventually build up against the foundation and basement wall.  If the basement wall is concrete block often the block will leak or seep water and the wall will fill with water.  And as  you might guess, if water can seep in it can seep out into your basement.  There is another path that is possible as well.  Ground water can accumulate under your basement floor and seep in between the footer and the floor then come up through the expansion gap between the floor and the basement wall. The sump pit and pump are supposed to take care of this problem (if you have them) but some times it comes up that way anyway.

So what can be done?

Drain the wall into the floor drain or sump pit with a series of 1/2″ id schedule 40 PVC pipe and fittings.  A series of  1″ diameter holes drilled into the bottom row of the concrete bricks just above the floor.  Each hole has a 3″ long piece of the PVC pipe glued with Masonry Goop glue with about 1″ of the pipe sticking out of the wall.  An appropriate T or Elbow fitting is pushed onto each of the pipes sticking out of the wall without glue, and the T’s are connected together with more pipe.  When the pipe that is running around the wall passes the sump pit or floor drain, an additional T is inserted and a pipe is run over to the sump pit or floor drain to drain the system.  The pipe and fittings are not glued together so that they can be taken apart and cleaned out as necessary.

Just a note: if the wall is leaking when you start this project the holes drilled in the concrete block will run with water until the water in the wall has drained out. So you may want to start with a hole that is nearest to the drain point to limit the mess. I have seen this draining go on for hours in one of the houses I did this to. But after the system was installed, the wall and basement remained dry.

Musty smelling carpet is caused by mold and mold spores in and on your carpet even if you can not see the mold growing.

Washing the carpet in most cases only makes the problem worse. The same goes for dehumidifying the area of the musty smelling carpet.

The way we have found to eliminate the musty odor is to kill the mold and spores that are causing the odor and vacuum up the resulting dust.

Killing mold and spores is a bit more difficult than you might think or hope. Basically there are 2 products that will actually kill both mold and spores:  ozone and chlorine dioxide.

Ozone gas is poison. The US EPA has not published a safe level of ozone because (my opinion) there isn’t one. The fact that Canada has banned the import of products that produce ozone even as a byproduct says volumes. The other issue is that you need fairly high levels of ozone to do the job. Levels high enough to cause fabric bleaching, and plastics to become hard and brittle to say nothing of what it can do to your eyes, skin and lungs.

Chlorine dioxide (CLO2) gas at levels above 10 parts per million (PPM) can be toxic if you are exposed for longer than a few minutes at a time. However, CLO2 is very effective at much lower levels. From .003 to .01 ppm which the EPA has indicated is safe for 24/7 exposure. And the fact that you need no electric to produce CLO2 using the OdorXit CLO2 product makes it really easy to use in any closed space. Yes, a fan will improve it performance, but the fan is not necessary for many applications including musty carpeting

After treating moldy musty carpet with CLO2 and killing all the mold and spores, there will be a nasty dust left in and on the carpet. This dust is the residue of the dead mold and spores that contains a product called mycotoxin that can be very toxic to humans and pets.  Follow the link to find out much more about what they are and how dangerous they can be.  Suffice to say, you need to vacuum the dust up with a very low dust vacuum cleaner.  Breathing dust containing mycotoxins can and will make you sick given the chance.

OdorXit CLO2 is available at the OdorXit website.