Waterproof Exterior Wall, Foundation, Footer With a Sump Pump Drain Pipe

Waterproof Exterior Wall with Mel-RolI wanted to show you the right way to seal up a foundation for when you’re running footer pipe. This actually was a garden bed and I know that seems crazy. I mean, why would you put a garden bed right over your tile?

Anyways, we came in and I see guys all the time telling homeowners take a tar or this bucket or rubber and brush it on and roll it on and that’s waterproofing or foundation.  That is not waterproofing your foundation. That’s damp proofing. There is a difference. And I know these guys mean well I do. I know their passion is there for sure. One of them happens to be a pioneer of the yard water, drainage and I have a lot of respect for how hard he works. So I’m not trying to take a shot at anybody here, I just, I hope, I hope even the older guys are open-minded and willing to learn from this.

So, if you look at our codebook, if you, if you’re a licensed builder, you know this because you’ve covered it in your material, but again, just brushing on tar or a rubber coating that’s damp proofing and you just can’t stick  visqueen to a tar and consider that waterproofing either. So you want a membrane. A membrane is waterproof, that’s waterproof.

So, what we do is we take a primer and you paint brush a primer on and the product we use and love is called Mel-Roe. So it’s Mel-Role.  Well here in Michigan, I buy it at Boomers.  You got to go to a contractor store it’s not a The Home Deport or nothing like that yet, should be hopefully one day. But for homeowners, go ahead and Google it and find out who your local dealer is for Mel-Roe, you got to buy the primer. You put the primer up on the foundation. You want to clean the foundation, you want to power wash the foundation and you want it dry.

A lot of times in fall weather like we’re having right now, this cool weather, we, uh, we’ll take a torch. Actually, we got the torch right here. So we’ll take a torch and we’ll dry the foundation once we carwash it because we don’t have time to hang around and wait for a sunny day. We got to get the job done. So that’s how we do it. So that’s a membrane. That’s waterproofing right there when you have a membrane up against the foundation that’s waterproof, not damp proof, that’s waterproof.  Since this is going to be a garden once again, which is pretty crazy, I’d never planned anything over tile.

We’re actually using PVC schedule 40 because we’re going to have to run through this yearly to clean all the roots out of it. And how we ended up with a piece of Scheduled 40 with the drain holes in it, we just took the triple wall pipe that you can buy. This is really meant for a septic field, this was around four-inch piece of triple wall and we cut it and we used it as a template so that we could get our holes perfect because they’re supposed to be 45-degree angles. So that’s how we did that.

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