Hi everyone, it’s Michael from The Crack Doctor again.
Today I would like to answer a question we get a lot: Why Do Foundations Crack?
“Most building foundations are made of poured concrete.”
Concrete expands and contracts with moisture and thermal cycles but it is not very flexible so it creates expansion joints for itself in the form of foundation cracks. The majority of basement cracks occurred very early in the buildings’ life but are so fine that they can hardly be detected. Over the years, during thousands of freeze-thaw cycles, the crack gets bigger and begins to leak.
Building code for concrete strength varies from province to province but in Ontario it is not uncommon to discover cracks at approximately twelve foot intervals in the standard residential foundation.
A foundation crack will most often travel from top to bottom spanning the full height of the wall and will always penetrate through to the outside.
Since a foundation crack is really an expansion joint, it will always flex at that spot which makes it critically important to repair the crack with a flexible material.
The Crack Doctor has developed a permanent repair for fractured concrete which involves injecting, at very high pressure, a permanently flexible material which expands to fill the full thickness of the foundation wall from inside to outside or from outside to inside.
Our crack repair material has an expected life of five hundred years when not exposed to sun light. The Crack Doctor’s foundation crack repair carries a lifetime transferrable warranty.
