Many of you have certainly heard of the beautiful Butchart Gardens in Victoria B.C. As you can imagine, when I visit a place like that I want to see more than just the flowers. So, David Clarke gave me a tour of the hidden side of the gardens: where their water comes from. What may surprise yo...
Brian from Cornwall, Ontario just bought a house and when it rains heavily, it flows in the basement. Someone recommended that he dig a trench inside the basement to drain the water away.First of all, see if simply landscaping sloping away from the house, and rain gutters and downspouts away fro...
A quick look at cleaning downspouts showed that there are various ways to clean them and more interestingly, some ways to keep them clean. Most rain gutter guards fail to keep debris out of the gutter and out of the downspout. We showed one interesting set of products.The attachment between the...
Downspouts bring water down from the rain gutters but you must not let them just dump the water near the house, or you could have leakage problems in your basement. We showed two gadgets to help out.For downspouts that are fed directly into the foundation weeping tiles, the Easy-Clean system ...
James has water that spills out of one corner of his rain gutters where there is no downspout. And the downspout that goes into the weeping tiles often overflows.It could be that the slope of the rain gutters is not steep enough to drain away the water, or that the size of the rain gutter is t...
It is amazing what can be made out of copper, and perhaps even more amazing to discover that still today there exist coppersmiths, plying their trade with many of the same tools used hundreds of years ago. We think of copper today as fancy hoods over kitchen ranges or even copper roofs, particul...
Hi Jon,
I have a driveway retaining wall that continues to be pushed by the ground, even though it is backed by gravel and drained to "nothing under the driveway" except crushed gravel. I realize proper drainage affects this somewhat, however would prefer not to cut open my driveway, sidewalk a...
Leafs and other debris clogging up the rain gutters can be the death of a roof. On a one story bungalow you can pretty easily keep those gutters clean but when things are higher up, or you have a lot of mature trees in the yard, it can be a big maintenance task. If you have tried any of the scree...
This article deals with walls below grade, foundation walls. For insulating above grade cinder block walls see How do you Insulate a Brick and Block construction as well as Insulating an Above Grade Block Wall from the Inside.
The best way to prevent water from leaking into the basement is not ...
One of the most successful, but most expensive ways to keep leaves out of rain gutters is to place a solid shield over the top.
Using the principle of surface tension of water, the water flows over the shield and wraps around its outside curve. That curve extends out over the rain gutter itsel...
