In this episode, Reuben and Tessa are joined by Steve Grohn, owner of Standard Water, who shares his expertise on basement waterproofing and other related services and they discuss basement water issues and the importance of proper drainage. They also address common misconceptions and scams in the industry, emphasizing the importance of providing accurate solutions to homeowners. Steve highlights the comprehensive approach his company takes, considering factors such as gutters, downspouts, and grading before recommending drain tile installation. He also discusses the measures his company takes to minimize dust and ensure a clean work environment. In this conversation, Steve Grohn discusses various aspects of basement waterproofing and foundation repair. He explains the process of installing drain tile systems, the challenges of removing concrete during basement waterproofing, and the importance of proper waterproofing to prevent water intrusion. Steve also touches on the topic of radon mitigation and the benefits of using drain tile systems in conjunction with radon mitigation systems. Additionally, he briefly mentions the use of helical piers and push piers for foundation repair.
Takeaways
Proper drainage is crucial for preventing basement water issues.
It is important to address the root cause of water intrusion rather than just installing drain tile as a quick fix.
Some companies use fear tactics and misinformation to sell unnecessary services.
Standard Water takes a comprehensive approach, considering factors such as gutters, downspouts, and grading before recommending drain tile installation.
Dust control measures, such as negative air pressure and HEPA filters, are essential during basement waterproofing projects. Basement waterproofing involves the installation of drain tile systems to prevent water intrusion.
Removing concrete during basement waterproofing can be a labor-intensive process.
Proper waterproofing is essential to prevent water damage and mold growth in basements.
Drain tile systems can be used in conjunction with radon mitigation systems to remove radon gas from basements.
Helical piers and push piers are used for foundation repair to stabilize and lift sinking or settling foundations.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Water Heater Failure
01:55 Sponsor Shoutout and Minnesota’s Best Award
03:34 Guest Introduction and Overview of Steve’s Companies
05:36 Differentiating Standard Water from Competitors
11:44 Scams and Misinformation in the Waterproofing Industry
18:25 Considering the Big Picture and Multiple Solutions
22:31 Dust Control Measures During Basement Waterproofing
25:00 Basement Waterproofing and Drain Tile Systems
29:16 The Challenges of Concrete Removal in Basement Waterproofing
38:47 The Importance of Proper Waterproofing
45:14 Combining Drain Tile Systems with Radon Mitigation
TRANSCRIPTION
The following is a transcription from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be slightly incomplete or contain minor inaccuracies due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Reuben Saltzman: Welcome to my house. Welcome to the Structure Talk Podcast, a production of Structure Tech Home Inspections. My name is Reuben Saltzman. I’m your host alongside building science geek, Tessa Murray. We help home inspectors up their game through education, and we help homeowners to be better stewards of their houses. We’ve been keeping it real on this podcast since 2019, and we are also the number one home inspection podcast in the world, according to my mom.
RS: Welcome back to the show. Welcome to the Structure Talk Podcast. Tessa, great to see you. How’s every little thing in your world?
Tessa Murray: Hey. I can’t complain, but I do have a quick little story that I know that you’re gonna love, Reuben.
RS: I can’t wait.
TM: Okay. The other day, reached in for a trash bag underneath the kitchen sink and water, standing water underneath the kitchen sink in the cabinet. Take a closer look, and we have an on-demand electric water heater. As we’ve discussed on the show previously, and you actually did a show because of the failures you had with yours that caused a lot of damage. But luckily, mine hadn’t gone through the ceiling yet. All the water was still on the cabinet floor, and we found it fast enough that we were able to take care of it. But yes, I think it’s about 12 years old, and it failed. So…
RS: 12 years?
TM: Water everywhere. Yeah. Yeah.
RS: Oh.
TM: Yep.
RS: I can’t believe you got that much life out of it.
TM: I know, I know. Well, we do have a water softener that helps, I think, take out impurities and who knows. But yes, it was a ticking time bomb. I’ve been worried about it ever since we did our podcast on the ones you had that failed.
RS: Yeah, yeah. Well, I can’t believe you didn’t do something like yank it out of there after we talked about it, Tess.
TM: [laughter] Oh.
RS: All right.
TM: You know what? I’m in a rental, so it’s not really my problem.
RS: Oh. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.
TM: If this was my house and I owned it, I would be proactive on that, but anyways.
RS: Sure. Okay. All right.
TM: Anyways, that just happened a couple days ago. But yeah, what about you? What’s happening in your world, Reuben?
RS: Well, before we get into all that, I wanna give a shout out to our show sponsors, IEB, Inspector Empire Builder. It is a coaching group. I don’t know if it’s a coaching group. We never know exactly what to call it, [laughter] but it’s a community for home inspectors who are interested in collaborating with like-minded home inspectors, people who wanna grow their business. We’re not here talking about technical stuff about how to technically inspect the house. We’re here to talk about running our businesses, running our lives, managing work-life balance, all that stuff, and getting advice on how to run your business. It has been invaluable for me. I’ve been a member for a long time now and just appreciate them. So, if you’re a home inspector looking for a little bit of guidance on running your business, I encourage you to visit them. We’ll have a link to their website in the show notes. Again, it’s IEB, Inspector Empire Builder. Awesome group. Next thing I wanna get out of here, we got a guest who’s waiting, so I’m just trying to power through these topics here so we can bring our guest on.
[overlapping conversation]
TM: We’ve got an exciting topic today, yeah, and a great guest.
[overlapping conversation]
RS: Yeah, we got a good one. But I also wanted to share, we had been asking our circle to vote for us here in the Twin Cities, the Star Tribune, it’s our local newspaper. They started doing this thing called Minnesota’s Best, where people vote for their favorite service providers. And the first year it came out, we won silver unknowingly. We never even asked anybody to vote. We didn’t know the thing was going on. We just got notified, “Hey, you won silver.” After that, we started campaigning and asking people, “Hey, will you vote for us?” And for the third year in a row, we have now won gold. So, super pumped about that.
TM: Congratulations. Well deserved.
RS: Thank you, thank you.
TM: Well deserved.
RS: Yep. So, that was Minnesota’s Best. And then the last one is we just did a podcast with Skip Walker. We were talking about smoke alarms, and I had a follow up to this. I was writing a blog post about photoelectric smoke alarms in the new selection at Home Depot. And on my third visit to the store to examine these smoke alarms, Tessa, I’m so embarrassed. If I look more carefully at the box, it actually says, there’s an icon indicating it’s a photoelectric smoke alarm. So, I have to correct myself. On the last show, I said there’s nothing on the outside of the box that indicates that there is. And then I was curious about the other handful of smoke alarms that Home Depot sold. And I inspected every single package that was not this one flavor of smoke alarm. Home Depot no longer sells ionization smoke alarms.
TM: What? Really?
RS: They’re done. Yes. At least, I can’t speak for everyone, but the one by my house in Maple Grove, they don’t have a single ionization. They don’t sell a single dual sensor smoke alarm. Everything is photoelectric now, so kudos.
TM: My goodness. Wow. Not even a dual ionization and photoelectric?
RS: Not even a dual.
TM: They’re just completely gone?
RS: Yep. So, good for them. And like I told you, I tried emailing them, trying to figure out why the change, and I never got a response from them, but I think the answer is clear. The reason for the change is they don’t wanna sell ionization smoke alarms anymore. [laughter] That’s it right there. So, that’s, that. Had to update us. And now, now let’s bring our guest on.
TM: Let’s do it.
RS: Yeah, all right.
TM: He’s been patiently waiting in the background here.
[overlapping conversation]
RS: Steve, are you with us still?
TM: Yeah. [laughter]
RS: We didn’t put you to sleep?
Steve Grohn: I’m here. I’m here. I’m with you.
RS: All right, cool. So, we got Steve Grohn with… Well, I don’t know how to introduce you, Steve. I wanna say “Steve Grohn with Standard Water,” a company that we have been referring for a long time for basement water intrusion problems, but it’s not his only company. Steve’s got like five or six different companies that he is running now. How do I introduce you, Steve?
[laughter]
SG: I’m still trying to figure out what I’m gonna do when I grow up, but… [laughter] Yeah. Technically it’s only three companies.
RS: Okay. All right.
SG: So, yes, you’re right. Standard Water. We do egress windows, radon mitigation, foundation repair for basements, and waterproofing. And I’ve got service division. We replace thousands, plural, thousands of sump pumps each year. I’m a licensed general contractor in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and obviously have my radon mitigation license. We’re a small company, 30 employees or so. And having just an unbelievable banner record year for the ages, just weird, booked out through the rest of the year. It’s just because of the rain, you know?
RS: Sure.
SG: And yeah, it’s just been amazing. We’ve phenomenal salespeople. I just feel blessed and lucky and with how everything has been. But you gotta remember, three years ago it was a drought and it’s the reverse. So, we’re dependent on rain to a degree, although foundation repair is stronger when it gets drier. There’s more issues that way. The ground kinda heaves. It’s not like a stable thing. You think it’s stable, but it’s moving back and forth. At any rate, the second company is AJ Alberts Plumbing out of Woodbury. I have 10 plumbers, four of whom are master plumbers. We work the Seven County Metro, and if it touches water, we do it. Water softeners, RO systems. There’s a lot of talk out there with PFAS, the chemicals that have been dumped in the ground by 3M and pretty much everyone else, that causes all sorts of issues. So, reverse osmosis is very popular. I think as time goes on and people know this now, it’ll just become more prevalent: That we are unhealthy because of the water we drink, the food that we eat, and the air that we breathe.
SG: So, as much as you can correct those or be as healthy as you can. And so for water, people are drinking chlorine water, chlorinated water mostly, many times. And to extend the life of chlorine, they put in chloramine. That’s a known carcinogen. You shower in this stuff, you breathe this stuff. We used chlorine in World War II, right? To kill people, or World War I it was. So, yeah. Water filtration is a huge part of AJ Alberts. We also do remodeling, do boilers, drain cleaning. And then of course, every sort of toilet and faucet you can imagine. Very busy. A lot of phone calls.
SG: And then the third company is Barrier Construction. It’s housed in the same building as Standard Water over in Crystal by Brooklyn Park, Minneapolis, Ravensdale area. Barrier specializes in… All those homes, if you heard about all those lawsuits with homes, they had stucco. And the reason there’s water intrusion and mold behind that stucco is they weren’t installed properly, mainly relative to the windows. The stucco itself is fine, but then water gets behind there and causes damage. So, you know this, with home inspections, you go out, it’s stucco, you get your moisture meter out, “Hey, there’s moisture in here.” You start doing some tests, you have mold. And if you’re a home buyer, well, I don’t want to buy that until it’s fixed. And that’s a very common situation. So, we fix that. And sometimes you don’t know how bad it is till you start digging away. Some is straightforward. There’s a spot here, spot there. And then we’ve had a few homes here in the last few years, literal entire home tear offs.
TM: Oh.
SG: And so we’ll take off literally all… Imagine stucco. How do you put cement on the side of the house and it sticks, right? You’ve got wire in there like mesh, and you don’t just casually take it off. You need saws. You have to wear… You have to be safe. You have to wear helmets to breathe properly, to not breathe all that dust. You have to throw all that away. You have to carry it away. It’s sharp metal. It’s just difficult. And then you have to put it back, right? And to put it back’s difficult because you need to match the original stucco, both the design and the color. So, we’ve got 15 carpenters out there working year round. They are primarily doing outdoor work. And then Barriers also got a division that does mold mitigation remediation which ties into what Standard does, ’cause you got all this water in the basement and there’s a lot of mold. So, Barriers got a division that goes out and cleans mold basically. That’s the mold mitigation. But mold and moisture tie into basically all the companies in one way or another. So, the companies exchange leads are integrated to a certain degree, but yet operate autonomously.
RS: Yeah. And we have been very close referral partners for a long time. Before I knew you, I knew Matt Roach. And back when we purchased Private Eye and we started getting into doing stucco testing, that’s when I got to know Matt Roach back in 2014. And we have been very good referral partners where they need someone to do intrusive testing, they refer us. We need someone to fix bad stucco, we would refer Barrier. And before it was Barrier, there was another name for it. I don’t even remember the previous name of this company. And then you guys ended up becoming sister companies, and then that’s how I got to know Steve.
RS: And then that’s where Steve took over Standard Water. And Standard Water, I’ll just sing their praises for a minute. They’ve been in the Twin Cities forever doing basement water stuff. And on all of their jobs, after they install their drain tile and they put in the sump basket and whatever, they’ve always got this stamp that they put in the concrete for their brand. And you see their logo all over the Twin Cities, and you just get a good feeling when you see their logo stamped in there, ’cause you know that it was a reputable company. They do very high quality work. They’ve got the backup system installed, they do everything right. And so, we would always feel good about it when we saw that it was Standard Water doing the work. And so then when Steve took over, I was like, “Oh, who are you? You bought Standard Water. Fantastic. This is great.” So, we love those guys, and we send them business for all of the stuff that they do, ’cause they do good work and they take good care of their customers. And, Tessa, remind me, did we do a podcast where I was complaining about basement water companies and how some of them just like to scam people?
TM: I believe so. I believe we talked about that a little bit. I think it was recently, you would see someone take out their moisture meter and try and scan the surface of a concrete block foundation, if I remember correctly, with the wrong type of moisture meter.
RS: Yes, yes. They were using a wood moisture meter, they were holding it to a concrete block foundation wall, and it registers that it’s wet. Of course it does. That’s what concrete will do when you’re using a wood moisture meter. And they’re telling people, “Yeah, you got a basement water problem, you need drain tile.” And that’s their sales tactic. And it’s just… It’s either incompetence or they’re lying.
[overlapping conversation]
TM: Predatory. Yeah.
RS: Yeah, I don’t know what it is, but it’s unconscionable. And I talked to Steve, “What’s you guys’ process?” And, Steve, if you guys are coming into somebody’s house just to share the opposite of what these guys are doing, what do your sales people do when they’re called out to investigate a wet basement issue? Do you go just straight to drain tile? What’s your process?
SG: Yeah. That’s a good question. First of all, if we get called out on average to 10 drain tile potential jobs, we quote eight of those 10; not 10 out of 10, not 9 out of 10. We quote eight out of 10. I have a really good friend of mine. By the way, Reuben and I do CrossFit together.
RS: Yeah, we do.
SG: We could do 10 podcasts on that. It’s a lot of fun. But one of my…
RS: Steve and I would get on the phone, and we would talk for an hour just about CrossFit. It is so obnoxious.
SG: So, one of my CrossFit coaches is my desk dad where I go to in the Mendota, and he’s an amazing realtor. We’ve done a bunch of egress windows at his house, and he had a bunch of water coming in and he says, “Yeah, pretty sure it’s the foundation, dadada.” I knew he didn’t have drain tile. And he’s over in Mendota and we do a pile of work in Mendota, so I sent one of my guys over. And it was one of the hottest days this summer, and here his air conditioner was working pretty hard, and he had a leak coming out of like his coil and furnace. Had nothing to do with drain tiles. So, we explained that. We explained that. And we did actually, the particular service tech that went out there wasn’t really a salesman but… And we do have moisture meters, and we could show him that there was some moisture in the block, but he didn’t need drain tile. There was no water coming in the basement as a result of that. And we drove away. So there’s no quote.
SG: So, you don’t want someone to buy something when you don’t have a real fix or the solution or there’s not a real problem. And I’m not gonna say the names of any of my competitors, but I know for a fact that the fear tactics definitely do work. They definitely do them. And the other thing, this could be a podcast too, if a in-home salesman is in your house for longer than 60 minutes, there’s a problem. [chuckle] I’m telling you, there’s a problem. You don’t need more than an hour in there. If you’re in there for more than an hour, your prices must be so high that you just wanna hang there until they either buy or kick you out, and then they’re gonna do fear. So, yeah, I love competition, I really do. If we go toe to toe with someone else, I look forward to it.
SG: I think if we can relay the facts, I think we went… Like, with drain tile, our drain tile is hard PVC with holes in it, and we install it beside the footer, not on top the footer. What that means is you have to excavate way more cement and way more gravel to do it. So, if you were gonna say, “What would be the most difficult, most expensive way you could install drain tile?” you would’ve picked the way we do it. It is by far the most laborious, most difficult, but it’s also the best. Clearly, it’s the best. If it wasn’t the best, we would do it the cheaper way. All the other companies don’t put drain tile like a gutter on top of the footer. But that makes sense. We literally, on a 100 foot job, we’d literally, plural, tons; tons and tons of… Less material would have to be hauled out, and less material would have to be hauled in. So, we feel like we have the best solution. It’s also the most difficult solution. And if you’re a competitor selling against us, and you can’t beat us on solution and you can’t beat us on price, what are you gonna beat us on? What do you got left?
RS: Yeah. There’s nothing, man.
SG: Well, you’re gonna be unscrupulous. That’s the answer. So, it’s a tough business that way. And you encountered part of it.
RS: Yeah. Yep.
SG: Fear and scare tactics, unfortunately they work. We don’t use ’em, but they do work.
TM: Steve, I’ve got a question for you. Besides the example you gave with it being like the result of an AC that wasn’t draining properly from the condensate line, what are some other situations where your company might be called out because the homeowner thinks they need drain tile but really drain tile won’t fix it?
SG: Yeah. I’d say one of the most common ones is like a rain gutter has become disconnected right by the house, and there’s water only coming in that spot, and the gutter is just dropping the water right there. Now, could we install drain tile in that house and solve that problem? Yes. But should we tell the customer to just reattach the gutter and they’re probably gonna be fine? Or give them that option? It’s kinda interesting. I bet if we went through the last 10 sales that just came in here and we just looked at ’em, I’ll find at least one in there from a quote that we gave several years ago. So, for whatever reason, if water’s coming in your basement, you can clean the water up, wait for winter, you’re gonna live. Right? It sucks, but you can survive. You don’t have to have… Some of these people don’t have to have the work done, so they’ll wait till it gets worse. ‘Cause the problem’s not gonna get better. It will only get worse.
SG: And you think about water in a basement. Have you ever jumped in a swimming pool and hang onto a ball and try to bring that ball down in the water like a balloon? You can’t. You can’t. So, imagine same swimming pool, but the water’s on the outside of the pool. That is a hell of a lot of pressure coming in the home. And if the wire’s gonna come in the home, it’s most likely when, unless it was waterproofed properly originally, and they have a little water coming in, it’s just a matter of time and… Gonna have an issue probably around the perimeter of the house. So, yeah.
TM: Well, I appreciate you explaining that because I think that’s what also sets you guys apart, is that you’re looking at the big picture when you arrive to a house. You’re walking around the outside, you’re looking at the gutters and the downspouts and the grading, and you’re seeing why is the water coming in, where is it coming in, and what do we do to fix it? And is drain tile the solution? And it’s not always the first step you should take, is what I’m hearing.
SG: Yeah, it’s probably a multi-pronged step. And maybe in some case we should probably advocate for both of ’em better than we do. But in the situation I gave you, another one would be we come in a basement, a whole bunch of water’s coming in, and there’s an egress window, and you can see the water above the egress window grade is coming in there. Do they need drain tile? No, probably not. But in some cases, yes. What we can do is drain tile that portion right by that window, and we can tap the block, bring the water through that window well down into the drain tile and send it out of the home. We can also remove the egress window. And then there’s other solutions too. We don’t necessarily do ’em. You can put a sump pump in the bottom of the basin of the window well, but that’s gonna have inherent issues in the wintertime, and egress windows just can be really difficult, ’cause once it fills up with water outside… So, that’s one of the beautiful things. If we do a drain tile system and an egress window, we can drain that right into our drain tile, and they will literally never… “Never” is a big word, right? We teach our kids to never say never. [laughter] You always. We don’t say “always,” right? But “never.” Like, “We’ll never have wire problems.”
RS: That’s awesome. No, Steve, let me ask you something else. There was a guy on our team before we knew you guys, before you had taken over there. I can’t remember what company they had used, but they had drain tile installed in their basement, and they got home after the company had started the demo, cutting up the concrete and the floor. And there was dust covering everything in their entire house. Entire first floor is covered in concrete dust. What do you guys do to help contain dust when you’re cutting up a basement?
SG: Okay, this is really a big deal. And OSHA has regulations relative to silica, that silica dust gets in your lungs and people die of that stuff. So, we go to the ends of the earth to make sure it’s a healthy… Forget about the homeowner for a sec, right? Employees come first. The health of my employees come first. For example, we go in, and we always engineer the home so that we can put the basement in negative air pressure, first of all. So, we’re sucking the air out as we work. And then the second thing is we have some monster HEPA machines that clean the air at a rate of about 1,011 CFM, that’s cubic feet per minute. And we go through the… These HEPA filters are expensive, but we go through ’em. And so, we’ll hook up two or three of those sometimes on jobs, and then we’ll put that home in negative pressure.
SG: And when you do that, you stick in a big 12 inch pipe that’s hooked up to a monster fan on the outside of the house. And then you have to seal up around that pipe, and you flip that fan on and you just suck the air out. And you do that in combination of putting up the plastic to the ceiling, and we’ve got push deals that’ll bring it all the way up. We cover everything in advance as much as we can. And then you put that home in negative air pressure. And, God, I cannot even remember last time we had a problem with the customer relative to dust being left in their home. There is dust, don’t get me wrong, but not like that.
RS: Yeah.
SG: We’re not perfect. We have some goof ups too where we don’t clean up properly, but it’s not because of that dust, that the dust you’re talking about.
RS: Yeah.
SG: So, whoever’s doing that absolute amateur hour, I kinda cringe on homeowners. And people can do this work themselves, but you’re gonna get a jackhammer, you better get ear plugs, right? You better have a way of doing this. You don’t breathe the silica. And then you gotta move each piece of cement outside. It’s gotta go somewhere. And then you gotta get rid of it. So, it’s heavy labor.
RS: What do you do with all that, with all the concrete? Where does it go? Just outta curiosity.
SG: We take it to the gravel pit in Maple Grove primarily, and drop it off there.
RS: Okay. All right.
SG: Yeah.
RS: Just curious.
SG: But that desk can be a big… Is a really big deal. We also tell customers in advance how bad it’s gonna be, and we encourage them, and there’s a list of stuff they have to do. In fact, that’s one of the challenges most people from the time they buy to install. Let’s say our schedule’s wide open, most customers do not wanna see us on average for at least three weeks. ‘Cause if you think about your own basement, if you gotta remove everything, take five feet around the edge of your basement, like, oh, people have carpet, then they have shelving, they have couches and they just like, “I don’t wanna do this. Who wants to do this?” So, we do have some prepping services, but it takes some effort. And you get in some of these homes, it’s not just move the stuff to the middle. They gotta get a garbage dump themselves ’cause they have so much to get rid of.
RS: Sure.
SG: Yeah. No charge to help them clean up and organize their basement. Yeah, we give them…
RS: Wow.
SG: Not give ’em a reason to do all that.
RS: That’s awesome. And then…
TM: I’m just curious… Oh, go ahead, Reuben.
RS: No, go ahead.
TM: Yeah, I was wondering, would you say that there’s a certain… Are there certain types of foundations that work better for preventing water coming in? Or are there certain foundations that you see most often having trouble with water in the Twin Cities area?
SG: Well, if you imagine, when homes are built, if they’re waterproofed properly, what they’ve done is on the exterior of their home they have applied the tar, right? And everything that prevents the wire from coming in in the first place. And so, I think for a lot of the new homes today, we don’t see problems. But yeah, if the house has been waterproofed properly and it’s a port foundation, it’s not hard to get a crack in there. And there are sometimes you ask about drain tile, sometimes we don’t do drain tile, sometimes we will. If there’s that crack, we will stitch it, which is putting carbon fiber, steel metal the size of a ruler in a cross direction with the crack and then seal it, with either polyurethane or there’s a couple different types of sealants that we use to prevent that wire from coming in.
SG: Another thing we’ll do too at times, we will dig on the outside of the home. I had a friend of mine in Minneapolis, home was built like 1900 and the concrete’s falling apart. You’ve probably seen those. You get into homes and then in this particular case, everything’s finished: Electric, everything. To do drain tile would’ve just been unbelievably expensive. But the water was coming in by one window, so we dug down. It was a deep hole, but we dug down, and then we did patch the cement on the inside and the outside of it. And then after that we put tar on it and then we put a membrane on it. And then after that we put a drainage board, dimple board on top of that, and then we backfilled with combat [0:29:35.0] ____. And so really there is no way in hell that water is gonna come back in that area again. Maybe it’ll come in somewhere else. In that particular instance, this was a couple of years ago, I think we charged $5,000 for that. It’s a big hole, and we had to haul away quite a bit of dirt. We’re harling in combat [0:29:56.0] ____ to make sure we get good drainage there. But yeah, no problem since then because it’s been sealed properly. And that’s an example of a solution that didn’t require drain tile either.
RS: Now, Steve, you bring up the price. You said like $5,000 for that. And it makes me think, we never talked about price. What is an average price range if someone’s gonna have drain tile installed around the perimeter of their house? Let’s say you got a 1200 square foot footprint on a house. What’s a cost range for that?
SG: Yeah. Round numbers, normal install, and this would include the permit and include the sump pump and include the discharge lines, and this would include hauling everything away and just everything, the whole nine yards. We’re typically, right now we’re $86 a foot. So, do the math. A hundred foot, 8,600 bucks. It’ll be something like that. Obviously there’s considerations. We’ll discount jobs in the winter. We charge more for jobs that cost more, right?
RS: Okay. All right. And so, my example, a 1200 square foot, what is that? That’d be like a 30 by 40, something like that. And so that’d be about 140 lineal feet. Is my math wrong? Yeah. Okay. 140 lineal feet. Okay.
[overlapping conversation]
SG: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, you got 140 times 86, which would be about 12 grand.
RS: Okay. All right. It’s less than I was thinking. I was thinking it was probably closer to like 15,000 to 20,000. Okay. All right. Well, that’s delightful, ’cause I thought prices had gone so much more up. [chuckle] It’s good to hear they’re still still in the, well, whatever. You get what I’m saying. That’s great. Okay. All right.
TM: And I’ve got a question for you, Steve. You mentioned that a house and that strategy where you actually did some work on the exterior of the foundation to try and redirect water and seal the foundation and protect it. But are there certain situations where you’d actually advocate an exterior drain tile system instead of an interior one?
SG: Yeah, we don’t do much, too much of that. But there are systems or like French drains, and you can put some pumps in certain low spots and pump it out, or just dig down and pipe the drain tile, and install drain tile and bring it somewhere else. There’s also situations where we bring water into the storm sewer, and sometimes we’ll tie that into the gutter system. Not all cities allow us to do that. And that can be spendy but worthwhile. Different solutions to just bring the water from the roof from the inside of the home, and just get it pumped into the normal, not the sewer system but the overflow or just the storm sewer system, yeah.
[overlapping conversation]
RS: Yeah. My dad ended up doing that at his own house. It was a DIY project at his house in St. Louis Park. He’s got a big backyard, and he’s got the lowest point in a surrounding area. And his backyard and his neighbor’s backyard, I don’t know what have… There was another house that got built, and after that things changed and his backyard would flood, and it would stay there and there’s nowhere for the water to go. And eventually they ended up installing a drain pit in the lowest point in their backyard. And then he ran maybe a couple hundred feet of pipe going from this pit. And the city allowed him to connect this discharge directly into the storm sewer system.
TM: Wow. Wow.
RS: And so, that’s where it goes. He’s got pictures of it. It was a cool system.
TM: And the city said, “Thank you, Neil Saltzman, for taking care of this water problem for us.”
[laughter]
RS: I don’t think he ever got that thank you, but it seems like there should have been. Yeah, he really was kinda leaning on the city like, “Hey, look, can’t you guys fix this? There’s nowhere for this to go anywhere.” They’re like, “This is designated swamp land. Just be glad it hasn’t turned into a swamp in the 39 years you’ve been here, but that’s how it’s designated.”
TM: Wow. That’s crazy. Well, yeah, just going back to that discussion though. The reason I asked that question is ’cause from a building science perspective and home performance, if you can, you wanna keep the water on the outside of the house. [laughter] And if you can stop it from coming in in the first place, do that. And so, we always talk about water management and having a proper system of gutters and downspouts and downspouts that are actually connected and taking the water away from the foundation, and correcting negative grading and having it slope away. And so, if you’ve done all those things then and you still have water coming into your basement, bulk water coming in, that’s when you might consider doing some interior drain tile system. Because it’s not cost effective to try and dig out the entire foundation and install waterproofing and exterior insulation and a French drain or drain tile system on the outside once the house is already built. A retrofit situation like that is really difficult to do. So, anyways, that’s why, I guess, you’d go at it from the inside if you’ve done all those things and you still have bulk water coming in. Right? Correct me if I’m wrong in any of that, Steve.
SG: Can you ask that one more time? I’m sorry.
[overlapping conversation]
RS: No, she can’t, she can’t. [laughter]
TM: Correct me if I’m wrong. [chuckle]
RS: It was a mouthful. Well, I’m just gonna say she’s right. We’ll go with that.
SG: [laughter] Okay.
RS: But something else I wanted to ask you about, Steve, is, of course when you’re doing all this, it ties in very nicely with radon mitigation systems or radon reduction systems, whatever we’re calling it these days. ‘Cause so often you basically got a pipe that’s connected into that drain tile system and it sucks air out of it. So, what is you guys’ process for that?
SG: Yeah, so let me back up a little bit so everyone’s clear on radon. Radon is a gas, kind of like smoke. And if you inhale enough of it long enough, it’s proven to cause cancer.
RS: Yeah.
SG: And the level that requires some mitigation or desired medication, they say like four picoliter. So, there’s a way of testing it. And then the way radon gets in a home is it needs three things. It needs pressure to get into the home. So, some sort of negative pressure in the basement. Or like even in the wintertime, you open your doors, it’s a stack effect, it puts the basement negative pressure. Radon levels typically go up a point in the wintertime. Number two, you need radon… Well, you need radon in the ground. Not all ground is created the same. There’s some ground that doesn’t have radon in. And then number three is you need a way for the radon to get into the home, some sort of cracks. So, if you had Saran wrap on the entire outside of your basement and underneath it, it wouldn’t matter if there’s radon all over. And do you have negative pressure, how’s it gonna get in? It’s just not gonna get in. So, in terms of, and I don’t know if everyone knows this, but you’ve got over 50 radon testers, you’ve got 10 plus home inspectors, you have your people out getting those and testing it, home transactions and whatnot.
SG: So, we definitely do that sort of work. So, when we install our drain tile system… Okay, so when you install a radon fan, you wanna suck the air out before it gets in the basement. You wanna suck the air out before… So, not air that’s in your basement, the air before it gets in your basement. And so, what you wanna do is suck the air from a space that gives you the least amount of resistance. So, if the soil is sand, the air is not gonna move at all. But if you’re gonna attach a pipe to our drain tile system, which is below the cement floor, there’s no resistance. Our drain tile system by far, and there’s not anything else that competes with this, allows more radon to be removed from the home than any other system out. Let me put it this way. After we connect to our drain tile, we have never… “Never” is a big word. Remember, “never” is a big word. We’ve never had a test come back above four with our perimeter, ever.
SG: Usually the test comes back below one. It’s just like R goes away. Now, you do have to make sure the basement is sealed off properly, but our drain tile system paired with the radon system is just amazing. And when no one talks about, but it’s really I think maybe even just about as cool, is you’re removing so much air that it prevents, helps prevent the basement from getting as humid. So, you know that humidity is coming in from moisture in the walls or in the dirt, and you’re sucking that icky air out. You’ve been in the basement, you get that icky smell, you know what I mean.
RS: Oh, yeah.
SG: But it helps remove that icky sort of smell when it’s attached to our drain tile system. That being said, there’s some homes that don’t have any drain tile at all, and we will install systems, and we have a way of excavating dirt below the area where we’re gonna suck the air out. You have to have what’s called communication. So, you need to be able to pull air from different parts of the basement in order to get the best radon mitigation. But we also have some different ways of… We had a situation a year and a half ago, it was a St. Paul home, it was testing at 20, which is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.
RS: That’s high. Yeah.
SG: Oh, it’s high off the chart. And it was a double basement. The home was built in like 1880, and they put a new basement around a portion of it in like 1920. It was really odd. And so it was like two levels. And to make it more complicated, they had infra-radiant heat through this floor. And then they want us to get there, and there’s no drain tile, and it’s really bad dirt. You know, it’s St. Paul, so… And it’s a two-story home, three-story home. Long story short, we put in an HRV, which is a ducted airflow system. We put the basement in positive pressure. That helped, that in of itself brought the levels down to probably, I don’t know, a three. That in of itself was ridiculous. And then along with that, we installed 60 feet of drain tile in the middle of the house, not for the purpose of removing water. And then we attached our radon mitigation system to that, and we got it below one. I still can’t believe it to this day that it was testing over 20.
SG: So, we had to go out with… We had to locate where all the radiant heating was ’cause we didn’t wanna run into that. That was ridiculous. So, pretty proud of that. And those HRVs, they bring in the fresh air, so you walk around in the basement, you just smell, it’s just fresh smell ’cause it’s fresh air. So, we have a variety of different solutions to remove the radon, get it to the right levels. When we’re done, we refer the customer to the company, typically, that did the initial radon test. So, if it’s Structure Tech and a chunk of them are, then the Structure Tech home inspector goes back out to measure it. We’ll also give the customer a charcoal test kit if that’s what’s warranted too, we’ll do that. But yeah, radon is a very… It’s a very interesting topic these days.
RS: Yeah, we’ve done quite a few podcasts about radon. You know Josh Kerber at the State of Minnesota?
SG: I do.
RS: Okay, yeah, we had… I think that was the last time we talked about radon. We had him on to get super geeky and technical about the finer points of radon mitigation systems. I learned a lot from him. Man, he’s…
TM: Yeah.
SG: He’s a smart guy, yeah.
RS: He’s a smart guy.
TM: Yeah.
RS: Yeah. All right, well…
TM: Well, that’s fascinating. You had to do that combination system with adding an HRV to that as well. That’s really impressive.
RS: Yeah.
SG: Yeah, there are different solutions, but the HRV is an incredible one. But at AJ Alberts, then, that’s the company that does HRVs and HVACs, so we have that piece covered.
TM: Wow.
SG: We had a home, really interesting. It had mold in, so we had Barrier removing mold. They needed an HRV, Standard installed a radon and waterproofing. And then when the dust settled, that lady actually had cancer, she wanted to make sure everything tested well. She wanted the best mold test, the best radon test, humidity, all that. So, then Structure Tech went in to do all the testing. When it was all said and done, so all four entities were working together, it was really a very interesting home.
RS: It’s a good partnership we got, good synergy between the companies.
TM: I was gonna say, everything you need for a healthy home is right here, I guess, with your company, Steve, because water is a home’s worst enemy, and it can manifest in lots of different ways through exterior water intrusion around windows and rotting sheathing, to coming through a foundation, to creating mold, all these things. And you look at all these different parts and pieces, and it sounds like you’ve got some creative solutions to dealing with each one.
RS: Yeah. And I’ll just throw out a plug for Tessa. If you have something where it’s not quite so obvious, you’re not seeing bulk water coming in at your foundation walls or something like that, you just got some problem, you can’t get to the bottom of it, that’s where Tessa comes in. She’s like, she’s the detective, Tessa with Your House Coach, and she’s the one to do the deep dive, spend hours figuring out exactly what’s causing the problem and recommending a solution. So, there’s a place where Tessa fits into this whole thing as well. Those are more complicated ones that we throw over her way, but…
TM: I was gonna say, the more complicated, the better. Houses are complex systems, right, Steve? And there’s a lot of times it’s not just one thing that’s going on; it’s lots of things that contribute to several problems. So, trying to figure out what’s going on and how to fix it, that’s the fun part, I think.
RS: Well, Steve, there’s one other service you offer that we haven’t really touched on yet, which is helical piers and other foundation repairs. I think it was called push press or something like that, or maybe I’m thinking…
[overlapping conversation]
RS: Okay, I’m thinking of a weightlifting term, I screwed them up there.
[laughter]
RS: Push piers, yeah, there we go. We’re not gonna have time to get into that today, but Steve, I wanna schedule a follow-up visit. And I know you said you got somebody else in your company who can really talk about those, who can geek out on them. So, after the show…
[overlapping conversation]
RS: Oh, there he is.
Michael: How are we going, guys?
RS: Hey.
[overlapping conversation]
SG: Yeah, we can… If you wanna wrap this up and go to the next podcast, we’re ready to roll. But yeah, as it relates to piering, if you walk into a basement and see stair-step cracks and like a chunk of the basement’s actually going down two, three, four, five inches, there’s ways we can stabilize that so there’s no more movement, but there’s also ways that we can dig underneath the foundation. And just like you jack up your car for a flat tire, we’ll jack the house up and stabilize it. And so, that’s what Michael does, along where he can… Sometimes we can do that from the inside of the house, sometimes from the outside. And then sometimes if it’s not as bad or it’s more of a horizontal crack, we can install something called straps, which allows the wall basically to stabilize. So, there’s a variety of different solutions. Sometimes we combine them. When you get into piering, an engineer gets involved and puts their stamp on all the jobs. ‘Cause you have to measure: What’s the weight of the wall? And what’s the weight of the house? And how much do you need to jack up? And how big do the piers need to be? How wide do they need to be? How deep do they need to go? How long should they be? How close should they be? Every three feet, every four feet, every five feet, every four and a half feet. If you wanted to…
RS: Steve, you’re… You’re stepping all over your next show, Steve.
[laughter]
RS: I want to get into this in detail.
SG: All right. But yeah, but you got cracks in your foundation, we do that too.
RS: Sweet, sweet.
[laughter]
RS: Well, if we got time, maybe we’ll just kind of do a double header here. But if not, we’ll schedule another time to have you guys on. But I don’t wanna just gloss over this topic. This needs to be a show all into itself. So, for today, for our listeners, thank you for listening. Steve, thank you so much for joining us. We will have a link to your company in the show notes. And just throw it out there though. What’s your website for Standard Water?
SG: Standardwater.com, and we’ve got a couple office personnel. If you send an email to service@standardwater, they are on it. The phone number on our website, the 763-537-4849, can text it, call it. And then we give free estimates on the work that needs to be done. And if you need service on existing system or sump pumps, we don’t really talk about sump pumps, but dual pumps, backup pumps, bigger sump pump basins. We have three quarter horse, half horse, full horse, we can do alternating with the backup. It’s like the Forrest Gump shrimp…
[music]
RS: Yeah, yeah.
SG: Movie. It’s like…
RS: I’m thinking of that as you were listing all these options.
SG: And that’s all I know about sump pumps.
[laughter]
RS: We’re not gonna do better than that. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Steve. I appreciate it.
SG: Yeah, very well.
TM: Yeah, thanks Steve.
[overlapping conversation]
SG: Thanks for inviting me. All right, bye.
RS: Tessa, good to see you. Take care.
TM: Good to see you too.
SG: All right.
[music]