This article is an excerpt from Episode 10 of Alchemy-Spetec's podcast The Injection Connection, featuring Alchemy-Spetec independent rep John Ziebell. Formerly the Vice President of Operations for Deneef Construction Chemicals, Inc., John has 36 years of experience in the chemical grout industry and is currently a member of the International Concrete Repair Institute (ICRI). (If you'd rather view or listen, an audio/visual version of this excerpt is posted at the bottom of the article.)

Charlie Lerman: What are some of the most common mistakes you see over and over again?

John Ziebell: The two biggest by far are my pet peeves and they're my number one problems for all 36 years. Number one, the contractor does not know or does not determine the thickness of the structure that he's trying to drill into to seal leaks. He puts his injection holes too close to the crack or joint and he drills at such a shallow angle that - let's just say it's a 12 inch thick wall and he's actually intersecting the crack two or three inches in.

This leads into problem two - he starts pumping the grout and as soon as he sees the milky white liquid at the surface, he stops pumping and goes to the next injection hole, the next injection packer. So, he may have filled four or five inches at best of that 12 inches. All the rest of that crack is wide open, the water is still on the reinforcing steel, corroding it. It's finding hairline cracks, it's wicking off into other areas. So, those are number one and number two above everything.

Number three, and this is mainly contractors who make this mistake. A lot of old-time contractors simply do not want to use any type of grout that requires an accelerator because they think it's like an epoxy and once they mix it up, they've only got a short period of time before it's going to gel their pump. And I have talked until I'm blue in the face about this, but they still use hydrophilics on everything. Now, if you're down in a sewer, I know you've got a lot of experience in sewers and manholes and stuff, you're okay because it's wet all the time. But boy, you get up in the kind of thing that I've done mostly through the years here in Texas where you got wet-dry cycling, and you put the hydrophilic in there? It's almost assuredly going to weep at some point in the future. So, those are really the three biggest problems. The first two are the biggest by far.

View the video version of this excerpt...

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