This article is an excerpt from Episode 14 of Alchemy-Spetec's podcast The Injection Connection, featuring veteran coatings expert Murray Heywood. (If you'd rather view or listen, an audio/visual version of this excerpt is posted at the bottom of the article.)

Charlie Lerman: From your point of view when it comes to grouting, what are some of the common mistakes or problems you see that people just deal with repeatedly?

Murray Heywood: Well, when it comes to my world, the coatings world, one of our biggest challenges is water, keeping it where you want it or not letting it get in where you don't want it. That water molecule creates a lot of damage. Concrete, which is predominantly the work that we do in the infrastructure world, 85% of water and wastewater structures are concrete. And concrete has very poor elongation properties, it doesn't stretch very well but it does move a lot because of settlement and this and that, and inflection when you're loading tanks, unloading, so you get cracks. If we don't address the water coming in or whatnot, it creates even bigger issues. So grout plays a huge role in doing that. And I think one of the challenges that I see is people don't understand that you just can't fill it with some cement because if it cracks again it's going to leak again. You just can't fill it with an epoxy injection because that's rigid. So just the misconception of how to deal with it is prevalent and it's something that we try to explain a lot. Mistakes are made where they'll, well, "We're just going to put hydraulic cement in and fix it that way." Or, "We're going to do this or the coating should handle it and we shouldn't have to do this extra work". So I just see the mistakes in the materials they select to do the repairs and not understanding necessarily that it has to be treated or you're just spending thousands and thousands of dollars to rehab this and you're going to skip that part. That's going to wreak havoc on your system. Those are the common mistakes. It's a lack of understanding really when you get to the bottom of it, of how it all works together.

Charlie: Yeah. And neither of us are engineers who have gone and got those types of degrees, so we're not always the smartest person in the room.

Murray: I may not be the smartest person in this room right here.

Charlie: I’ll give you that one. I'll take that. Thank you. But really what you find is, that it's not that this industry is rocket science or hard to figure out. It's that it's non-intuitive and most of the time, people just overlook it, they don't even understand. Again, it's not a fear thing of, "oh, you're just never going to figure this out and be able to launch a rocket to Mars". It comes down to people just making common mistakes with it. Like you mentioned with the epoxy, there's no elongation or very little elongation for concrete at all and you'll have people, they waterproof epoxies all the time and then they get a mirror crack right by it and they're like, "Whoa, didn't we just fix this last year?" And you're like, there it is.

View the video version of this excerpt...

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