Alchatek Blog

A homeowner called Home Energy Professionals in Tennessee with an interesting driveway problem. There was an 8-inch drop at the point where the driveway met the edge of the garage floor. That was enough to prevent the resident from getting their car into the garage at all. The homebuilders did not extend a nearby gutter downspout far enough away from the driveway. Rainwater caused erosion under the slabs, causing them to sink over time. What made this case unique was the fact that the final slab (closest to the garage) in this 20-foot-wide driveway was only two feet long. Slabs with such narrow dimensions are notoriously difficult to lift evenly. Due to the unusual nature of this job, they called in Alchemy-Spetec’s Colt Hullander (Director of Technical Services – Geotech Division) as a consultant.

Powerful Polymers

The Home Energy Professionals crew used AP Lift 430, a two-component, high strength, high density, hydro-insensitive structural polyurethane foam. They chose AP Lift 430 because it’s one of the most consistently reliable lifting foams in the industry. This high-density foam is extremely strong, providing concrete slabs and structures with reliable and lasting support.

Painless Procedures

The crew drilled their first injection hole about 3 feet from one edge of the slab, right in the middle of the 2-foot length (about 1 foot in from both edges). They lifted this end of the slab for about 2 inches and then stopped. Lifting any further at this point would likely have cracked the slab. Next, they drilled another hole about 6 feet in from the edge and repeated the process. When they reached the end of the 20 feet, they started again – redrilling that first hole and lifting another 2 inches. With this gradual injection process, they carefully raised the slab 8 inches and leveled it off with the garage floor. They then moved on to lift the other, conventionally sized slabs in the rest of the driveway.

Rapid Results

This challenging slab lift job was completed in just 3 hours. Fifteen minutes after the injections were completed, the homeowner was able to drive their car across the newly leveled driveway and into the garage. The crew at Home Energy Professionals had another successful job in the books!

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A general contracting company working on an excavation job for a new sea turtle habitat at Loggerhead Marinelife Center in Juno Beach, Florida needed specialists to protect the foundation of the adjacent building from potential destabilization. Underground Services of America was called in to create a polyurethane grout wall for this very purpose.

Powerful Polymer

The crew used AP Soil 600, a single component, moisture activated, hydrophobic, extra-low viscosity, polyurethane soil grout. This is the premier product for stabilizing soil via permeation grouting. It's also NSF-approved for contact with drinking water. Using an environmentally safe repair material in a marine habitat is extremely important.

Painless Procedure

Underground Services of America professionals drove injection rods into the ground next to the building foundation in a staggered pattern (see photo). The rods were 18 inches apart from each other to ensure consistent, thorough permeation of the soil with the high-strength grout. They injected at a rate of one gallon per foot. A total of 500 gallons was used to form the grout wall. The project was completed in just two days.

Rapid Result

The resin was cured within 24 hours of completion. The job was finished on a Friday. On the following Monday, the GC began excavation on the future sea turtle habitat without any fear of damaging the adjacent foundation.

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A couple of recent judgments in slip and fall cases should concern any property owner with slip OR trip risks on the premises. 

On July 12, 2019, WTXL TV in Tallahassee posted an article on their website about a near 2 million dollar judgment for a slip and fall case at a local convenience store:

On Thursday, a Leon County jury ruled that Siraji Inc., the owner of the USA Grocers convenience store in the 2600 block of Roberts Avenue, was responsible for causing the 2016 slip and fall of 47-year-old Stephanie Jenkins. Jenkins was awarded $1.9 million for the permanent and severe injuries she sustained.

On January 8, 2021, Daily Report posted an article about a 1 million dollar judgment in an Atlanta slip and fall case:

Nearly a year after a judge awarded a woman injured in a slip-and-fall accident at an Atlanta restaurant more than $1.1 million in damages, the parties have settled for just over $1 million.

These are record judgments against property owners for these types of accidents. If you have a trip and fall litigation risk on your site, contact us for a qualified slab lifting contractor referral today!

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Planners at Washington D.C.’s water utility, D.C. Water, decided to take proactive measures against potential flooding of their facility. Located right next to the Potomac, their facility could’ve been at risk in the event of an out-of-the-ordinary natural disaster. Determining that the main risk to the water supply in such a case would be permeation through sub-surface soil, they began installing a metal sheet pile wall deep into the substrate between the riverbank and the facility. However, in some spots they were not able to drive a sheet pile panel into the ground because of underground utility lines or rocky substrate. The planners called in LJS Waterproofing to create sub-surface grout walls in those spots to fill in the gaps.

Powerful Polymer

The LJS crew “constructed” these sections of the underground wall by injecting AP Fill 700. This is a single component, water-activated, hydrophobic, low viscosity, closed-cell polyurethane injection resin. This grout was used because it permeates the soil, fills small voids in the soil, and cuts off water flow.

Painless Procedure

LJS professionals used a Geoprobe to drive injection pipes into the ground (up to 33 feet in some locations). They then injected one gallon per foot using upward staging. The next injection point was 18 inches away from the first one. This process was repeated until a grout wall formed, filling the gap between the two adjacent underground sheet piles. For a large-scale job like this, LJS used the PolyShark single component grout pump.

Rapid Results

With solid, impermeable grout walls filling in the gaps, a sub-surface barrier between the riverbank and the drinking water facility was now in place. The planners at D.C. Water were very satisfied with this solution. LJS Waterproofing came through exactly in the way they had promised.

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The administrators of a church in Kingston, New York discovered water leaking through a wall into a hallway. The leak was located right next to the elevator. As water seeped into the elevator pit, it became flooded. Elevator pits often contain oil from hydraulic leaks in the equipment. Disposing of that oily water over and over can cost a property owner tens of thousands of dollars over time. The administrators reached out to LJS Waterproofing for assistance before the problem drove their budget through the roof.

Powerful Polymer

The LJS crew injected Spetec PUR F400 polyurethane grout to stop the water infiltration. This material reacts with the water inside the concrete cracks, curing to form an impenetrable seal. Chemical grouts are the most reliable way to shut down leaks in concrete.

Painless Procedure

1. Concrete crack injection with polyurethane resin is a five-step process:
2. Drill the injection holes.
3. Flush debris out of the holes with water.
4. Install the injection port.
5. Flush the crack with water.
6. Inject the resin.

For a complete overview of the crack injection process LJS professionals used on this job, see the Alchemy-Spetec blog post series 5 Steps of Concrete Crack Injection.

Rapid Result

The crew finished the repairs in a timely manner, saving the church a great deal of money in the process. The hallway is now completely dry and the elevator pit is no longer flooding. An ounce of prevention, in this case, was definitely worth a pound of cure!

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The owners of a valuable one-story house in New Jersey decided to add a second story to the structure. Unbeknownst to them (and to the contractor who worked on the project) four feet of the soil beneath the foundation had been poorly compacted by the home builder. When the second story was added, the soil could not support it and the foundation was critically damaged. The foundation issue caused the structure to shift a bit, which then caused roof damage as well.

When the contractor attempted to replace the roof, rainwater infiltrated the structure, eventually reaching the poorly compacted soil beneath the foundation and creating voids. These voids further destabilized the entire structure. Talk about a problem going from bad to worse! By this point, the residents had been forced out of their home for about a year! The general contractor then contacted LJS Waterproofing for assistance. A contractor in New Jersey with extensive soil and foundation stabilization experience, LJS quickly arrived on the scene and took immediate action to remedy the situation.

Powerful Polymer

The LJS crew used Alchemy-Spetec’s AP Fill 700 high-strength soil stabilization grout to solidify the four feet of poorly compacted soil beneath the foundation. This polyurethane resin was the ideal choice because of its ability to thoroughly permeate the soil and then cure to an incredibly high compressive strength. LJS used Alchemy-Spetec’s PolyShark grout pump to install the material. This pump is specifically designed for large-scale soil stabilization jobs.

Painless Procedure

The crew used a Geoprobe pipe driver to insert grout injection pipes four feet deep into the supporting soil around the house. AP Fill 700 was then injected to stabilize the soil. They also used a carbide drill bit to create small 3/8” drill holes in the concrete foundation slab in a diamond pattern, 4 feet on center. After each drill hole was created, the crew inserted a pipe through the slab and into the ground, pumping the grout to stabilize the soil and fill the voids.

Rapid Result

LJS completed stabilization of the entire foundation in just two weeks, ending a year-long cycle of compounding problems for the structure. This allowed the general contractor to repair the foundation, finish replacing the roof, and replace the damaged flooring with no further issues. Most importantly, the beleaguered residents were soon able to move back into their house after an exhausting, year-long ordeal.

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Aging infrastructure is a common problem in municipalities across North America. Wastewater treatment tanks with leaking cracks are a particularly serious problem because the result is often environmental contamination. Administrators at a wastewater treatment plant in New York City contracted LJS Waterproofing to repair 39 leaking concrete tanks. An experienced LJS crew arrived on the scene shortly thereafter, ready to take on this critical threat to the environment.

Powerful Polymer

The LJS crew injected Spetec PUR F400 to seal the leaking cracks. This material is a solvent and phthalate-free, water-reactive, hydrophobic, closed-cell, low viscosity, shrink-free, flexible, one-component polyurethane injection resin designed to shut off water leaks.

Painless Procedure

Concrete crack injection with polyurethane resin is a five-step process:

1. Drill the injection hole.
2. Flush debris out of the hole with water.
3. Install the injection port.
4. Flush the crack with water.
5. Inject the resin.

For a complete overview of the crack injection process LJS professionals used on this job, see the Alchemy-Spetec blog post series 5 Steps of Concrete Crack Injection.

Rapid Result

LJS Waterproofing sealed every leaking crack in all 39 concrete tanks, preventing any future wastewater from leaking into the surrounding environment. The administrators at the New York City wastewater treatment plant were extremely happy with the results.

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This article is an excerpt from Episode 13 of Alchemy-Spetec's podcast The Injection Connection, featuring Erin Rothman - Founder and CEO of StormSensor. (If you'd rather view or listen, an audio/visual version of this excerpt is posted at the bottom of the article.)

Charlie Lerman: Do you ever get involved with EPA Consent Decrees where they've said to a municipality, "Your system's all hosed up. You need to get this fixed and you're going to do it in this time frame." Did they ever call you in for that type of monitoring or anything like that?

Erin Rothman: The consent decree programs we've been a part of have been on the combined sewer side. And a lot of that is looking at obviously when overflow is happening, how significant the overflow is. We can quantify it given in tidal locations, so being able to separate different tidal sources or flow sources. But then, really, in doing that, helping them really understanding the total volume that needs to be addressed instead of the modeled volume and incorporating that into long-term control plans.

Charlie: Gotcha. Because a lot of municipalities, especially when they're slapped with a consent decree, just think, "We just need to increase the system capacity. We need to make it bigger. We need a bigger plan." Or something like that.

Erin: Yes, increase the budget to pay the fines.

Charlie: Right. And mitigation oftentimes is a great solution that helps or even gets them to where they need to be.

Erin: Exactly. And there are all different ways you can do it. It does not just mean increasing the size of the pipe and putting them over there.

Charlie: No. That's obviously where chemical grouting comes in. That's a small portion of how to control some things. And also with chemical grouting, you find saving opportunities just right there at the manhole. A lot of these people think, “We don't have a budget to start this” or “We don't even know where to start”. But there are some really simple things. When you look at a 10 gallon a minute leak in a manhole - that is roughly, depending what part of the country you're in, between about 12 to $25 000 a year in treatment costs. 

Erin: That's one leak.

Charlie: Right, one leak. And something like that is usually super easy to repair. We're talking a couple of thousand dollars, one day, one crew out there and they can immediately repair it. You see, that $3000 you paid to fix that manhole saves $25000 that year. It's very simple stuff and I really feel that we need some champions out there to get people to understand this. Maybe some type of push with our legislators. This is kind of a passion that I’ve found and it goes great with trying to be more environmentally friendly and saving money at the same time. Who's against this kind of thing? And I don't understand why we're not doing more of it.

Erin: Exactly and providing jobs for the people to do the maintenance and creating those repairs.

Alchemy-Spetec is pleased to announce the opening of a Western region manufacturing facility and grout lab in Reno, Nevada. Leak Seal and Geotech products are both currently stocked at this new location. Customers in the Western states will benefit from faster shipments. Alchemy-Spetec’s industry-leading tech support team will offer training programs and grout labs at the Reno location in the near future.

Vice President of Sales & Marketing Brian Oeder explains, “This effort is part of an ongoing commitment to providing easily accessible infrastructure repair products and technical training to contractors from coast to coast. We’re acutely aware of the tight deadlines our customers often face and we’re laser-focused on making sure our products and support expertise are always available.” President & CEO Stephen C. Barton adds, “Our new Reno facility is the latest step in our growth strategy. Serving customers on the West Coast by reducing transit time is our primary driver. We now have a one or two-day shipping point to the entire West Coast.”

For more information, contact:
Brian Oeder
VP Sales & Marketing
513-473-0062
boeder@alchemy-spetec.com

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This article is an excerpt from Episode 13 of Alchemy-Spetec's podcast The Injection Connection, featuring Erin Rothman - Founder and CEO of StormSensor. (If you'd rather view or listen, an audio/visual version of this excerpt is posted at the bottom of the article.)

Charlie Lerman: How did you get into this and how did you end up starting Storm Sensor? 

Erin Rothman: I think everyone's dream is to work in a sewer, so, of course, we start there! But I was a Vice President at a consulting company in Seattle, circa 2010-2011, and we brought in a stormwater group. For the first time in our company's history, we were losing money and we couldn't figure out why. When I talked to my stormwater team, they said that every time it rained at the office, they had to go out and sample their sites. Just because it was raining here doesn't mean it was raining there. So, they're going out like four times before they can collect a sample. And I said, "That's the silliest thing I’ve ever heard." Why don't we just have a rain gauge that texts us when it rains? And they said, why don't you go invent that? And I said, I will, I'm going to call it StormSensor. That's how it started as a little sparkle in my eye, but I had no hardware or software experience at the time. And I didn't know if I could even begin to put together a company like that. But as I started talking to more people in the stormwater industry and learned that there was a lot of frustration - and so much of it related to not knowing what was going on within these systems, I realized that maybe I could solve this problem with a team of brilliant people who could actually build the things that were in my head. That's how it started.

Charlie: That’s spectacular.

Erin: Yeah, I started with construction and industrial compliance because that was my background. And I started talking to cities and so many of them said they just needed to know how much water was moving through their storm system. That it wasn't metered and they didn't know. That just opened up a world of opportunity to me.

Charlie: Wow! That’s excellent. When you deal with below-grade infrastructure, there are a lot of needs but they're not really well defined. Nobody even focuses on them because it's out of sight out of mind. And I often say even for grouting, Alchemy-Spetec's biggest competitor is not another grout company - it's ignorance. People just don't understand that this kind of technology, these types of repairs (or your monitoring system) are even out there. And I think that's because municipalities are on tight budgets obviously. We want them that way, we don't want to just throw money at them. We want them to use the funds correctly. But you get a lot of people who start off at low-level positions in municipalities and then there's turnover, they move up, they go on to other things. And a lot of information is lost there. So, it's not necessarily that the government's just bad. It's kind of the nature of it, we all want to grow in our careers but these things get left behind.

Erin: Absolutely. And then the people paying for it, the citizens and taxpayers, want to see the benefit of what they're spending their money on. If you can't see it, then why would you pay for something that you can't see, that you can't understand? If you wait to fix it is once it stops working, it's too late because you're dealing with flooding and backups and paying too much for treatment and everything else.

Charlie: Oddly enough, it’s going back to that study I mentioned earlier in this interview, the 188 million dollars for I&I repairs - paying that is actually the easy part of it. What it comes down to is that inflow also causes damage to infrastructure. You see sinkholes and damage to property, potentially harmful or life-threatening conditions. And then, when these systems overflow, you're putting septic out there in the public, damaging our waterways and our health.

Erin: Yes, and sometimes even our homes and our businesses and the people who live and/or work there. It's becoming a lot more common.

View the video version of this excerpt...

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