Basement Waterproofing - 🐊Steel Beams- The Downsides | Foundation Repair

A mini-series on steel beams (also known as i beams) for foundation repair in your basement. Are they a good idea? Are there any alternatives? What are the pros and cons? New videos every Sunday!

One of the problems with the standard steel i beams is that lack of flexibility. Because it's 100% rigid, when it's mounted to the floor and the floor joist above, there will be a gap between the wall and the actual beam. So what a lot of contractors will do to fill that gap, they stuff it with concrete, they'll stuff it with shims, which really creates a nasty, unfinished look. Because we have the ability with the PowerBrace to move the wall, that gap actually is not a problem and we don't want to fill that gap. We actually want to leave that gap so over time we can use our PowerBraces. To be installed- we start at the bottom. We will mount to the bottom so that it will stick out a little bit as the bow goes in and that allows us to take that i beam and tighten it and push it against the wall over time. One of the other problems that we find with i beams is because of their availability, we find that anyone will install them and what that leads to is non professionals installing i beams on walls and it's not designed for that. The objective of course is to fix your wall and make sure that you have that structural integrity to either live in your house for life or sell your property, whatever it might be. When it's done by just picking up any material that's out there there's no- a lot of times with contractors there's no thought behind it and they're just using what's available and that's one of the problems with the i beams because they're so readily available that they become overused and it's not thought about properly. Also with a steel i beam if they are not installed properly you can actually cause further damage to not only your wall but your floor joists as well because of where they're installed.