Video Transcript

I’m Dan Thomas, the Business Development Manager for PolyWall Building Solutions. We’re a division of PolyGuard products, an employee-owned, Texas-based manufacturer of a number of different air and water barrier systems. The particular system we’ve got on this project is our PolyWall Homestretch membrane. This is designed specifically for ICF construction however it can also be used as waterproofing for traditional poured concrete and CMU block walls.

The first step in preparation to install the waterproofing is to create a clean and dry working surface for yourself. So if the ICFs have been exposed for any length of time you could use a push broom, wipe them down, knock off any debris from the pour, any dust that’s accrued through UV and anything that would be on the footer concrete spills, dust, debris, construction dirt, what have you. Make sure that’s a clean dry surface also. Then you would go and use our 2200 joint filler and put that at the critical juncture of the footer and the vertical wall. Also any divots you would have, voids, gaps in your wall, you would want to use the 2200 joint filler in those applications to any penetrations you’ve got coming through that wall you will flash that with our 2200 joint filler.

Okay, then the next step you would do is to prime the footer, the inside and outside corners, with our Suretac Primer. You come up the wall approximately four to six inches across the top of your footer and then down the face of your footer again four to six inches depending on what your conditions are. Remember that the detail tape is 12 inches wide and you’re trying to cover both the face of the wall the top of the footer and then down the face of the footer. You’ll complete that detail all the way around the structure and then also the detail tape on the inside and outside corners.

Now you’re ready to install the field. Here again, we will get the Sur-Tac primer out. Now that is a water-based primer that can be used anywhere in the United States, any code jurisdiction in the United States can use that product but it is the name Shur-Tac describes not only what it does but also the name of the product. So once it’s on there it is very very sticky. So you’ll apply that to the rest of the field of your walls. You’ll let that tac off depending on humidity that could stay open for 12 to 18 hours. We’re on a project now where we’ve got high humidity and we’ve had it open for that long and it worked just fine.

At that point you’re ready to install the field membrane our home stretch membrane that’s a 36 inch wide roll you’ll cut that to length depending on what your what your height dimensions are we typically install this vertically from the top of the wall down and over the footer it can be installed horizontally but you’ve got to have a lot of manpower on the job site to do that effectively a couple things to keep in mind one there’s a two and a half inch minimum overlap on each sheet and that overlap should go in the direction of the water flow like you were shingling a roof although you’re shingling this the way that you know the water is going to go so that’s the way you install the membrane and that will continue all the way around your structure as you’re installing your field membrane sheets one of the things you want to have handy is a j-roller because you’re going to roll the membrane into the substrate into the primer to ensure a very tight bond between your membrane and your substrate or in this case the icf wall system hand pressure is not enough you want to you want to put a roller pressure on that to ensure a long tenuous adhesion on the wall you don’t know how long you may be exposed because your construction schedule now it does have to be these membranes have to be covered within 30 days for UV exposure, you might cover that with the product we’re going to talk about in a minute our Arroyo Drain Board but you need to roll it every sheet and every seam. One of the last things you want to do is put a termination bar. Now those are supplied by others, it’s a 10-foot aluminum strip. You’re going to mechanically attach that at the top of your membrane and you’re going to fill the top of that with our 2200 joint filler. To do two things one to make sure that we’ve got good closure at the top and two to make sure that you put the joint filler on there to divert the water again away from the wall and down the surface to your drainage system.

All right one of the things that we recommend is to before the backfill is that you protect your brand new waterproofing. You’re not going to backfill directly against the sheet membrane that you just put in possibly gouging with sharp stones construction debris you have no idea what’s going on there. And furthermore, you don’t want any bulk water directly on your waterproofing over time. So we have a product that actually does two things our arroyo drainboard protects your waterproofing but it also creates a way to allow water any bulk water to escape into your drainage system. And that is a dimple board product with a soil fabric on it. You apply that with a single component urethane foam adhesive called Stay Put. You put the adhesive on the back of the Arroyo Board you put the adhesive on the wall and you let that flash off. It takes virtually a minute and you laminate, you meld the two together just like countertop laminate. And that holds it until the backfill. And you work you put the outlet channel on horizontally and then again you would drop the Arroyo Drainboard field sections vertically from the top of the wall. It has a three-inch soil fabric margin on each piece so you overlap that again shingling it so you’re not allowing any soil to get down into the channels of your Arroyo Drainboard.

Depending on what your evacuation system is we’ve got some accessories, a T outlet that can go right into an abs pipe detail. Or you can let gravity naturally take it into a french drain system. So there are a couple of different methodologies on how you evacuate your water but we like to think of the Arroyo Drainboard as acting as a shield that keeps the bulk water away from your waterproofing. Waterproofing never actually has to do its work. We actually know that’s probably not going to be the case in the real world but the objective is to get the water away from your structure as quickly as possible. We know water is going to be present how do we evacuate it away from your structure? The Arroyo Drainboard’s a perfect way to do that. Simple to install and will again extend the life of your project and keep it keep the outside out and the inside in.

So everything we’ve talked about for this particular project or for any ICF project you can get all these through BuildBlock. Our membrane system, our drainage system, our adhesive systems, our detail sealants all available through BuildBlock. You can check it out on their website you can look at these products for more detail at the PolyWall, poly-wall.com. You can download any of the technical information there the application instructions are there and there are several nice videos there that you’ll see on the application system.

Click to learn more about ICF Waterproofing and the PolyWall products offered through BuildBlock.