Water That Sits Is Water That Damages

A puddle in a garage looks like nothing. It is chloride-laden water sitting in contact with concrete for hours after every rain, driving contamination into the slab at exactly that spot. Areas that pond are always the areas that spall, and the connection is rarely made.

The connection is easy to miss because ponding looks like a nuisance rather than a mechanism. It helps to think of a puddle as a chloride solution held in contact with concrete for several hours after every rain, several dozen times a year, for the life of the building.

A garage deck should fall to drains that are clear, connected and maintained. In practice drains fill with grit and debris, downpipes get crushed during other work, and the falls that were built get altered by patch repairs that sit slightly proud of the surrounding slab.

Clearing and testing the drains is the cheapest intervention available on a garage, and it is worth doing before any repair scope is priced — because some of what looks like a repair problem is a maintenance problem that has been running for years.

1. 01Map ponding before designing repairs.
2. 02Clear and repair drains as part of the work.
3. 03Correct slope where repair allows it.
4. 04Detail coating terminations at drains properly.
5. 05Verify drainage after the work with water.

Map where the garage ponds before designing anything. The ponding map and the deterioration map are almost always the same drawing, and correcting drainage is the cheapest thing an owner can do to slow future damage.

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