Crack Repairs

Alberta Sweeprite offers a variety of concrete and membrane wall and floor crack repairs in parkades with a mix of the right products and the right procedures for the job at hand.

Urethane Membrane Coatings: When you have a parkade with multiple levels you will have a traffic deck coating membrane that covers the concrete to prevent water and salts from leaking through cracks and causing the rebar to rust and ultimately to no longer provide the strength in the concrete necessary to support vehicular traffic. (Read more about this in our Traffic Deck Coatings Service)

These types of cracks must always be fixed from the surface. To do so we rout the concrete, fill with a specialized urethane caulk that can flex to twice its size with movement, then resurface with the appropriate basecoat, embedded aggregate and urethane top coat. There is no other alternative if you want it done correctly but some managers still try epoxy injection based on poor advice from concrete crack repair services that don’t fully understand even their own business. Reference Beware below.

Urethane Injected Resin Grouts: All leaking cracks, whether they are in the floors or walls of parkades, are always best repaired from the outside rather than the inside because your most effective measure to prevent water seepage always starts at preventing the water from ever entering the building.

However, in some cases it is not practical to repair from the outside. For walls this is due to excavation depth, perimeter barriers outside such as curbs and sidewalks along the building. For parkade ceilings with split slab construction (two slabs sandwiched together) or when above the parkade is an asphalt parking lot or landscaping. In these cases Urethane Injected Grouts are the cheapest and best solutions

Urethane injected grouts are mechanically injected resins that follow the water and expand to fill cavities and voids on the side which is the source of the water. These resins maintain their flexibility and do not reopen with movement. Urethane resins are not suitable for repairing concrete itself and do not add strength or durability to the repair. They are only suitable for stopping leaks.

Epoxy Injected Resins: Are a system best described as essentially welding cracks back together. This type of repair restores the strength and loading capabilities designed into the original concrete rendering the concrete as good as new.

Epoxy injection repairs should generally be made at the request of an engineer who has evaluated the problem and made this recommendation for remediation. Epoxy is not a suitable repair for water leakage. When properly applied it can somewhat seal air, water, chemicals, debris and other contamination but is not a long term fix for these issues and will more often than not eventually fail.

Be Wary: Many companies operating in Edmonton and Northern Alberta that fix cracks use Epoxy repair as their only tool in the box. Epoxy is a wonderful product that is very strong and durable but unless an engineer is specifically calling for epoxy it is an inappropriate fix for leaking cracks on a parkade floor and is little more than a stop gap method at best and not a permanent repair method.

This is because Epoxy is very strong stuff and while dynamic movement and vibration in the floor is unlikely to break the epoxy itself, the epoxy does break away from the seams of the cracks and starts leaking again and Edmonton is littered with these failed repairs.

Further, Epoxy will not displace or react with water and, therefore, is largely ineffective at waterproofing an actual leaking crack. If epoxy is injected while the crack is leaking, the water seepage may actually create channels through the epoxy, creating leaks in the new repair.

Because epoxy injection does not penetrate the crack to the surface of the source of the water it allows for a channel or a valley where water and salt can pool in the original crack even though it is no longer leaking. The standing water mixed with salt pooled in the tops of cracks can ironically accelerate the damage to the concrete making things worse from a structural integrity perspective.

If a crack has been previously injected and the original epoxy has cracked, it can be next to impossible to find the exact spot to re-inject and because the rest of the repair is a solid mass, the epoxy cannot flow to find the cracks.

Epoxy injection is hand pumped into plastic port and is actually more expensive than doing it properly by mechanically injecting urethane with steel ports in the case of leaking walls and properly sealing with urethane deck coatings in the case of leaking floors.