The reasons for the appearance of cracks in brick houses, a huge variety. This is unforeseen seismic activity, and mechanical damage, and mistakes made during construction. For example, cracks can occur due to incorrect tying of the brickwork of the bearing walls of the house. What to do if a crack in the wall of a brick house has already appeared? In any case, the house will need both superficial, cosmetic, and thorough repairs with the elimination of the causes of damage if they appeared due to a violation of construction technology. If in time you do not strengthen the base and walls of the house, then one small gap can provoke a skew of the supporting structure and irreversible deformation of the house.
Causes of Wall Damage
There are several main reasons why a gap may appear in the wall:
- Regular natural settlement of the house for more than 1-2 years (the choice of the foundation admissible for construction on a particular type of soil is of great importance) and natural shifts.
- The subsidence and further cracking of the foundation due to regular washing of groundwater or poorly distributed load, giving a skew by one point.
- Freezing of the foundation and further destruction after the next change in temperature.
- Strong load on the brickwork. Under such circumstances, cracks appear not only on the walls, but also on the pillars. A characteristic feature of cracks that appeared due to excessive pressure is vertical direction and isolation.
- Violation of the pouring technology at the stage of building the foundation of the house, poor-quality materials and their incomplete drying.
Foundation strengthening
Serious problems with the integrity of the structure suggest a complete restructuring of the foundation:
- First of all, along the wall with a crack at the level of the base horizon, you need to make a deep trench. The width of the trench should not exceed the thickness of the foundation.
- After this, the crack needs to be widened a little, cleaned from weakly strengthened stones and cement cementing them.
- The expanded and cleaned area is drilled under the reinforcement horizontally and vertically. It is necessary to twist reinforcing bars of a suitable size with anchors and fix them by welding. The distance between the rods depends on how wide the crack is.. This reinforcement is made as a further bundle with the skeleton of a new reinforcing base.
- Now you can make the formwork and pour concrete into it. To prevent new cracks, all work with the base is carried out only after it dries. You can also sometimes water it so that the hardening occurs evenly.
The solution will dry for a very long time - at least a month, only after this time you can ram the site and make a blind area.
These measures will help stop the destruction of the walls and only after they can be carried out, you can proceed to the immediate elimination of defects.
Elimination of defects
After strengthening the foundation, cosmetic repair of cracks in the brick walls is carried out.. In order to make sure that new cracks are no longer foreseen, it is worth sticking paper at the places of damage and monitor their integrity. If the piece of paper does not tear, you can begin their restoration.
Small, shallow cracks can be repaired with a cement mortar, having previously cleaned their edges, and knocking unstable pieces of material and adhesion solution from them with a hammer. So that the adhesion to the new solution is more durable, it is worth moistening the edges of the gap with water. The middle slots need to be covered with a mixture of sand and cement (3: 1 ratio).
Sealing large cracks
In order to eliminate large (more than 1-2 centimeters wide) connectors, you need to do much more operations, which are described in more detail below..
First you need to completely disassemble the entire area with a crack, starting from the upper rows. All unstable and collapsing bricks must be replaced with new ones. During the laying of new brickwork, they need to be reinforced additionally. If the gap occurred in the node of the brick walls, the reinforcement can be made using a strip of strip steel, bending its ends to the sides of the masonry and fixing with bolts.
If there is no way to disassemble the wall, the cracking in the brick walls is repaired by casting crushed stone with cement mortar into large crevices and reinforcing with a metal strip fixed by anchors.
If cracks appear that threaten the integrity of the building, it is necessary to complete the wall reinforcement. Steel rods are installed along the perimeter of the house from the outside and inside. The result is a kind of powerful steel belt covering the entire building.
If the crack is too deep, the cement injection method can also be used: for this, inch holes are drilled along the entire length of the crack at a distance of 15-20 cm from each other. A tube filled with cement mortar is placed inside the hole, and by means of a sealant or a special construction syringe, the mortar is injected into the crack, filling it with itself.
In addition, some developers use mounting foam to fill large cracks.. To do this, it is blown deep into the cracks, dries and is fixed on the outside with cement.
Sometimes cracks and tears are so catastrophic that the wall cracks through. In such cases, it is also necessary to strengthen the walls from the inside. To do this, deeply moisten the gap, fill the gap with cement and gravel, and install metal plates fixed by anchors. After the solution has dried, you can begin to finish the inside of the cracked wall.
So, repairing cracks in brick walls is an important and difficult task, requiring large physical and material costs. Nevertheless, if you do not fix such defects on time, the house will soon simply become warped or deformed irrevocably.