insulate garage?

[Wood_workur]

My garage often ett water about an inch deep in thw winter from all of the condensation. Any ideas to keep the garage insides, and my tools dry? I am looking for a cost effective solution. Oh, by the way, I have a single car (14x20) garage.

[JimD]

An inch of water is not condensation. You must have water coming in from outside. You need to make sure gutters flow away from the house and there is nothing else channeling water up against the basement. You may have to dig around the basement on the outside down to the footers and install a french drain - a perforated pipe in a gravel bed that drains by gravity away from the house. It's a lot of work but not a lot of money if you dig it yourself.

Jim

[Wood_workur]

uhh...


there is no basement in my garage. my garage is not attached to my house. there is an inch of water in some part, most are just damp. the garage footing is not sloped right to begin with. the condensation gets on everything in the garage, so I want it to end

[dlminehart]

Condensation happens when warm moist air cools. Cool air can't hold as much moisture (which is why people talk about getting dry skin in northern winters), so the water vapor condenses out as liquid on available surfaces (or even drops from the sky as rain). So, as Jim says, it's unlikely that you're getting this water as condensation . . . unless you have an air conditioned garage open to a warm swamp on all sides, or you have warm humid days followed by cold nights with no air movement between garage and outside.

On the other hand, if you have ground water seeping into the garage, the high humidity (and one inch of water can do that!) during a warm day could become dew on everything in the garage if it gets cold in there at night. Sounds like you should do as Jim suggested: french drains around the perimeter of the garage, so the seepage goes elsewhere. Drain pipe is about 50 cents a foot, so no big expense.

[Jim-Iowa]

If your getting that much water, you need to be checking some things.
Sounds like the water is running under the sills and across the concrete. Normally a Sill Seal is put down before the walls are set.
I suspect either it was not or has failed.
If this has been going on for sometime, you may find rot in the sills and lower ends of some studs. You may be in danger of losing the garage if it is not corrected soon.
What was said about drains, evespouts and banking soil to direct water away is a good start. But check those sills and repair them before you lose it all.

[Wood_workur]

the sills are set on a riser layer on concrete, it looks loke the riser was poured with the footing.

[mater]

I would go with the french drains and do some waterproofing on the outside while I was at it.

[Wood_workur]

let me ask one other thing... along with french drains, what measure can I take to avoid the condensation on my tools? Would plastic over them work?

[ironhat]

quote:Originally posted by Wood_workur

let me ask one other thing... along with french drains, what measure can I take to avoid the condensation on my tools?

Not much, I'm afraid. As said, the high humidity condition in the entire garage is the issue and condensation occurs on *everything*. There is no way to single out your equipment for protection. I only see two options - not solutions:
1. Keep your equipment coated with a protectant like Johnson's Wax or one of the commercial products like Boeshield.
2. Put your hand tools into an enclosed area under your workbench and install a 40 watt bulb and leave it on to reduce the relative humidity. Please don't think that I'm nuts. I knew and old fella who did his work in a pretty nasty old garage and kept all of his hand tools and hand power tools in there where they stayed in perfect condition. His large power stuff he kept coated with oil and wiped it off when he wanted to use them - can't say that I'd recommed that one because of the oil getting into the wood. He didn't do furniture work. I'd be getting started on those drains before the wet season.
Later,
Chiz

[Wood_workur]

What about plastic tarps over the stuff?

[Bulkley]

quote:Originally posted by Wood_workur

What about plastic tarps over the stuff?

Tarps would only mask the problem at best, and might make it worse for your tools. You really have to find the source of the water and keep it out. Your garage isn't built over a spring, is it?

[dlminehart]

Tarps would limit the amount of moist air moving over, and condensing on, the tools. The effectiveness would depend on how tight you wrap the tarps around everything, and on how much air movement you get in the garage, which in turn depends on things like how often you open the doors, how well sealed the garage envelope is, etc. This is a back-asswards approach, though, addressing symptoms instead of causes. The cost of tarps, and the extra effort it would take to deal with them, is perhaps more than fixing the problem itself.

[LarryG]

IME tarps make the problem worse, not better. As the warm, wet air rises it condenses on the underside of the tarp and drips back down onto the tool, and since air flow is inhibited there's no way for things to dry out.

I tried covering my jointer with a tarp last winter. One day I pulled the tarp off and was horrified to see the tables had turned a dull shade of orange. The tarp came off, and stayed off.

[Tom Miller]

quote:Originally posted by LarryG

As the warm, wet air rises it condenses on the underside of the tarp and drips back down onto the tool....

In fact, if you replace the word "tool" with "basin" this reads like a survival manual for collecting drinking water from ground moisture.

Is this an attached garage? If so, another source of moisture that hasn't been mentioned is warm air leakage from the house into the garage. But it would have to be a big leak.

Until you find the source of your water, you might want to be ventilating your garage to the outdoors.

Regards,
Tom

[twistsol]

I had a similar problem. In' the summer when the air is warm and wet, I got a lot of condensation on the three buried concrete walls and floor of my garage. We had puddles on the floor. I now keep a dehumidifier in my garage set at 40%. It has a drain hose running out onto the driveway because I had to empty it two or three times a day. My dripping concrete walls and wet floor are now gone unless the kids leave the garage doors open on a hot humid day.