Four years ago, our poured concret basement had some minor water seepage through the wall during a heavy rain. We invited Hydra Shield Basement Services to our house for recommendations to fix the problem. They told us building a French drain connecting to a new sump pump would solve the problem. We spent $7,000 to have them build the French drain, dig a dry well and install a new sump pump. It turns out that it was a big waste of money.

First, the basement wall continued to seep water during a heavy rain just as it had before the "fix". After many months of calls, the company did come back and applied some DryLock paint. This solved the problem, but let us know that the the previous work was completely unnecessary. A couple hundred dollars of paint was all that was needed.

Second, the new well has been dry as a bone. We have not seen any water flow into the well for the past four years even during consecutive days of heavy rain and, the new sump pump has never had any water to pump.

Third, they connected the sump pump to the sewer line. When my husband asked if it follows the building code, they said "yes, we do it all the time". When we found out it is against the township building code, we asked them to come back to fix the problem. They promised that they would be back to re-route the pipe, but kept postponing the time. After a few months, they didn't even answer our calls. To this day, the company never came back to fix the problem. Our final solution was to disconnect the sump pump from the sewer line and remove it from the basement. This was the easiest solution since the well never had water in it and hence, we had a useless pump that never pumped water. This became necessary when we went to sell our house and could not get a certificate of continuing occupancy unless the pump was either removed or re-routed so that water would exit the basement by means other than the sewer line.