I spent tens of thousands on waterproofing my home, but it leaked just six months after I lived there?
The workers blame the wall for moisture, the developer blames the foundation for settlement, and the material supplier blames the construction for not doing it well. No one has taken responsibility for this.
This is not an isolated incident at all, but a decades-old problem in the waterproofing industry.
Many people don’t know that this industry has never been afraid of water leakage. It is afraid that the logic of water leakage will be understood by ordinary people, afraid that the whole process will be open and transparent, and afraid that a systematic solution that can run smoothly will be implemented.
In the past few decades, the industry has relied on “three things” to make ends meet: guessing, talking, and luck.
If there is a problem, it is always pushed to an invisible place. The rainy season in Laimei today is too heavy, and the grassroots layer is not dry tomorrow. Anyway, ordinary people cannot figure out how the water flows. Water leakage is always an unexplained “accident”, and anyone can take the responsibility completely.
Now this system of gameplay that has been played for decades is about to become unplayable.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has clearly required that the design service life of waterproofing layers in important parts of buildings should be no less than 20 years, and the entire industry has been forced to promote a systematic waterproofing plan for full life cycle management.
In the past, the short-sighted approach of laying down materials and handing over the work and then returning to make repair money was directly blocked by the policy.
No one dares to work with the temporary repair mentality of “blocking water and pressing water” anymore. The logic of long-term durability and structural integration must be understood from the beginning in order to support the 20-year warranty requirement.
New technologies such as the Internet of Things and BIM are also entering the waterproofing industry.
Nowadays, many new projects embed embedded sensors directly into the structure. The internal humidity and temperature are monitored in real time 24 hours a day, and the slightest sign of water leakage can be warned in advance.
Using BIM modeling can also simulate all possible paths of water in advance. Which gaps can allow water to pass through, and which nodes can easily store water, all are clearly laid out on the table.
In the future, if someone opens their mouth, they will say that the bulge is due to poor material quality and the leakage is due to abnormal weather. They will directly use the traceable data to throw out the cause and effect chain.
Nowadays, various places are also certifying the professional skills of waterproofing workers, and the barriers to entry have been greatly raised.
It is no longer possible to just recruit two laborers and get started. All construction workers must systematically learn the path logic and structural principles of waterproofing. There are unified standards for the same process. There will no longer be the outrageous situation of ten masters working in ten different ways.
Those good days of relying on vague information to make a living are coming to an end.
The old routine of fearing logic, transparency, and system will be eliminated sooner or later. Water leakage is no longer an unexplainable accident. Those who make mistakes must be responsible for the results. This is what the industry should be like.
