If you are looking for ways to reduce moisture in your upcoming building project, you likely have spent a great deal of time reading about different products that promise to help your foundation stay dry. In that research, you may have come across Geo-Mat Drainage Boards as the optimal tool for helping protect your foundation.

Perhaps as you read that description, you saw a lot of terms that made the Geo-Mats sound impressive without really telling you what it does to protect your foundation.

You may have heard the claims that it was eco-friendly or LEED compliant without understanding how or why a membrane can supplement the foundation and keep it dry for a generation.

This is the article for you.

The basics

First, the easy stuff. Geo-Mat boards are made of recycled, non-toxic, environmentally safe materials.

Among other things, that means Geo-Mat helps improve your LEED score if environmental sustainability – or a customer with high expectations – are your goal.

Geo-Mats fasten easily in place and stay where you put them.

And if there are places where the water load might be too much, sealing strips help keep the Geo-MAt in place and keep the water out.

Moderate Geo-Mat

The Geo-Mat keeps your foundation safe from hydrostatic pressure by directing water to your drainage system.

Hydrostatic pressure is a term well known to builders, and it is a concept known well to swimmers. When you dive in a pool and swim at the surface, water gets in your ears. Of course it does, because your ears are essentially cups for catching sound … and they’re great at catching water too.

But as you dive deeper underwater, say to the bottom of a ten foot pool, you feel a pressure on your ears. For many people this is very uncomfortable. That pain is caused by the weight of all the water above you. This is hydrostatic pressure.

This same pressure forces water through concrete foundations over time.

Geo-Mat resists that by allowing water to drain, unimpeded, to your external draining system. The pressure doesn’t have a chance to build up, and water doesn’t have a chance to force its way into your foundation.

Advanced Geo-Mat

Geo-Mat meets IRC and IBC requirements for withstanding up to 16ft – 5515psf.

In short, this means for most major building applications, in the United States and around the world, Geo-Mat is going to handle the pressure that the earth around your project wants to apply to your foundation as you fill and pack earth back in around it.