I'm not sure if anyone can help but I think I may have a big problem with the extension I am building.
The extension is quite large and is a conventional brick and block build. We used 6200 bricks and about 1100 blocks and between 50/60 25Kg bags of mastercrete. It appears the brickies that laid all the brickwork used a lot of platerciser in the motar mix i.e. 78Liters. Back calculating how much placticser should be used it appears they have used enough for 624 bags of cement - approx 10 times the suggested maximum dosage. In addition matercrete also recomend that only half the amount of suggested platisicer be used as matercrete already includes platiciser. So you could say 20 times the amount required was used.
The problem is that now (about 10 months after the brickwork was completed Aug 07) we are getting some very large cracks appearing in both the brick and blockwork, many sections are loose and both the bricks are blocks are falling out in sections.
Has anyone come across this problem before. I would be very interested to hear from anyone that has seen an example of overdosing or could suggest someone who may be able to provide an inspection to confirm/squash my worst fears that it has to come down.
Local BCO has visited and will only state that where it structurally unsafe it will need to be corrected.
Brickies have been back to visit and have suggested we could get away with repointing specific areas (I am not so sure)
There is a lot of money and time involved in this project so any comments/advice would be most welcome.
The extension is quite large and is a conventional brick and block build. We used 6200 bricks and about 1100 blocks and between 50/60 25Kg bags of mastercrete. It appears the brickies that laid all the brickwork used a lot of platerciser in the motar mix i.e. 78Liters. Back calculating how much placticser should be used it appears they have used enough for 624 bags of cement - approx 10 times the suggested maximum dosage. In addition matercrete also recomend that only half the amount of suggested platisicer be used as matercrete already includes platiciser. So you could say 20 times the amount required was used.
The problem is that now (about 10 months after the brickwork was completed Aug 07) we are getting some very large cracks appearing in both the brick and blockwork, many sections are loose and both the bricks are blocks are falling out in sections.
Has anyone come across this problem before. I would be very interested to hear from anyone that has seen an example of overdosing or could suggest someone who may be able to provide an inspection to confirm/squash my worst fears that it has to come down.
Local BCO has visited and will only state that where it structurally unsafe it will need to be corrected.
Brickies have been back to visit and have suggested we could get away with repointing specific areas (I am not so sure)
There is a lot of money and time involved in this project so any comments/advice would be most welcome.