ABS Orders Cellar Conversions London and Home Counties UK

The founder, Ray Foulkes entered the basement waterproofing business in 1992 when a friend asked if he could recommend anyone in the business....

The answer was 'no we can't!'

Back then we did concrete repairs to high rise buildings and civil engineering structures. A lot of that work involved waterproofing of one kind of another but we didn't do basements back then as there was nothing on the market that we could trust.

So we had to answer that we couldn't' recommend anyone in the industry and had a go ourselves using a bit of 'out of the box' thinking, as no faith in anything that the industry had to offer at the time.

To cut a long (30 years) story short, we developed our own perimeter drainage system with a sump and pump which was effectively the opposite of 'tanking' which tries to hold water back and it solved the problem. That was in 1992 and the basement is still dry today.

Over the years that followed we went on to develop our own proprietary drainage and sump and pump systems including the Waterguard and BaseDrain channeling systems, the ThermaDry membrane which solved the condensation problem that plagues all plastic, dimpled type membranes which are all plastic with no thermal properties and the FloodBuster Sump and pump system.

It took a few years but we transformed the basement waterproofing industry in the UK, now drainage systems and sumps and pumps are more common than the altogether 'tanking systems' - mostly cement based renders and coatings that attempt to hold water pressure back.

Ray was elected to the post of Technical Officer of the British Structural Waterproofing Association (BSWA) in 2001 and was the principle author of the BSWA 'Guide to Waterproofing Existing Basements' first published in 2003.

We were the first company to offer sump and pump servicing and we still service installations that we did 20 years or so ago.

Our systems became so popular internationally that we developed our international export business exporting our Basement Waterproofing Systems worldwide, but mostly to the USA and Canada and have founded a network of 'Trusted Basement Contractors' in those countries who install our systems regularly.

We undertake complete cellar conversions but do not do underpinning or excavate new basements.

If you have a wet basement or would like to convert a damp or flooded cellar in South and West London, Surrey or Berkshire, please fill in our contact form.