Your Brick Home Needs Weeping Hole Covers

If there’s one thing you’ll learn after buying a house, it’s that water is your enemy . Every day, in surprisingly different ways, water enters your home and tries to destroy, rust, and wash away everything inside it , including you. That’s why the people who built your home took steps to anticipate and fight water infiltration – steps that many new homeowners are sometimes surprised to learn about.

For example, if your house is brick on the outside, you may notice that there are regular gaps in the mortar – literally holes on the outside of your house. It’s easy to get alarmed – holes in your home are usually bad news. But holes in a brick spaced at regular intervals are perfectly normal. They are called tear holes and serve an important purpose and require your special attention.

Humidity control

Brick and mortar are porous materials, which means that water can easily penetrate them. This is fine as long as the water has a way to run off; if water gets trapped behind a brick, it will inevitably undermine its structural integrity, and if water sits on the interior lining of your home for too long, it can cause serious damage.

That’s why brick facades have drainage holes. When the bricks absorb water, it ends up running after them in search of salvation. Bricklayers purposely make small holes in the wall so that water can safely drain out of your home. These drainage holes also allow air to circulate, allowing the brickwork to dry out between showers and preventing mold growth. The cladding used on the outside of your home is designed to channel moisture into these drainage holes, preventing your home from rotting in a surprisingly short time.

Covers for lacrimal openings

Because of their primary function of protecting your home from insidious water damage, it is vital that you never, under any circumstances, clog drainage holes. However, this creates a whole new problem: pests.

Insects and small creatures such as mice can sometimes use these lacrimal openings as an invasion vector. Once behind a brick, they can sometimes find or make holes in the walls and from there open a store in your house. This is one reason why homeowners sometimes make the disastrous choice of plugging their tear holes—no one likes the idea that weep holes act as an invitation to all the invasive species in your area. Sometimes people advise you to stuff steel wool in drain holes to keep pests out, but this is a bad idea as it can restrict airflow and moisture too much.

Instead of covering drain holes, you should install drain covers . These are metal or plastic pieces designed to slide into an opening and create a pest barrier. They are easy to install – many of them can simply be clamped and pushed in, although sometimes you need to cut them to fit your hole exactly and sometimes it is recommended to use some silicone to secure them in place. There is a wide variety of drain cap products out there, and they all work in the same way, so it’s hard to go wrong.

It is important to note that tear plugs will not stop smaller insects such as ants; they need to let air and moisture through so that the tiny bugs can still get in. But they are very effective in keeping rodents and larger insects like cockroaches from entering your home, while still allowing the tear sac to do its job. .