Roberta H writes, I have been living in my new home for some time now & have been asking for the contractor to clean the brick because it is obvious that they never were. Well, last week they finally sent someone to clean the brick with a pressure washer & not long after beginning the guys stopped to come & show me that the mortar joints were being blown out from between the bricks. Needless to say, I told them to stop. What would cause this?

That doesn’t sound good Roberta, one thing that could cause it with a pressure washer would be if they were using the “0″ tip instead of one of the fan tips, & it would also damage the bricks, but if they were using the regular fan tips & it was blowing the mortar out of the joints there is a good chance that it was a bad batch of mortar, & if that is the case then the question becomes was that bad batch of mortar isolated & just used in that area or is this going to be a problem for the whole house. Being new construction, have the general & masonry contractor take a look at it & see what they say, if your not getting straight answers or get the run around give me a call & we’ll do what we can to help.

Thanks for reading my article titled, "Mortar Joints Failing. I hope that you enjoyed reading it.

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