Balcony Railing Systems in multifamily housing have become an area of focus, both from the design community as well as governing agencies. In the last ten years code requirements have been increased to address balcony railing failures. One of the changes involves support of the railing system (dependent upon span and load calculations), one way support is achieved is by using embedded plates that provide a connection point from the railing system to the balcony deck or structure below.
Railing embeds while addressing safety issues, create a difficult waterproofing condition. Today, waterproofing embeds is not standard and relies on an array of products and techniques not originally designed for this application. In the illustrations (below) captioned current practice, you will notice that one layer of the peel and stick membrane is placed on the balcony deck prior to the embed installation, this means that the fasteners used to secure the embed penetrate the waterproofing membrane. The next step is to install the membrane over the deck providing cut outs for the embeds. Finally a mountain of mastic is used to seal the embed, plate and fasteners. This practice is the norm for multifamily construction. We believe this practice is time consuming, costly, and causes liable parties many sleepless nights.
Formulated Materials has designed and developed a simple and certain solution to balcony railing support embeds, Elevation Balcony Embed System (Patent Pending). Elevation Balcony Embed System is a two component system; Elevation Embed Pan, and Elevation Pan Sealant. The Elevation Embed Pan is installed to surround the railing embed support, the cavity is filled with 1/2″ of Elevation Pan Sealant fully encapsulating the mounting plate and fasteners with a permanent bond to the deck. The result, a seamless waterproof system that is simple and certain!
Contact us today for more information regarding Elevation Balcony Embed System or any of our other systems.
