EIFS is a pretty amazing product and there are zillions of examples of things that have been done with it that are ingenious and that go far past the original intended use of EIFS as a wall cladding. There are also lots of sad stories of pushing EIFS way past its limits, with all sorts of poor outcomes and happy lawyers. This month's column is an overview of some of the odd things that I've seen attempted using the system that are examples of what not to do with EIFS.
Built-in downspouts.
On retrofit projects, perhaps in an effort to avoid removing and reinstalling existing downspouts or on new buildings to hide them, I've seen downspouts buried inside the EIFS foam layer. Doing so is easy-just remove some of the foam to accommodate the pipe and install the foam over the pipe. The first time I ran into this dumb idea was while investigating a leaky wall. Well, I guess you could say that the wall itself was leaking and it turn out that the downspout had gotten plugged and was overflowing at the seams between the pipe sections. The moral to this is that rainwater belongs outside of the wall and to fix this, the wall needs to be torn apart.