A manager of a light industrial park in Sainte-Julie, on the South Shore, mandated us to solve a recurring problem of garter snakes and mice infiltrating a building housing small manufacturing units. Several tenants had reported snakes in the office spaces adjacent to the shops, and rodents had damaged electrical wiring in two units. Managers had previously tried to seal visible openings with steel wool and expanding foam, but without prior mapping, the results remained insufficient in the long term. An industrial smoke test was proposed to cover the entire perimeter of the building and to draw up an exhaustive inventory of the infiltration routes, before any further sealing attempts.
Particularities of a light industrial building with multiple units
This type of building is characterized by the presence of numerous penetrations into the envelope: individual utility entrances for each unit, loading dock doors, mechanical ventilation ducts specific to each tenant, and electrical and telephone wiring passages. Our team in Sainte-Julie conducted a two-hour preliminary inspection to map all known bushings before starting the test. During this phase, technicians also checked the condition of the flashings around the ventilation ducts on the roof, an area often overlooked but frequently used by snakes to enter the roof and technical attic spaces.
The smoke test was carried out after the tenants closed at the end of the week. Smoke was introduced into the main drain system as well as into the technical void spaces between the concrete block walls. The results were striking: smoke appeared under five different dock doors, around several electrical boxes embedded in the exterior walls, and in the expansion joint between two sections of the building built in two phases. These construction junctions are particularly vulnerable points, often ignored during ordinary inspections because they are not visible without specialized equipment. All leaks were precisely located and then chalked to facilitate remediation work.
Remediation plan and sealing work
The smoke test report made it possible to establish a prioritized corrective plan, ranking the interventions according to the criticality of the leaks and their proximity to the workspaces. The dock door bottom seals have been replaced with flexible rubber models resistant to UV and extreme temperatures in Quebec. The electrical boxes have received neoprene compression seals around their edges. The inter-building expansion joint was treated with a compressible expanded polyethylene waterproofing profile and then covered with a galvanized metal lick. The professional caulking of the envelope was completed on the three accessible sides, with particular attention to the foundation corners where the slab meets the concrete block wall, a classic area of infiltration in this type of construction.
A second smoke test carried out a week after the work validated the effectiveness of the corrections. Only one minor residual leak was detected in a bathroom ventilation duct, which was corrected in less than an hour by the addition of a compressible foam gasket. The manager has received an annotated plan of the building showing all the sealed points, which can be used as a reference for future renovation work or a change of tenant. For other similar cases carried out in the region, see our previous smoke test realisation.
Preventive management for the South Shore industrial parks
Light industrial buildings built between 1985 and 2005 in industrial parks in cities such as Sainte-Julie, Saint-Hubert or Varennes have architectural characteristics that make them susceptible to infiltration after fifteen or twenty years of use. Expansion joints age, roof flashings warp and dock doors lose their seal through freeze-thaw cycles. Our extermination services in Quebec include a customized preventative maintenance program for industrial park owners, with periodic smoke testing coordinated with tenant rotation. This proactive approach reduces the risk of property damage and tenant complaints, while maintaining the rental value of the building over the long term.