Piers have been recommended for my foundation. How do they work?
- Eric Scheele
- Jan 19, 2017
- 2 min read
Between expansive and compactable soils, foundations are pushed and pulled, ultimately creating movement. Each year, thousands of homeowners are faced with evaluating and repairing foundation problems. Fortunately, here are reliable, engineered solutions available to you as the home owner.
Since the root of structural problems is the soil, the first two solutions deal with taking the foundation's weight off of unstable soils and placing it on bedrock or other stable soil-these solutions are called push piers and helical piers.
Push Piers are basically long steel shafts that are hydraulically driven into the ground through the unstable surface soils until they reach bed-rock or other load bearing strata. Technicians can tell that the piers have reached bedrock by measuring the hydraulic pressure required to drive the piers into the ground until they meet an engineer specified depth. The home's weight is then transferred off of the unstable soil and onto the piers through pier brackets attached to the footing of the house.
How Piers are installed in 6 Basic Steps:
Step 1: Outside, sod and landscaping around the home is removed.
Step 2: Soil is removed until the footing of the concrete foundation can be seen.
Step 3: Foundation pier brackets of industrial-strength steel are attached to the footing of the home.
Step 4: Steel piers are hydraulically driven down to solid bedrock or other strata that is qualified to hold the load.
Step 5: The weight of the home is then carefully transferred to the solid steel piers.
Step 6: The soil around the home is replaced and landscaping can be returned to its original location.
KC Pier uses the industries best engineered Dyna-Pier system.
The benefits of using piers to repair a foundation are as follows:
Low cost. Up to ten times less than replacing the building foundation.
No disruption or loss of use of the dwelling. The repair is performed with the building being used as normal.
The equipment is portable and can be easily used in tight spaces.
Remedies both the cause of the settlement (unstable soil) and the consequences (dwelling out of level) in one step.
No yard destruction
No heavy equipment
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