Methods of Foundation Repair
Below is a comparison of the four major foundation repair methods in Texas. While each has its advantages and its disadvantages, a side-by-side comparison of Dawson's Bell Bottom Pier method clearly demonstrates that it is the best, safest, and most reliable way to solve a foundation problem. When you get the facts, you can be confident in your decision to trust Dawson Foundation Repair.
If you would like a more technical examination of each of the methods of foundation repair, check out ADSC's (The Association of Drilled Shaft Contractors) article Potential Heave in the Pressed Concrete & Pressed Steel Piles in Residential Foundation Construction which details serious problems with piling methods in the Dallas and Fort Worth areas and how they can damage your home's foundation, or take a look at the conclusions of PhD recipient Tom Witherspoon made in Load Capacity Testing and Analysis of Residential Underpinning Systems in Expansive Clay Environment.
| ♦ | The Bell Bottom Pier Method | |
| ♦ | The Pressed Piling Method | |
| ♦ | The Pressed Piling With Inserts Method | |
| ♦ | The Steel Piling Method |
Bell Bottom Pier Method
At Dawson Foundation Repair, we have built a company and a reputation over the past 26 years by providing a long-term solution for concerned homeowners. Our work is backed by our years of experience, a lifetime service agreement, and our satisfied customers. We know the bell bottom pier method is superior to all other methods because we install it every single day and have seen it perform time and time again.
The bell bottom pier method is the only thoroughly researched slab repair method on the market today. This pier design - poured concrete reinforced with steel rebar - is the same conceptual pier design used in the construction of commercial multi-story buildings and highway overpasses. They can be installed in any of the soil and moisture conditions found in Texas and cope equally well from Dallas to Corpus Christi, Beaumont to Austin.
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Click here to see a more detailed diagram of a Bell Bottom Pier
Pressed Piling Method
Concrete pressed pilings are installed all over Texas, but are particularly popular in places with soft, clay rich soil such as Corpus Christi, Houston, and Beaumont. Pressed pilings are composed of a series of precast concrete cylinders which are installed by digging a hole under the house and then, by using the weight of the home as the driving force, the cylinders are driven into the ground. This method has two major drawbacks: the cylinders are not secured together in any way and the slab itself is used in the driving process.
Because the cylinders are not secured, they cannot and will not resist horizontal movement, they can easily be set at an incorrect angle, and pilings can crack without being noticed during installation. Because the slab is used in the driving process there is no way to tell how deep the pilings will end up being driven. This means that the pilings could reach a point of refusal (the point at which they can go no deeper into the ground) which is not properly anchored in stable soil. If not in stable soil, the pilings provide no benefit, but if an installation crew forces the cylinders beyond this point, they can crack the slab and cause major damage to the home.
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Pressed Piling With Inserts Method
The pressed piling method had so many problems that the people who employed it were forced to come up with ways to fix some of its many drawbacks. The pressed piling with inserts method was one of the variations they came up with. The pressed piling with inserts method uses the same basic technique as the pressed piling method, with one minor change: the concrete cylinders are reinforced in one of several ways (usually with a piece of rebar) to stabilize them as they are driven into the soil.
While this helped somewhat with individual misaligned pilings, the new method did not only fail to fix any of the other drawbacks of the system, but it introduced two new ones as well: Instead of having a single cylinder misaligned, the entire piling could now be skewed and moisture seeping into the gaps can cause the soil to weaken even further.
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Steel Piling Method
The steel piling method is similar to concrete pilings and attempts to use the strength of steel to overcome the weaknesses that arise with the concrete methods. Pressed steel pilings are primarily used in the Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and San Antonio areas where conditions are dryer and soils are sandy or in ground with harder soil strata between clay layers which would normally be the refusal point (the point where it takes more force to press the piling deeper than it does to lift the house) for concrete pilings.
Steel pilings over all are similar to the two other piling methods with two notable differences. First, they have the benefit of being able to be driven deeper into the ground before refusal, which can be a major advantage in dryer soils. Unfortunately, they are frequently not pushed all the way to the refusal point, which means they could sag and fail to properly support the home. The other major difference is that the thinner pilings have less ability to resist the forces of shifting soil, especially upheaval, which can cause severe damage to a home's concrete slab.
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