What Is Piering?

When it comes to home buying, we’ve all heard that location is everything. “You can always change the house, but you can’t change where it’s standing!” real estate agents are fond of saying. This mentality has led housing developers to take more liberal risks with the location of their new construction. Today, many homes are built on increasingly unstable soils, creating a less than ideal environment for the home’s foundation. To ensure that a house or condominium stays put, structural engineers have developed a solution known as piering.

What Soil Problems Necessitate Foundation Piering?

There are a number of undesirable soil conditions that could lead a home builder, or future homeowner, to investigate the efficacy of piering.

Expansive Soils: This type of soil expands when saturated, but then shrinks when it dries out.

Hydro-Compactable: This type of soil is low-density dirt. This dirt loses some of its volume when it gets wet or when it is under load. This type of soil can settle very rapidly. Often leading to very catastrophic results for any type of structure that’s been built on it.

Subsidence: This term refers to the slow and incremental caving in or sinking of an area of land. It can be difficult to know where this type of problem will occur, subsidence and may not manifest itself for many years into the life of a property.

How Does Foundation Piering Work?

These problems can seem very frightening to a homeowner, who obviously doesn’t want to deal with part of their house falling down because of unstable soil conditions.

Foundation piering helps to take some of the weight of a structure’s foundation off of the soil, shifting it instead to firm bedrock or more stable soil in the area.

If you fear unstable soil near your home’s foundation, contact Magnum Piering for more information about how we can help.