Watch as Adrian and Brett from Techno Metal Post explain how engineered helical piers can replace concrete footings in your deck and landscape projects.
So today we’re setting the footings for a fairly large deck that’s going to be going in this area and what we use are engineered helical piers. And to talk about that particular type of footing I’ve got Brett from Techno Metal Post.
Well I think the key part that you mention is it’s an engineered system, so it’s a foundation system that relies on more than just the heavy concrete to support the load. It’s actually going to go and measure the quality of the soil and and as it’s drilling down it’s deciding where it has to end up putting that footing — four feet below grade or deeper so that it can then support the load that it’s designed to carry.
It’s a system that relies on measuring the quality of the soil which you can’t do with concrete. How do you decide whether the footing is going to go in four feet or six feet or seven feet? How do you determine that?
Well the soil is going to determine that for us. We know that the soil has a bearing capacity but our machines are all proprietary and are designed to measure that quality to measure the the soil as it’s drilling down and our machines have been tested at sixty test sites across the world to decide which types of soil we can do and we can drill in any type of soil and get the proper bearing that’s required to carry those loads, even loads that are higher than a traditional deck load, a roof load, etcetera.
The existing building code says that as long as that concrete pier goes four feet below grade in a certain diameter that it satisfies code but that doesn’t always work does it in every application?
No, and you’ve probably seen it in your practice and we’ve seen in ours where the concrete is actually heavy and actually adds an additional load to the soil as well and sometimes it will settle or even heave and move depending on the type of soil so we have to do something to combat that.
The machine that can actually measure the resistance through its torque as to when that post can carry the load it’s designed to carry and that’s what’s going to determine whether that soil has to be drilled six feet into that soil, four feet into that soil, or even ten or twenty feet into the soil.
So Brett I see you’ve got one of these green sleeves in your hand and what’s the purpose of these green sleeves? Why can’t you just put this right down into the ground?
Well, the green sleeve is an added measure against frost heave so we put the sleeve over top of the post. If the frost grabs anything it’s going to move the sleeve up and down on the post, so it’s an added protection against frost.
There are pressure gauges on the machine which the operator will watch and he’ll be reporting. He’s required to get a certain pressure that then tells him that yes, now that’s the pressure that’s required to set that post at the depth that’s appropriate but we still have to go about four feet minimum because the frost can go down that far and that’s what the building code tells us and we do satisfy all the requirements of the building building code in Ontario.
