Hello, my name is Brian Dufour. I am the Director of Operations here at KC Pier. We are in Independence and the weather’s panned out for us at the moment. What we’re doing here at this home is we’re installing five DynaPiers on the corner of this home to prevent it from settling any further. The house is only down about three quarters of an inch, but they wanted to go ahead and take care of the problem before it enhanced and caused more money in the future. So what we did is, we dug and boxed five pier holes. We dug approximately 27 inches under the foundation footing to ensure a proper measurement as well as correct adjustment to the foundation.
How Piering Works
The way that our piers are installed is they are concentrically loaded, so we have to dig underneath the footing to drive them directly underneath the foundation walls. As we do that, we use what’s called the DynaPier and what it is, is it is 15 inch steel segments that are filled with 9,000 PSI high strength grout. This one is a starter segment. It’s full all the way up, so when we start the drive in process, if there’s anything in our way, we can push right through it and prevents from tilting or pushing or bending anything in the future. What it does is as we drive this down, each segment interlocks approximately two and a half inches over and we drive it until we hit load bearing strata or refusal, whichever one comes first. Once we get to that point, what we have is we have smaller segments, so we can build the pier up to the closest underneath the footing without cutting anything. We don’t have to worry about bringing in any high strength tools or anything to cut anything on site. Once we get to that point, we have the piering head and what it does is, we have steel shims that go on top of the pier segment and underneath the head itself, we shim it and then we release the pressure, so everything sits directly on the pier. What I’m doing now is I’m taking off the front fascia of it because what we do that’s a little different from everybody else is the pier cap itself interlocks and closes everything in there, so the shims can’t fall out. So when your house does its normal shifting with the weather, it can’t shift the shims off of it and it can’t settle any further. Once we get to that point, we take all the soil, we compact it back in there and then the house will never settle any further than where it is at the moment. And that’s the main goal when you install piers.
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