Push Pin Pier Systems – Guardian Foundation Repair, Tennessee

A push pier carries the weight of your house down past the soil that is causing the trouble and onto ground that will hold. We expose the footing, set a concrete cylinder six inches across and twelve inches long into the hole with a powered ram on top and a titanium plate bracing the footing, and drive it down. Then we feed number four rebar through the cylinder and drive the next one in behind it. We keep going until there is enough resistance to stabilize the wall and, where it is possible, lift it.

As deep as they need to. There is no fixed number, because it depends on where the stable soil is on your lot. We drive cylinder after cylinder until the pier builds enough pressure to carry the load. That is the point of a resistance system. The ground tells you when you are deep enough rather than a specification deciding it in advance.

Yes, in many cases. Once the pier is set, we fix an eight by eight by sixteen inch cap block rated at nine thousand psi to the pier, and use a twenty ton bottle jack to make the adjustment. Then we shim from the cap block to the footing to hold the correction. How much lift is possible depends on how far the house settled and what the structure above will take without damage.

We back fill the hole and tamp the dirt as we go so it packs down properly rather than settling later and leaving you a depression in the yard. Because we dig by hand, the disturbed area is limited to where we actually worked.

Both carry the load to deeper soil. A push pier is driven down using the weight of the structure itself for resistance, which suits a house heavy enough to push against. A helical pier is turned into the ground like a screw and does not need that weight, so it fits lighter structures and additions. Which one is right comes down to your house and what is under it.