So today we’re going to go over the piering system that KC Pier uses, called the DynaPier System. It is a concentrically loaded pier, which means that we don’t have to break the footing of the foundation. We go directly under the foundation wall, under the footing. So as we’re pushing, we use the weight of the house to push it into the ground to hit what we need to make sure we have enough pressure to hold your house up. What we’re going to go over today is each individual piece and what it looks like as we build it up in the finished product underneath your house. What we’ll start with is the starter segment, a 15 inch segment. It’s full of 9,000 PSI high strength grout that is cured for 20 days, and it is full all the way to the brim.
How the DynaPier System Works
What that does is as you’re pushing it, it prevents the steel from kicking sideways, from filling up, and you get a solid piece. So once you hit something structurally sound, it won’t try to kick on you. This goes in first and then what you see behind us are smaller segments. The reason for the smaller segments is that we don’t have to cut the pier once we drive it to get our link. Each one of these can overlap two and a half inches. The reason for that is so we can build the pier up where we need to once we finish pushing the pier. What happens is we start with the starter, we install the starter, and then as we install the starter, we push the 15 inch segments over each one.
As we do that, we drive it until we hit refusal. It doesn’t matter if it’s five feet or five hundred feet, we drive until we have enough pressure to hold the structure that we’re pushing off of. During that process, once we get this up and once we get it to where it is, that’s where these smaller segments come in at. As we do this, we want to make sure that we can build a pier up as high as we can to minimize the shimming that needs to be done so there’s less issues than the pier itself in the future. Once we get there, once we get up to that area, we have what’s called a head unit. Now, it’s a half inch thick steel, that what it does is it helps put the shims inside of it and you tighten it together so the shims can’t come off.
Once we get the pier up itself, the head unit will slide behind it and whatever gap we have here, we use solid shims. We have numerous sizes all the way from an inch to an eighth and we add whatever we can fit in here and we beat them in to make sure that it’s solid. Once we get that on, the head unit is set just like this. With that being done, we have the other piece and what it does is it slides strictly over it. Then we come in with our galvanized nuts and we bolt it together. We completely tighten it together, and then once we get to that point, your house is sitting flush on top of the head. This system does not tie into your house because your house is designed to move to a certain extent.
It’s going to shift and it’s going to heave. We don’t want to tie into it and stop it from doing what it’s naturally supposed to do, because we don’t want to cause any more issues in the future. With the DynaPier system it does one thing and one thing only: it prevents the house from settling any further than where it was when these are installed.
You’re trying to get into a place where you can support the home and it doesn’t settle any further so you can go upstairs and cosmetically fix everything that you had the issues with. So here’s the finished product of the foundation pier. This is strictly for houses that are settling, doors that are sticking, floors that are unlevel. Issues like that are what you need this pier for.
Options with the DynaPier System
In a couple of videos you’ll see where we’ve installed the DynaPier System to recover the house one inch, two inch, three inches, depending on the homeowner’s preference and how much the house will allow us to achieve. We also put these in to support the house exactly where it is because there’s signs of it starting to move and the homeowner just wants to catch it before we get there. So you can use this in a couple of options of how it goes. We’ve lifted anywhere from one inch to nine inches with this. So there’s nothing we can’t achieve with the DynaPier System itself. We’ve done apartment complexes. We can do anything we want with it.
If you need help with your foundation, schedule a consultation with KC Pier today!