Murrieta Plumber: Excavate Slab Leak Concrete Step 3

Excavate Slab Leak Concrete in Murrieta Homes or Business

Slab Leak Concrete Excavation | Leaking pipes under a slab can cause big damage. If the initial signs of a slab leak are ignored, you may end up with a great deal of damage to your home’s foundation and possibly the ground around your house. Signs of a pipe slab leak concrete are damp, moist or wet spots on the carpeting or floor, an unexpected increase in your water bill or low water pressure in your house.

The other causes of a slab leak are using a non reamed pipe, bad installation, excess soldering flux and contact with concrete. Other signs of a possible slab leak concrete are hearing the sound of water running when no water is on and a place on the floor that feels hot to the touch.

New methods for finding a slab leak are available that include the use of sound amplification equipment and ultra-sound and electromagnetic detectors to find a pipe buried underground. Due to the fact that a slab leak concrete are found well underneath a building, they are more susceptible to natural breakdown and damage. Understanding what to look for and knowing how to detect a slab leak concrete are very important for any homeowner.

How to Evaluate Cracks in Poured Concrete Slabs & Floors

Floor slab & tile crack diagnosis & repair:

This article describes the types of cracks that occur in poured concrete slabs or floors and explains the risks associated with each, thus assisting in deciding what types of repair may be needed. Cracks in concrete floors or slabs occur in poured concrete slabs may be found both in basement and in slab on grade or “patio home” construction and have a variety of causes and cures that we discuss here.

This article series describes how to recognize and diagnose various types of foundation failure or damage, such as foundation cracks, masonry foundation crack patterns, and moving, leaning, bulging, or bowing building foundation walls.

Three Types of Cracks in Concrete Slabs & Floors

Types of foundation cracks, crack patterns, differences in the meaning of cracks in different foundation materials, site conditions, building history, and other evidence of building movement and damage are described to assist in recognizing foundation defects and to help the inspector separate cosmetic or low-risk conditions from those likely to be important and potentially costly to repair.

Shrinkage cracks in a slab are unlikely to be of any structural concern but can be a source of water entry or radon entry in buildings and may form a tripping hazard.

Settlement cracks in a slab indicate inadequate site preparation, such as failure to compact fill on which a slab was poured.

Frost heaves or expansive soil damage can cause substantial damage to basement, crawl space, or garage floor slabs in some conditions.

Each type of basement slab, floor slab, or slab on grade crack is discussed and described with photographs below.

Cracks come to the job along with the concrete, riding in the same truck! At a Journal of Light Construction conference (Boston 1985) a lecturer informed us that “Every concrete truck that comes to your job to pour a slab has at least four cracks in it. It’s up to you to either provide control joints, or not. If you leave out control joints the cracks will occur in a messier pattern at natural stress points in the slab.”

Three Types of Poured Concrete Slab Floors – Different Implications of Cracks & Movement

Before we describe crack, movement, and damage patterns and diagnosis in concrete slabs, we need to introduce three different types of poured concrete floor slabs.

We use the three Carson Dunlop Sketches shown here to comment on the occurrence, causes, and significance of cracks and movement in poured concrete slab construction.

Floating concrete slab characteristics:

In the sketch at above left, the floor slab (left side of the foundation wall) is simply “floating” sitting atop gravel and soil inside the foundation wall.

This is an idealized sketch.

The author’s first construction job (construction at the Fleet antiaircraft missile training center, Dam Neck, VA) consisted of raking roughly level loose-fill dirt inside of building foundations.

Over several summers of this labor we never once saw anyone using a soil compactor and rarely did we see gravel poured inside of the foundation walls before the slab was poured.

The bad news about typical floating slab construction (where the soil is not compacted) is that anything that causes the soil to settle risks slab cracking and settlement. Flooding, leaks, or simply poor handling of roof and surface runoff can send water under a building where it causes loose soil to settle.

The good news about cracks in floating slab construction is that the damage is to the floor, not to the structure that is supporting the building. Only if you see a floor slab crack that continues up in the foundation wall where the crack meets the wall would the structure be obviously involved.

More good news: if there is significant soil settlement under a floating slab, the slab is likely to break and follow the settling soil downwards; a sudden precipitous collapse of a floating slab is less likely than the next case we describe.

Supported poured concrete floor slab characteristics

As you can see from the sketch at left, the supported slab is a lot like the floating slab – it claims to have gravel and claims to have compacted soil below the slab.

But the edges of the floor slab rest on a lip built into the poured concrete footing which also supports the building walls.

The good news about a slab with this design is that a little soil settlement below the slab will not cause the floor to tip nor crack provided it has been adequately reinforced.

The bad news about a supported slab design is that if there were significant soil settlement below the slab and if it lacked proper reinforcement at the time of construction, it might collapse.

Where may this occur: if you inspect a garage built on what was originally a sloping hill, you can expect that the interior of the garage foundation was filled with lots of backfill soil. If your builder was the same fellow who hired the author (as we described above), all of this fill was left un-compacted. At the low end of the garage where the most fill was added, significant soil settlement can occur. If the slab was also not reinforced and if a lot of soil settlement occurs under this floor, it could collapse suddenly, say when your car is parked there. Get more information here…