Piers or no piers in North Texas?

[jodi1det]

We are in the process of getting pool quotes and one company hasn’t mentioned piers and the other says with our 4’ retaining wall we sit on in a neighborhood we need them to keep the integrity of the wall and the pool. I don’t know about how to come to a conclusion.

 

[AQUA~HOLICS]

The Steel engineering firm who is hired to provide the rebar requirements will have your answer.

 

[Texas Splash]

Welcome to TFP! If your contractor gives you the deer in the headlights response, you might contact yoru county Environmental office. They may have some data on file for your area. I know down here, the black clay gumbo soil is a real pain. I had to have several piers put under portions of our home perimeter due to shifting.

 

[JJ_Tex]

Hey neighbor. We did piers in ours, but our retaining wall is about 12' tall. Our PB got us in touch with an engineer, who contacted the HOA/neighborhood developer for specs on the retaining wall.

I think that was about $1,000 and he came back and recommended $10k worth of piers. Luckily when they were starting to put in the piers, they hit bedrock about a foot below our pool. PB called the engineer and they decided we did not need the $10k worth of piers so I got most of that $ back and ultimately put it towards upgrades.

 

[davecraze]

It’s all over the map in north Texas.

We did fully engineered piers because the pool, feature wall, cabana etc are all one monolithic tied-in structure. Unfortunately, when they went to do the concrete piers they hit water even through my immediate neighbor did not hit water on his piers/pool.

We had to redo the entire engineering with helical steel piers - like more than 30 of them.

On the plus side, there is no way that structure is going to sink unless the fracking all around DFW opens a hole in the earth under my house!