Hi all
I am building a deck and have decided to save myself some headaches by not using sonotubes or forms to bring my peirs up to ground level.
Here is some background. I dug piers for the deck and had them inspected with my foundation. Then backfilled while framing. Now I have dug back down to the piers(footers) and am ready to put my deck post on them. If I follow my original plan to use tubes or forms to bring the concrete up to finished grade it will require another inspection and a lot of concrete, trucks can’t get up the drive.
So here is the question. What is the best way to place the post on the pier footers and backfill them. What will make them last the longest and satisfy the inspectors as well?
HC
Western North Carolina
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In reasonable soil, anchor the posts with the same sort of anchors you'd use for piers, then backfill with some sort of gravel.
Make sure the anchors raise the posts off the concrete by 1/2" or so.
we bury our posts all the time
use a .40 treated post or if you want extra protection, use a .60 treated post
make sure your footing is below your frost line.. tamp the top of the concrete footing flat so you can dance your posts into postion
once you have your posts aligned and plumbed, brace them with scantlings (furring)
and backfill them with suitable material and tamp the backfill
cut your post tops to grade or install your simpson connectors and go about your framing.. the stand off brackets are a throwback to the way things were done before we had ground contact lumber.
by burying your posts, you also get the added benefit of addtional racking resistance,
the bottoms of our footings are typically 40" below finished grade.. so we often have 30" - 36" of post buried...
You don't say how many concrete posts you'd have to pour so I can't evaluate how much more trouble it would be to do it that way when you've got no access for the concrete truck. A typical 8"x60" Sonotube without a 'Bigfoot' base doesn't need that much concrete; we routinely mix that much manually in a wheelbarrow and pour it in using scrap pieces of tube as funnels or troughs.
If you must bury your wood posts, you should be using either cedar or hemlock, both of which have excellent rot resistance and will not leech nasty chemicals into your ground water as PT lumber does. (Mike and I always disagree on this one.) The key to longevity is double-sided: either you've got to keep the wood dry--which means really good drainage (which in turn means lots of gravel)--or you've got to keep it completely immersed in water, the way a dock pier is (this avoids giving the little beasties that munch on wood enough oxygen for them to survive). The second route is not practical for your application.
Another option would be to build a gravel cage from 1x and ½" wire mesh, set that on the footing and fill it with ¾" washed gravel right up to grade, backfilling around the cage as you go. Tamp well, needless to say. Then you can set your deck post on the gravel and be sure of (a) good drainage under your post, and (b) no frost heave.
Dinosaur
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