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Sinking or cracked concrete slab

Posted Mar 17, 2021 in Concrete Raising

A sink­ing slab (also known as sink­ing con­crete) is always worth fix­ing, whether it’s locat­ed in your base­ment, garage, dri­ve­way or patio. A sim­ple crack in a con­crete slab isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a prob­lem. Cracks are even sup­posed to occur along ​“con­trol” joints such as those built into a sidewalk.

When a con­crete slab cracks and sinks, this indi­cates a more seri­ous struc­tur­al issue. In addi­tion to look­ing bad, a sink­ing slab can cre­ate an uneven sur­face that pos­es a safe­ty haz­ard. Instead of hop­ing the prob­lem will go away or wor­ry­ing about the poten­tial for injuries and even law­suits, it’s smart to fix a sunken slab.

What caus­es a slab to sink?

When all or part of a slab sinks, it’s usu­al­ly due to one of two pos­si­ble con­di­tions. First off, the soil beneath the slab may have char­ac­ter­is­tics that make it com­press eas­i­ly. In oth­er words, the weight of the slab push­es down on the soil, caus­ing the slab to sink. Soil ero­sion can be anoth­er cause of a sink­ing slab. Heavy water flow some­times wash­es away the soil beneath a slab, which then sinks into the result­ing hole or void.

Some con­trac­tors rec­om­mend repair­ing a sink­ing slab by demol­ish­ing the dam­aged area and pour­ing new con­crete. There are sev­er­al prob­lems with this repair strat­e­gy. For starters, it’s expen­sive and the repair will take at least sev­er­al days because the fresh con­crete must hard­en and cure before the slab can be used again. But even more impor­tant­ly, if weak soil caused the slab to sink, the soil may com­press again under the weight of the new slab. A short­cut repair –adding more con­crete to lev­el or even out the slab — impos­es, even more, weight on the soil, increas­ing the risk of sink­ing in the future.

Polyurethane Foam Con­crete Rais­ing can repair your sink­ing slab quick­ly & effectively.

What if you could raise a cracked slab back to its prop­er lev­el in less than an hour, with no ​“down” time wait­ing for new con­crete or mor­tar to cure? This fast, afford­able way to repair a con­crete slab. The process involves drilling one or more small holes in the sunken area of the slab, then inject­ing an expand­ing ​“geot­ech­ni­cal” foam beneath the slab.

As the foam expands due to a chem­i­cal reac­tion, it push­es the slab back towards its orig­i­nal posi­tion. Our team can gauge the expand­ing action of the foam, con­trol­ling the injec­tion process for just the right degree of slab-rais­ing action.

Because the inject­ed poly­mer mate­r­i­al cures quick­ly, the restored slab can return to its full weight-bear­ing func­tion with­in a mat­ter of min­utes. Slab repair cost by using polyurethane method also costs far less than replac­ing the con­crete slab altogether.

Fam­i­ly Water­proof­ing Solu­tions can raise, lev­el, and sta­bi­lize your con­crete slabs for an afford­able price. One of the biggest advan­tages of using polyurethane foam is that it fills the voids while also adding sta­bil­i­ty. Call our team at (708) 330‑4466 for more infor­ma­tion on fix­ing that sink­ing or cracked con­crete slab today, or sched­ule an online FREE esti­mate.