Tunneling For Pipes, Plumbing and Concrete Slabs
At JC Foundation Repair, we’re a full service company specialising in a broad range of tunneling projects.
Tunneling for Pipes
With years of experience in concrete construction and foundation repair, we are also experts in under slab installation and tunneling. If you ever find yourself dealing with a broken water supply line or major sewer line right under your slab – you generally have two options:
The first one is to go right through the slab using a jackhammer, in the hopes that you might end up as close to the leak as possible. However, you can often miss the mark by several feet or in a worse-case scenario, discover that the pipe suffered a hairline fracture or crack which was not picked up by cameras.
In doing so, you might waste a fair amount of time, energy and resources, because you’ll have to follow the entire length of pipe to discover the leak in order to perform repairs.
The second option, and a far more feasible one, is to dig a tunnel under the slab from outside your home or building, and then follow the length of the pipe until you come across the leak. Even though this method can be tedious and labour-intensive, it is undeniably the best way to accurately pinpoint the sight of the leak, and that too without causing a big mess where your slab floor is left damaged.
Tunneling under slab, therefore, is the best way of locating under-the-slab leak sites and in many cases, it is the most accurate and practical way to get the job done.
Plumbing Tunnels – A Professional Job the first time around
After successfully locating the sight of the leak, our tunneling team will disassemble the damaged pipe(s) and install a new high-quality PVC pipe. Using specialised equipment, they will suspend the new pipe on metal hangers screwed into the slab, in order to prevent the slab from crushing the new pipe in the event of any potential foundation issues. This is simply a safety precaution that must be put in place to deal with unexpected circumstances.
Most companies place the new pipe directly in the dirt under the slab – in the event of any foundation settling or movement, the new pipe can get annihilated under the foundation’s weight. The quality metal hangers we use ensures that a scenario like this can be avoided altogether.
Once the repair has been successfully completed, our team backfills the tunnel using the displaced dirt and soaks it in water to achieve the desired level of compaction. They don’t stop until the dirt is firmly packed into the dug up hole.
If a small amount of dirt was dug out, we’ll evenly spread it out over your yard or build a small hill against your home to facilitate rainwater flowing down the pitch and away from the foundation. However, if a large amount of dirt was dug out, we’ll carry it away in a tailor and dispose of it at a site used solely for dumping sand, dirt and loam.
If you need a reliable, dependable and trustworthy contractor with years of experience in tunneling for pipes or tunneling under slab, please get in touch with us.
