Foundation repair in Reno NV - a house held up where the soil can carry it

Foundation pier installation in Reno usually costs about $8,300 to $24,700 for an 8 pier job, and that's the going range around here, not our price. Where yours lands depends on how many piers the house needs, how deep the firm soil sits and how hard the footings are to reach. I'll go through those with you on site before you decide anything.

It usually comes down to how heavy your house is. One pier maker says push piers, steel pipes pressed down using the weight of the house, suit heavy homes over dense soil that's within reach, while helical piers, which screw into the ground, suit lighter homes, mixed soils and sites with no bedrock in reach. Whichever you're offered, it's fair to ask whether each pier's holding strength gets checked as it goes in, which that maker ties to helical piers.

Helical piers fixed to the footing with steel brackets, plus added support for the beams and girders under the floor, are the standard approach, according to the same pier maker. It counts crawl space and pier-and-beam homes among the lightest houses, generally too light for a push pier. On a crawl space job I'll get under the house with a light, because the beams and posts tell me as much as the cracks upstairs.

Often yes, when the slab has sunk a moderate amount. One repair guide says foam injection works best for leveling concrete like driveways, garage floors and sidewalks where the settling is moderate. If yours has dropped a lot or broken into chunks, I'll tell you plainly whether leveling still makes sense.

Often it's soil that moves, since some clay soils swell when wet and shrink when dry, and they do the most harm where wet and dry seasons are sharp. A common cause is uneven wetting, like lawn and garden watering that soaks the ground outside the foundation while the soil under the house stays dry. That's general guidance rather than a read on your lot, so I check your sprinklers, downspouts and grading along with the cracks.

Ask which license they hold, because the Nevada State Contractors Board has a classification just for piers and foundations, listed as A-9. A business can be licensed for other kinds of work and not this one, so the classification is the part worth asking about.