🐊Earth Anchor Systems - Helical Anchor Cons | Foundation Repair

A mini series on earth anchor systems, what they do, and why we sometimes use them for foundation repair. Home improvement can be complicated, but not with Dry Guys!

In order to fix cracked and bowing walls or leaning in walls a lot of contractors will use a product known as a helical wall anchor. How these differ from the Geo-Lock wall anchor systems is the equipment that is used to drill them through your wall is much heavier, much bulkier and disturbs the household a lot more. So they take these helicals and drill them through the interior of your wall creating a hole that could be upwards of 12 inches in diameter that eventually will have to be repaired and it creates a non-watertight solution. They then drill through that active zone that we referred to and hope that they get to an area of virgin soil to where the helical may or may not hold your wall. A lot of times this doesn't prevent the wall from further moving in and it will continue to shear because it's just pulling on the dirt that is disturbed to begin with. The Geo-Lock wall anchor system as mentioned will have a 480 square inch plate, giving it a lot more surface area and a lot more capacity to hold back that wall and straighten the wall over time which a helical wall anchor will not do. The Geo-Lock wall anchor system allows for the wall to be moved back into place over time a helical wall anchor does not allow for that, there's also no nice, neat hideaway wall panels and they could possibly rust over time. Sometimes these fixes used by other contractors can actually create more problems than they're worth. So remember if you have a cracked, bowed or leaning wall, give us a call here at Dry Guys- we can come out and give you a proposal and an inspection.