Cracks get noticed in spring. The ground has been through a full winter cycle, the light is better, and somebody finally looks properly at the line running up the corner of the bay. Subsidence repair waste varies enormously depending on what the eventual answer turns out to be, which is why we are cautious about sizing a container for one of these jobs early. Our Leyland skip hire service supports this work once the method is settled.
Most cracks are not subsidence
Worth saying first, because the word causes a great deal of alarm. Houses move. Plaster cracks with seasonal movement, thermal expansion, and the ordinary settlement of an extension against an older structure, and the great majority of cracks people worry about are none of them structural.
The ones that warrant attention tend to be wider at one end than the other, run diagonally, pass through the brickwork rather than just the plaster, appear inside and outside in the same place, and get worse over months rather than staying static. Doors and windows that have stopped closing properly in one part of the house are another signal.
If that is what you have, the first call is your insurer rather than a builder, because subsidence is generally an insured peril and going ahead independently can complicate a claim considerably.
Monitoring comes before any work
This is the part that frustrates people and it is the right way round. Where subsidence is suspected, the usual process is a period of monitoring, often over several seasons, to establish whether the building is still moving and in which direction.
That feels like nothing happening. What it is actually doing is preventing an expensive repair being carried out on the wrong diagnosis. Underpinning a building that was moving for a reason that has since resolved itself is a great deal of money and disruption spent for nothing.
So do not book a skip in April for a crack you noticed in April. The waste side of this job is months away at the earliest, and possibly not needed at all.
What the eventual repair produces
The waste depends entirely on the method, and the methods differ enormously.
Where the cause is a tree drawing moisture out of clay subsoil, the answer is sometimes simply removing or reducing the tree, followed by a period of allowing the ground to recover. That produces tree waste rather than building waste.
Where the cause is a drainage leak washing material out from under a footing, which is common in older property, the repair is drainage work. That produces excavated spoil, broken pipe, and a modest amount of concrete.
Resin injection stabilisation produces almost no waste at all, which is one of its attractions. Small access holes, some spoil, and a great deal less disruption than the alternative.
Traditional underpinning is the heavy one. It means excavating in sections beneath the existing footing and filling with concrete, and it produces a large volume of dense spoil along with broken masonry and old concrete. On a domestic property that is a serious tonnage.
Spoil is heavy and there is more than the hole suggests
Excavated ground swells once it is dug out. Material that was compacted for centuries breaks up, air gets into it, and it occupies noticeably more space loose than it did in situ. Around here the ground is heavy clay, which swells more and holds more water than sandy ground.
So the trench volume is the floor rather than the ceiling of what you will be moving, and every bit of it is dense. Our page on how full can you fill a skip with soil covers what that means for a container, and our guide to skip size versus weight limits explains the two constraints.
The right answer on heavy inert material is smaller containers exchanged more often. A 4 tonne midi skip on a running exchange moves more spoil than one oversized container that cannot be lifted. On a larger underpinning job, bulk removal by grab lorry may be the better tool than skips at all, and we will say so if that is the case.
The internal making good
Once the structural work is done there is a second phase that produces a different load entirely. Cracked plaster hacked off and replaced, sometimes whole walls reskimmed, floor coverings that came up for the works, and frequently redecoration throughout the affected rooms.
That waste is bulky rather than dense. Any plasterboard has to be kept out of the general load, which our page on plasterboard disposal and building waste separation explains, and an 8 tonne builders skip is generally the right size for this phase.
Keeping the clean rubble and concrete from the structural phase separate from the mixed internal waste is worth the effort, because inert material gets crushed and recovered while mixed waste does not. Our environmental and recycling page explains the difference.
Access and placement
Underpinning happens at the base of a wall, which usually means the side or rear of a property and a long barrow run to wherever a container can stand. Board the route and plan it, because saturated ground under repeated heavy loads makes a mess quickly.
Where the container has to go on the road, Lancashire County Council acts as highway authority at £36 per month, covered in our guide on whether you need a permit to place a skip on the road in Lancashire. These jobs run long, so get the permit period right at the outset.
We work across this area daily, running Bamber Bridge skip hire jobs alongside Leyland and out across the surrounding villages.
Ring us on 01772 364399 once the method is agreed, and we will plan the containers around the phases. Our contact page is there if your contractor or loss adjuster would rather deal with us directly.
