Many homeowners seem wary of fixing uneven concrete floors. While the problem may be from long-time usage, it’s often a result of problems with installation. This difficulty is a result of layering wet concrete over a large area which will lead to the unevenness of your floors. The solution to an uneven concrete floor is called concrete leveling.
In this post, you will get to understand everything you need to know relating to concrete leveling. By the way, get this professional foundation repair bloomington in.
What Is Concrete Leveling?
Concrete leveling which is also known as concrete lifting is the process of raising an uneven concrete floor from a sunken state to its original position. This means fixing uneven floors occasioned by soil degradation or installation deficiency. It’s a process that is carried out whereby holes are drilled through the concrete slab to inject filler materials underneath the slab. This filler material will take up space beneath the concrete slab and the soil and raise it or jacks it to the original position. Concrete leveling is of two types, viz; slab jacking and mud jacking.
- Slabjacking – this process of concrete lifting or concrete level involves the injection of polyurethane foam as a filler after holes have been drilled into the concrete slab. Slabjacking is a new technique of concrete leveling which is gaining wide ground since it is very easy to control, faster to set up, and lasts much longer than the traditional way of lifting concrete that involves mud or slurry.
- Mudjacking – this is another type of concrete leveling that involves injecting a filler material which is known as “mud” or “concrete slurry” after holes have been drilled into a concrete slab.
The composition of the slurry is a mix of concrete, sand, limestone, water, and other materials which vary depending on the contractor and the equipment that are made use of. One essential thing must be ensured: the mixture of the material must be thin for it to pass through the injection gun and must also be thick enough to solidify or cure. What lifts the slab in this stead is the pressure of forcing the material under the slab. Mudjacking is the traditional way of concrete lifting which material is considerably cheaper unlike slab jacking own.
Differences Between Slabjacking And Mudjacking
- The drill size for mudjacking can vary between 1 to 1.5 inches while that of slab jacking may require the same or a bit lesser.
- It takes up to days or hours before completing the injection process of mud or concrete slurry while injecting polyurethane can be done within hours depending on the areas and degrees of leveling.
- In terms of durability, a slurry lifespan is gauged between 5 – 10 years while that of polyurethane foam, in most cases can be permanent.
- Issues likely to occur for slabjacking include sinking due to erosion while that of mudjacking is simply the mixture settling, getting decay, crack, erode or sink. This is due to the weight of the two fillers materials and how the sediments beneath the filler material hold up.
