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The importance of soil

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

The soil on your site is a critical aspect to your retaining wall project. Among the ways your soils can affect your overall project cost are:

  • Geogrid Requirements
  • Increased Effort to Compact
  • Cost of Importing Additional Material and Removing Existing Soils

A wall built in clay will have an increased need for geogrid when compared to the same wall build on a sandy site. This is because clay will “push” on the wall more than sand. This geogrid will be used to create a mass of soil large enough to overcome these forces.

Clays and silts resist compacting due to the shape of each grain of soil. They to trap water more and make proper compaction more labor intensive. It is important to achieve proper compaction to reduce future settlement and to increase the stability of the reinforced soil mass. To achieve the required compaction, you may need to compact more frequently with smaller lifts of soil, or use specialized compaction equipment.

When your site does not meet the minimum requirements suggested on the Working with Soils page on the Allan Block website, it may be required to remove the existing soil from the site and use select fill for the area within the geogrid. You may also find it necessary to increase the width of your base to compensate for poor soils under the wall.

If you have questionable soils on your site, please visit our website at allanblock.com for suggestions and recommendations. It will also be important that you contact a local engineer for help designing your retaining wall.

Tom

Posted in AB FAQs, Commercial Retaining Walls, Landscape Retaining Walls | 1 Response »
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Planning and Estimating your Segmental Retaining Wall

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
Planning and Estimating

Planning and Estimating

Our backyard wall was going to be a big project for a small backyard. We needed to have a staging plan for all the material, but before that we needed to estimate the project and figure our budget. The first step in building a retaining wall is to make a plan. A good plan will lead to a good project. To start, figure out how much grade change you are working with. In our case we had around 7 ft. We decided to cover this height with two terraced walls. But how tall should each wall be? We decided the lower wall should be about 3 ft tall for easy access for planting and gardening and the upper wall should cover the rest of the grade change and be as close to the property line as possible.

Now that we knew the rough wall height and wall length (property line length) we used the incredibly easy AB Landscape Estimating Tool that we downloaded from allanblock.com. It works in Microsoft Excel which most people have on their computers. When using this great tool, I had to remember to add a little to the wall height for the buried block. You can also use this estimate to calculate the amount of wall rock and infill soil you will need. Don’t forget to consider equipment rental such as a skid steer, plate compactor, diamond saw and maybe even a wet saw for cutting caps at the end. It all adds up and if you plan ahead you will limit the surprises to your budget during the process.

Staging & Site Preparation

Planning and Staging

How about staging the material? I think a lot of do-it-yourselfers like me, forget that with a project of this magnitude you need to store/stage a lot of material. Our project had 23 pallets of Allan Block, 3 truck loads of washed wall rock and 1 truck load of sand, drain piping and geogrid. We also had to have a place to store the spoil, or the earth that we removed

during the excavation of the hillside. This was a huge pile that was there from day one until the end of the project when it was used as topsoil backfill. Because we had a good plan for all the material and spoil, the neighbors were surprised we had space to actually build the wall!

Posted in Landscape Retaining Walls | 5 Responses »
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