Foundation pillows - the basis of lasting habitation

The foundation of any house is the foundation. From its strength and stability depends not only the longevity of the entire building, but also the comfort for living. An untrained person may think that the foundation of the house serves only as a building "platform" for the foundation of the walls, but this is not so.

Thanks to the foundation, all the enormous load that the house communicates to the soil is distributed evenly and accurately over the entire surface of the soil, which prevents the structure from sagging and falling apart due to seasonal tufts of soil. However, much more reliable in this respect pillows are foundation.

For millennia of construction practice, many generations of builders have developed a huge number of techniques for the correct erection of such structures. Using the accumulated knowledge, it is possible to build a house even in conditions of permafrost, but we will not enter this complex area. It is quite enough to discuss the question of what pillows are foundation.

More often in our locality use convenient and universal tape foundations. Their drawback is that there are often situations where the pressure on the soil they distribute unevenly. To avoid many unpleasant consequences, the foundation of the house must be put on a solid concrete slab. If you have serious doubts about the quality of the soil, the base underneath the slab has to be strengthened additionally with the help of piles pummeled into the depths of the earth.

Do not think that foundation pillows are used only in the belt variety. It is often necessary to install such a pillow under the columnar base, which is used for the construction of small cottages. She saves the building from "swim", which can happen on unstable types of soils.

By the way, we immediately determine what is meant by the term "foundation cushions": GOST has one definition, but often it causes difficulties and confusion, even among professional builders. As a rule, they believe that this should be called a well-packed layer of clay, gravel, or even sand. This should be considered a gross mistake, since in practice the foundation pillow is a powerful solid-cast slab of concrete, although here there may be exceptions.

So, the use of sand is permissible, but its minimum thickness should not be less than a meter. Concrete is used much more often, and it is not always used in unsatisfactory soil conditions: it often happens that too narrow bearing walls of buildings are placed on such a foundation. It should also not be assumed that it must necessarily be monolithic, as often builders use prefabricated structures from several slabs at once. We will give the simplest information on which the foundation pillow is calculated, the dimensions of GOST are used in construction.

We take random values for the initial data. We have that 15 meters of the wall weigh 25 tons, the soil has a bearing capacity of 4 kg / cm. The calculations themselves are carried out in this case: we translate tons into kilograms, distributing them by area. We get 250 kg / cm, which need to be divided into soil characteristics (4 kg / cm ² ), resulting in 62.5 cm. All the digits to the right of the comma are aligned in the direction of their increase. Watch the multiplicity, which should be equal to a hundred. So we got a value of 625 mm, which we round up to 700 mm. Such foundation pads will be as reliable as possible, but for even greater reliability they should be reinforced.