On Mar 20, 4:58 pm, "Ivan Vegvary" wrote:
"aemeijers" wrote in message

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"jan siepelstad" wrote in message
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Isn't it possible to install a rented belt-conveyor?

"Ivan Vegvary" wrote in message
news:CBSLh.11343$el3.1563@trndny01...
Sorry, also cross posted to alt.home.repair

Need to dig out crawl space. Approximately 30' by 50' area. At present
it is about 4" deep. Want to dig down to 42" and lay down a moisture
barrier, put in vents, level house etc. Can't go any deeper due to high
water table. The digging is very easy (sandy loam), but I need clever
ideas on how to drag the dirt out. I have dug down 8 feet along side
the house and can access it with my small tractor/loader. I need ideas
of how to pull/push/drag/roll etc. all of this dirt over to the edge of
the house and drop it down to my waiting tractor. Wife can help a
little so maybe roller conveyers with ropes so I can send her a load and
pull my pan back to where I am digging? Maybe throw the slough on a
tarp and winch it out?

After the first week, you'll curse yourself- this is a massive amount of
hand labor. Do you have a good engineering design for the new foundation?
If the dirt is that soft, you'll have to hold back from the existing walls
a couple of feet to keep existing foundation from collapsing.

Proper approach to this project would have been to jack the house, even
just a little bit, and support it on needle beams and external cribbing.
Then you could put in a proper foundation footer system and 42" crawl, or
even a real raised basement with proper drains to handle high water table.
If your 8-foot-deep access pit isn't holding 4 feet of water in the spring
thaw, water table problem might not be bad as you think.

Bottom line- you need a qualified engineer to do a site survey. If you
just seat-of-pants it, you could easily end up with a worthless house.

aem sends....

Thanks for the advice. I am a licensed Civil Engineer. I have already dug
around the entire perimeter and installed 24" reinforced concrete footings.
Wish I could jack the house up but there is another 1200 square feet
attached that is on slab. Would be very labor intensive to alter the stair
cases and separate the two halves of the house. Easier to dig in situ.

Thanks

Good to see you're a CE but what do you plan to do with the ~200 yds
of dirt?

~ 3000 tons

That's ~8 "double dumps"

btw I've done the shop vac "moving sandy soil / damp sand" experiment

medium sized shop vac ~10 gallon........ soil removal rate ~ 1gpm

so you've got something on the order of 650 hours of vacuum
time.....not including time to empty & dispose of the dirt.

We're taking about ~100 days of vacuuming (if you can keep at it for 6
hours per day) Even if I'm high by 2x .....still 50 days of
vacuuming!

Consider contracting with a vacuum excavator.

Your new footings are 24" wide? How deep?

I hope they go below your intended excavation depth.

cheers
Bob