Strange way to build a foundation - I've never seen one like that in the
Hill Country, although nothing surprises me any more. You should be OK,
unless you're on the Buda Cap formation (thin veneer of calich/limestone
underlain by highly expansive clay, almost always misdiagnosed as nonplastic
until all the cracks show up in the home a year later), of which there is a
lot around. Where exactly are you building?

Jeff


"Lil' Dave" wrote in message
ink.net...
"Mario" wrote in message
ups.com...
Pier and Grade beam are pretty well explained by someone.

Down here common practice is to use grade beams. Piers are only used in
situations where you require a heck of a lot more strength than is
present at excavation depths or in situations where you definently need
to put your foundation on a layer of rock (for example in docks, large
buildings or houses on sandy soils vulnerable to liquefaction).


One exception I ran into is my home that is currently almost finished in
TX
hill country. The builder would only allow a home I picked out to be
built
on piers or pilings, no exceptions, no matter the grade or the soil type
makeup. The grade is slightly downslope at 3 degrees with a two foot
dropoff at the front of the house. The soil is approximately 2 inches to
nothing at the dropoff. Beneath is a one to two foot layer of caliche and
its corresponding rock type. Beneath that is fractured rock and in some
cases solid rock near the dropoff. None of which was going any place.

I decreased the dropoff later by moving the soil from the septic tank
excavation to the front of the house. Then backgraded to a more desirable
slope to the front of the house.

Piers tend to be more expensive than the grade beam, since they require
more work to design, more supervision in the field, and more
specialized equipment to build.

The builder hired out a drilling machine normally seen for the
installation
of utility poles. They used a 24 inch auger bit. The average footing for
the piers was around 4 feet in depth. The workers used 1X12s for the
forms
for the actual piers. The footings were tied to the piers with rebar
during
the pours. They also used rebar in the piers and footing themselves.
They
used a transit twice to verify the location and height of each pier before
pouring. A strip of flashing type metal was inserted to the top of the
pier
during the pour and was exposed around 10 inches. This was used to tie
the
pier to the sill. A wider piece of flashing was placed flat on top of
each
pier where the sill actully rode on the pier.


Post tensioned is probably that: some kind of grade beam with post
tensioned foundation. Might be that the technology is specific to one
company, but the builder doesn't wanna say "ABC Inc.'s post tensioned
foundation technology" in his document.