Concrete is one of the oldest man-made construction materials there is, and even the ancient Egyptians used a form of concrete to make things. Even today, concrete is an essential building material to use, and for its job, there is no substitute. Concrete can be used to make just about anything, from highway overpasses to skyscraper foundations to warehouse floors and sidewalks. Today’s concrete industry is a robust one, and that includes not only pouring concrete, but also repairing or replacing it. Concrete is not indestructible, and sometimes, a sidewalk or concrete patio may suffer from sinking earth and start to crack. If this happens, concrete raising can be done, and crack repair may fill in any unsightly cracks in the concrete’s surface. A homeowner may call local concrete crack repair services for the job, and these concrete crack repair services will know just what to do. What is there to know about concrete and the work of professional concrete crack repair services?
All About Concrete
The idea behind concrete is fairly simple. It is made of water, aggregate and sand, and cement, forming a thick liquid. Once concrete is poured into place, it will start to cure and harden, both inside and out. This is why concrete trucks store their concrete in a rotating drum, to prevent the contents from curing early. Concrete is quite strong, and average concrete has a strength rating of 3,000 psi while the strongest may have a strength of 20,000 psi or even more. Concrete’s strength is useful for anything from building a dam to making a sidewalk or the floor of a commercial building. In fact, more and more buildings are swapping out marble or tile floors for polished concrete ones, taking advantage of concrete’s great strength. When a warehouse is newly built, the concrete floor may be treated for even more strength, and it will have a polished surface that resists corrosion, stains, and pressure. Such treated concrete is also attractive and easy to paint on.
Why Concrete Crack Repair Services Are Needed
Concrete is tough, but as mentioned earlier, it may suffer cracks and faults in the right circumstances. Patios and sidewalks are a good example of this, as such thing are built right on the ground. Over time, that ground may start to sag and sink from water weight, and this will bring down the concrete with it. The lowered concrete is misaligned from the rest of the concrete, and that difference can create large cracks and other faults. At best, this is unsightly, and at worst, the cracks and misaligned concrete can make a tripping hazard. To repair sidewalks and patios, a homeowner may call upon concrete crack repair services nearby.
Often, removing and replacing the concrete is not necessary for this job, and doing so is expensive and time consuming anyway. Instead, once concrete crack repair services arrive on the scene, workers will set up pumps that can inject materials underneath the sidewalk or patio. Once enough filler is put in place, this will raise the concrete back up, hence the name, and restore its smooth, level surface. This is a minimally invasive way to repair a compromised sidewalk or patio, and extra work may be done to completely fill in the cracks or other faults. This restores the concrete’s look and removes the tripping hazard, and at a much lower cost than having the concrete removed and replaced. Older methods for doing this, such as mudjacking and slabjacking, date back a full century, though those methods were slower than modern ones. Fresh concrete needs two to seven days to be usable, and there is a minimum 24-hour wait after performing mudjacking or slabjacking. By contrast, concrete may be used almost right away once modern concrete lifting is performed. This is highly convenient, especially for sidewalks that get a lot of traffic.
