Crawl Space Supports for Foundation Repair
Having a sturdy support system in your crawl space is the key to a structurally stable home. If the beams or floor joists that support the floor above are compromised, you’ll experience sagging, bouncy, uneven floors. Don’t let the damage advance to the extreme of the floor caving out from under you or a loved one. Make sure your floor is supported the right way.
That’s where a crawl space floor support system like the SettleStop IntelliJack™ comes in. This heavy-duty crawl space jack can better support the girders, floor joists, and beams in your crawl space, as well as the floor above. It may even help lift sagging parts of the floor back to level.
What Are Floor Joists and Crawl Space Supports?
If you have a basement or a crawl space, these areas require a floor joist system. It’s this underlying structure that provides support for your furniture, flooring, and everything else inside the house.
A floor joist is a horizontal structure that’s used in framing open spaces during home construction. When combined with the floor framing, joists help to stiffen the subfloor shearing, enabling it to function as a horizontal diaphragm. The beams are usually installed after the crawl space or basement has been built. Once in place, they support the floor above. Joists must be parallel, equidistant, and span between beams or load-bearing walls, which transmit their weight to vertical members.
If your crawl space or basement has sustained significant moisture damage, joists that hold up the home may need additional points of support. You can buttress them by installing the SettleStop IntelliJack™ Crawl Space Stabilizing System. What this system does is stop your floor joist from sagging. Plus, it is easy to adjust in case your home shifts further in the future.
Foundation Repair Solutions
What Sets SettleStop IntelliJack™ Crawl Space Supports Apart from Other Repairs?
Instead of trying to sister an existing floor joist or replace the floor joists altogether, you may be able to bolster your floor joists with the SettleStop IntelliJack™ system. Here are the biggest benefits of the SettleStop IntelliJack™ system.
Transfers Weight onto Stable Loads
The reason floor joists sag is because they’re carrying too much weight. This can occur if the original building plan didn’t account for the weight on the floor joists or if you’ve added extra weight through a renovation or repair. You need to be able to transfer the weight to something that can hold it.
The SettleStop IntelliJack™ system is the perfect stable load for your floor joists. Because of its engineering, it can hold the weight that’s currently causing your floor joists to sag. That includes additional weight the home didn’t initially intend to support.
Supports Extremely Heavy Loads
One element to look out for is the weight of the load that a crawl space support system can carry. This is one of the reasons sistering a joist typically won’t work. More often than not, the new joist won’t even handle as much weight as it could when it was brand new.
This isn’t a problem for the SettleStop IntelliJack™ system. Our crawl space support system has an allowable load capacity of more than 24,000 pounds per support jack, and is tested and certified to the highest industry standards. You can rest assured that the SettleStop IntelliJack™ system will boost your crawl space, no matter how much weight you put on top of it.
Fits Any Accessible Crawl Space
When you’re considering crawl space supports, you must think about how the support will fit. A crawl space support needs to fit the crawl space perfectly, ideally with as little wiggle room as possible.
As long as a Groundworks expert can get into your crawl space, they can install the SettleStop IntelliJack™ crawl space support system. The SettleStop IntelliJack™ support system is easy for an expert to move into a crawl space and set up, leading to an effective and simple system that works.
Lifts Floors Back to Their Original Position
The ideal crawl space support shouldn’t just rest snugly against the floor joist and keep it from sinking further. Rather, it should move your floor back to its original position. After all, when you’re trying to fix the floor, you want to make it as if the problem hadn’t existed at all.
Because the SettleStop IntelliJack™ support system adjusts to different heights and lifts so much weight, a Groundworks expert can potentially use it to lift your floor back to its initial position. The SettleStop IntelliJack™ system doesn’t just keep your floors from deteriorating. It may be able to actively make your floors like new.
Steel Construction
The engineering of a crawl space support system is incredibly important. After all, you’re trusting your crawl space support system with a lot. The ideal crawl space support system will be able to support lots of weight while still being adjustable, which is a lot to ask.
You don’t have to worry that you’re asking too much of your crawl space support system. The SettleStop IntelliJack™ system does it all. The steel construction of the SettleStop IntelliJack™ system, combined with its premiere engineering, ensures you don’t have to worry about its strength under your home.
FAQs About the SettleStop IntelliJack™ Crawl Space Support System
When you add crawl space supports, you’re enhancing the amount of structural support your crawl space has available. That can help you avoid sagging floors, which often have to do with a lack of support for your crawl space.
- An Effective Fix for Some Homes
Crawl space supports can be a great option if the problem in your crawl space revolves around an issue with your joists not having enough support overall. Many homes just need more load-bearing capacity underneath their joists. Rather than trying to sister the joist or just ignore the problem, crawl space supports can help you address the problem head-on.
Because of this, when you’re dealing with joists that are struggling under your home’s weight, crawl space jacks can be a great option. However, although crawl space supports can help you with sagging floors in some homes, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all repair. There are some instances where this just might not work well.
- Request Help from an Expert
The best way to make sure you know what’s going on with your crawl space is to get help from an expert. A professional will be able to give you more information about the root causes, the associated issues, and any small warning signs you’ve overlooked. This will helps you pick the right fix, not the one that just seems acceptable.
Plus, the SettleStop IntelliJack™ support system is only available through a Groundworks expert, so you can get a high-grade solution to your problems. There are a lot of crawl space support opportunities, so you never have to worry about not having enough options. You can schedule an inspection today to get more help with your crawl space, no matter what’s happening.
When you’re looking to avoid sagging floors, you do need to think about how much weight your crawl space may end up handling. However, the amount of weight that you need to handle may vary, which is why it’s a good idea to look at each case individually.
- Different Homes and Rooms
Different homes will often need to handle different amounts of weight. That has to do with several factors, but especially the home’s unique construction. Some homes, especially those with multiple stories, will require more weight support than other homes.
It’s also important to look at how much weight each room needs to handle. For example, if you have a heavy safe in one room, those floor joists will need to bear more weight than the china cabinet in the next room. You might need to reinforce some rooms, but not other rooms; it’s all about what each room needs.
- Always Better to Be Safe
It’s a good idea to always overshoot how much weight your crawl space floor joists need to handle. If you’re ever uncertain, then a professional will be able to make an educated guess – but overall, it’s wise to go bigger rather than smaller. If your home is overly reinforced, then it will be safeguarded against unexpected changes in weather or additional weight. However, if it’s poorly fortified, then it may buckle under the home’s weight or require more repairs in the future.
Rather than just doing the minimum necessary for your home to function, you might want to add more structural support for an even better load-bearing capability. That way, you don’t have to worry if you want to replace your kitchen counters with marble, for example.
The fact that you have sagging floors doesn’t mean you’ve discovered the root problem, or that you’re prepared to fix it. That’s because sagging floors are not all the same. Each will have its causes, secondary issues, and necessary repairs.
- Different Problems
Two different floors that look the same from the top may have different underlying causes. For example, some sagging floors may occur because of wood rot. In contrast, others occur because you have too much weight resting on top of a floor joist.
You need to tackle the base problem, not the symptom. This will ensure you apply a direct fix, rather than a broad one that wastes time, money, and energy. The more precise the solution, the less intrusive the repairs will be. For example, a home with wood rot problems might need replacement of the floor joists, whereas a home with too much weight on top of it might just need crawl space jacks.
- A Professional’s Opinion
Because the problems underlying two different sagging floors may be completely different, you have no way of knowing what’s going on without getting into the floor itself. You’ll need to go down into the crawl space or basement to look for the obvious warning signs, as well as the subtle ones. This is why an expert can be extremely helpful.
With an expert’s help, you can benefit from years of experience and practice in spotting issues. Because the root problems may seem unrelated, it’s easy for a layman to overlook them or to misdiagnose the signs. That can leave you with a solution that doesn’t truly halt the damage or that is too invasive for your actual needs. By scheduling a free inspection, you can get right to the point and move on to the important part – making your home safer and healthier.
Get the Best Solution with SettleStop IntelliJack™ Crawl Space Supports
As you can hopefully see, crawl space supports are a great way to raise your currently sunken floor joists to their old heights. You can’t leave your crawl space to have sunken floor joists forever, as you could run into long-term problems. However, there are also many problems with temporary or low-quality solutions for the problem. That’s where SettleStop IntelliJack™ comes in.
If you’re currently dealing with sunken floors, the SettleStop IntelliJack™ crawl space support system may be the best way to handle this problem. However, you won’t be able to know for sure until you have an expert take a look at the problem. Schedule a free inspection from a crawl space repair expert to learn more about your options with the SettleStop IntelliJack™ system.