Mini piling comes first on this page. The larger of our two written-up Essex jobs, on High Road in Buckhurst Hill, used sectional flight auger piles at 350mm, the top of our mini piling range. The other, at Arkesden near Saffron Walden, used screw piles under a cottage extension.
Both are examples. Behind them is over 20 years of family experience in piling, and this site shows a selection of our jobs, not all of them. We also install CFA and steel cased driven piles and build the reinforced concrete on top. For Essex the nearest of our three offices is London (HQ) on Tottenham Court Road.
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The Buckhurst Hill job was the piled foundation and reinforced concrete substructure for a new-build house with a lower ground floor. The plot was a tight infill between existing neighbouring properties. That is the kind of site mini piling rigs are made for: compact machines that work with short auger sections.
We installed 26 sectional flight auger piles at 350mm diameter, open-bored to competent bearing strata. Individual pile loads varied from 70kN to 305kN, and each pile was reinforced with a 5H12 bar cage. All 26 piles had sonic integrity testing to confirm they were sound.
The concrete followed. A 92m² raft slab at 200mm thick sits on more than 90 linear metres of ground beams at various depths. Under every reinforced concrete element went 225mm Cordek Cellcore to guard against clay heave. Piling and foundations together took about five and a half weeks.
SFA PilingBuckhurst Hill, Essex
Screw PilingArkesden, Essex
Bulls Green Cottage is a thatched property in the village of Arkesden. Its extension needed piles to carry the building loads through variable near-surface soils to firmer ground below. An existing well inside the footprint meant the nine pile positions had to be set out around it.
We installed nine Type 76R screw piles with triple helix lead flights, torqued into the boulder clay with an excavator-mounted attachment. Safe working loads ran from 50kN to 80kN. Installation pressures exceeded the engineer's design requirements on every pile.
The 28m² raft slab was cast 250mm thick in C28/35 concrete, with A393 mesh top and bottom, on 225mm Cellcore HX-S void formers. The building inspector approved the foundation on the day of the pour. The whole job took four days from mobilisation.
Our services: Mini pilingCFA pilingSFA pilingSCD pilingScrew pilingFoundations
This is what the two Essex write-ups record, and no more. At Buckhurst Hill the ground investigation found high to very high plasticity London Clay from near the surface, with pockets of medium-dense sand and gravel beneath. Groundwater was met at 3m and stood at around 1.5m, a real consideration for work below ground level. The piles were founded well into the firm clay.
At Arkesden the geological profile showed boulder clay running to a significant depth. It gave a consistent bearing layer for the helical piles. Both Essex jobs had anti-heave void formers under the concrete, fitted to guard against clay heave.
The two jobs above are both single houses. This page is also for developers, builders, groundworkers and engineers with drawings for housing plots, commercial buildings and schemes with a programme measured in weeks.
For that scale the usual answer is CFA piling. A hollow-stem auger drills to depth and concrete is pumped through it as it comes out, with no casing. It makes less noise and vibration than driven piling, which suits urban sites.
Whatever the method, you deal with a named project manager from quote to completion. We are a family business with more than 20 years of family experience in piling.
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