When you have a broken pipe under the slab of your home there are a few ways to fix the problem. One is to have your San Antonio Plumber cut out the concrete and repair a section of pipe. This is a messy proposition and most people don’t want someone cutting a hole in the foundation of their home. The most common way of fixing a sewer leak under your slab is to tunnel under your house and remove the bad sections of pipe replacing them with new pipe.
Tunneling under a house is time consuming because it all has to be done by hand. Once you have dug out the section of pipe that has problems you might find that part of the pipe runs through a beam. Once the repairs to the under slab sewer system have been fixed then you have to back fill the tunnel.
San Antonio Plumbing Tunnels
San Antonio plumbing tunnels can be back filled two ways. One way is to pump concrete inside the tunnel, filling the void left from the plumbing tunnel excavation. This concrete mixture is called flo-able fill. This make a secondary beam running the length of the San Antonio plumbing tunnel. This can be a good way to back fill a plumbing tunnel in San Antonio but it can also cause more problems later. If your San Antonio home is on soil that contracts or expands quite a bit this could cause a break on your under slab sewer piping when any excessive moisture or excessive lack of moisture occurs. We all know that either there is no rain in San Antonio or it rains so much it floods. So if your home is on soil that is prone to move then we suggest this is not a good way to back fill your San Antonio sewer tunnel.
Another way to back fill an under slab plumbing tunnel in San Antonio is to back fill the tunnel with the dirt excavated from the tunnel or with new fill dirt that is brought in. This actually causes a void under the slab but this is ok because if your house is in an area where the soil moves it will compensate for when the dirt heaves up when it gets wet.
Remember, when your slab moves the sewer pipes under your slab don’t move and this is what causes breaks. So if you have somewhere for the soil to move your slab won’t move.
