Building a house in Thailand: Soil Tests
It is Bangkok Builder’s experience that we recommend anyone building a house in Thailand, have a professional soil test survey carried out. This should be done before your architect and engineer start structural drawings, in the architectural stage. The information gathered from the soil test report, is vital for the engineer to know how deep piles should be bored down into the ground, to support the weight of the structure.
Not everyone is experienced in construction and a lot of people, when building a house in Thailand, have not been involved in construction before. So they are not 100% clear on the process, or the importance of the various stages. Unfortunately due to this, sometimes they can listen to the wrong person, or receive the wrong advice; which can in certain circumstances, cause them considerable problems later on and very costly repairs. To avoid this, Bangkok Builder gladly provides advice and hope it helps you understand more clearly.
The building foundations naturally require being on strong and stable soils. The soil consistency and strength varies according to the specific location of the land and the land site itself. If the soil information under a building is not clearly known, the foundation of the building could have future problems, crack, subside, or in the worse case, be dangerously unstable. This can dramatically effect your home. The engineer needs to know about the soil, to do his calculations and drawings correctly. The engineer requires the soil tests report to be able to do this.
It is very important to understand, that a house weighs a considerable amount. So the engineer needs to know what the soil consistency is below the ground, so he knows how deep piles need to go, to support the weight of the home. Subsidence does occur in construction and foundation problems do occur. If this happens it can be extremely costly to repair, or correct. In some instances it cannot be corrected. Not having a soil test survey carried out is a matter of luck, if the engineer got it right. To take that risk, is simply not worth it, when spending a lot of money on your home, the structural integrity of the building and when considering the safety of the occupants. As a construction contractor we can not emphasise this enough and advise you have a soil test done and insist to your architect and engineer it is done.
For a relatively small amount of money compared to the huge costs you could incur, if the structure has problems, we highly recommend to all our clients and anyone building a house, to have a soil test survey carried out. Do not be a victim of bad advice, or cost cutting. It is simply not a good idea in construction.
If you have a professional soil report already, please do provide it to us, if we are doing your architectural drawings. If you do not have one yet, we can organise this to be done. It takes 1 to a few days on site for the test samples to be taken and then 2-3 weeks for the report to come back from the laboratory. Please contact Bangkok Builder if you require a soil test survey.
