If you are building a house in Thailand, constructing a condominium or involved in any form of building project, before you do engineering drawings, you need a soil test survey done on your land. Soil tests for construction of buildings or any structure, is the first step in construction planning to understand the suitability of soil for the proposed construction work.

Soil testing takes place in the first stage of building a new house, where a series of soil samples are taken from your block of land. The soil profile of each home site varies from place to place, so it is compulsory to have a soil report, even before your house plans are decided on. Make sure you have the results of your soil test prior to signing any building contract, as the outcome can significantly affect your build costs. Contact Bangkok Builder and we can help organize a soil survey test to be completed.

It is also imperative for the engineer to know what is below the ground that you are going to build on; to know ground conditions and soil content. So when the engineer calculates all the structural detail and considers the foundations, he/she needs to know what is below the surface of the ground and the consistency of the soil. In the construction industry this is known as a soil survey or soil test and is carried out by a team to go to the land and bore down to various depths and take core samples. Then those samples are taken back to the laboratory for testing. Once all tests are completed, a professional report is provided giving the engineer important information.

It is from the soil survey, the engineer will calculate what type of pile and foundation your house, or property requires. The civil engineer will advise the bearing capacity, which is the ability of a soil to support a load from the foundation. They need to calculate, how far the piles need to go down, to safely and securely hold up the weight of the construction. When they calculate the loads of the property, they use all of this information and details.

It is a vital part of the construction process. The structure is a major part of the construction and you do not want any mistakes, or miscalculations. The result of not doing it all correctly and not having a soil survey done can be terrible, with unsafe structures, cracks, foundation issues, pile issues and subsidence. Our advice is, do not make this mistake and always; make sure you have the soil survey completed. It must be done by the professional company.

It takes about 1-2 days on site for the team to go there with the machinery and take samples and do bore holes. Then maybe another 2-3 weeks in the laboratory for the soil test results and report to be completed. You should have the soil survey done before the engineer requires them.

From our experience, the customer asks us to facilitate them, once they have land and are ready to go ahead with architectural drawings. So it’s one of the first things they do.

We have facilitated soil tests and surveys for many customers, so please contact us and we can provide the quotation.