The Signs of a Bad Concrete Job

Summary:

Cesar identifies cracking as the clearest sign that a concrete job wasn't done properly, and he connects it directly to what happens underneath the surface. He gets frequent calls from people asking whether damaged concrete can be patched, and his honest answer is often that replacement is the better path, because a patch over a failing base will keep failing. When ACR replaces a slab, they prepare the entire base properly and put reinforcement into the new work, using rebar and fiber in the concrete so it holds up over the long term. His view is that nearly every surface failure a homeowner sees is the visible result of something that was skipped below it, and that those failures usually appear a year or two after the job.

Answer:

The biggest sign is cracking. Sometimes people call and they say, can you fix it? Can you patch this? And a lot of times I tell them, I think it's better if you replace the whole thing. Because if the problem is underneath, patching the top is not going to solve it. It's going to crack again. When we replace it, we prepare the whole base first, the whole area underneath. That's where the job is really made or not made. Then we can put rebar in it, we can put fiber in the concrete, and like that it's going to hold for longer terms. That's the difference. A lot of the bad jobs you see, somebody poured concrete on ground that wasn't ready and didn't put anything in it to hold it together. It looks fine the first year. Then you start seeing the cracks, and the cracks get bigger, and now you're paying for it twice.