Many of you will have seen the term Prestressed Precast Concrete when looking at products at your local Home Depot or other home improvement store. This can be used for a wide variety of things in your home improvement projects but one of the most common uses is for foundation footer drain tiles. These drain tiles are typically used to catch any runoff water that may have spilled over from the top of your house during heavy rains and they help to make sure your foundation stays sound.
Using precast concrete for your footer drains or foundation beams requires one simple installation method, which is the “trowel down” construction method. To do this, you will first need to secure the support beams to the ground with either steel ties or cement straps. You will then spread a good amount of concrete on the beams and then set up your trowel over them. Trowel-down construction methods are really simple and they work great, but sometimes they do not give you the look that you want. If you find that this does not look right, you can always go back to doing it the traditional way.
The traditional way of laying these foundation beams involves putting up a lot of drywall and then hammering the concrete into place through the drywall. This takes a lot of time, and many homeowners aren’t willing to wait around for their concrete to dry so they end up hammering the concrete into place using their back yard barbells, which aren’t the best look. Using Prestressed Precast Concrete, you can simply drop the beams into place and hammer them into place all by yourself. Since Prestressed Precast Concrete has a thicker and more durable concrete base, you can be sure that these beams will last longer than the traditional ones.