Fence Foam vs Dry Pack vs Wet Set | We compare methods to see which is best for fence posts

welcome to class, that's not it, so I'm sitting in front of my phone trying to figure out exactly

which

method of putting up a

fence

post is the

best

. I just found it on youtube and it seems like I can think of three different ways. you have a wet set you have a dry set and now you have

foam

I feel like I'm back in school and I don't know what to do join me and we'll find out here today we have set up three different

methods

, we have set up a

foam

setting method, a method of dry

pack

and a wet setup method, we're going to put two of each type of poles each way, so we're going to set up three different ways and right behind me, we're going to start with that. now we have already premixed the concrete that we will use for our wet set, we have already filled this hole completely and now we are going to fill this hole completely since we are going to do it three times twice. because we already have six holes dug all the holes are dug to the same depth all the holes have the same diameter the frost is 18 inches deep all the holes will receive the same post they will receive a 2 3 8 ss 49 foot post Each of these two holes has four bags of concrete per hole, the concrete we have chosen is this one here along with a 60 pound bag of concrete, four per hole.

Let's go ahead and get these two wet sets if you want. go ahead and do it, this is my fluffy dragon assistant, it sounded good, let's go ahead and fill in the soil and let them get established, there is no water in the hole so we just rely on the water that is already there. on the ground, okay, so we have six and a half,

which

would be three and a quarter, so what we're going to do is take a soul and we're going to use it to stabilize our pole and hold it up. At that level, we're going to use this to pre-level our

posts

so we can just pour that foam in there.

This mess of this method works great, especially if you are drilling or grouting

posts

in concrete and not If you don't have time to sit there and hold each one individually, you can do this method and it holds it for you, so the foam we have here we have a part a and a part b, if we mix all that together, we will have too much and we are going to have a big foam catastrophe here, so what we have here is we measure the height in each one's bucket and we are going to mix exactly half and half of part a and part b and we have a line of part a and part b inside this cube, so I'm not just doing a mixture either way, we're taking half of part a and half of the other part, so let's take part a.

I'm going to mix it until it lines up on that line and it's exactly half and half, so I'm going to pour the other half into this and Andrew is going to get ready for the drill as soon as this starts to react and it starts to look like foam, this is very thick. and nasty, safety glasses, chemical resistant gloves, here, it gets bigger as you talk, I guess if we need to fill it in, we can mix the rest up, so this method, oh, this method. I'm pretty sure we could get a lot better at that, that's pretty complicated, so out of these three

methods

that we did, we have the foam, I mean, it's pretty solid, I wouldn't use it in any way because that's not it.

I'm going to be fair to the other two methods we tried, but I mean we can still see we have a result, ooh, that one yeah, I can stand it, it's pretty neat, messy but pretty neat, and we've got the dry

pack

et, I'm really. interested to see what happens here. I'm kind of interested in that I think it will stay the same. I could be 100 wrong. Maybe it will be very, very difficult and then we will have the traditional wet set. I know what happens with this, but I want to

compare

. this to the other two methods, so join us in seven days and we will find out together what happens today is March 4th, it is very humid, it has been about three weeks since we established these posts and in the meantime, What happened is we got a big snow storm there's still snow today it's about 45 degrees there's a lot of water there's a lot of frozen ground let's see what impact the frozen ground had on the normal concrete and maybe the foam and then we'll see what, uh how The Dry Pack turned out because we had a lot of water so it had the highest possible chance of being successful so we're going to dig up these poles and the reason we're going to dig them up with an excavator instead of throwing them away is actually we want to see what the concrete looks like, what the foam looks like and see if there was any impact, then we'll hit it with a hammer and see if that had an impact, so the three that are left are. that are left, what we're going to do is just see what it takes to free them, see if we can free those posts by hitting them with a hammer and eventually just pull them out of the ground and see if the concrete separates from the post or the foam separates from the post and find out which one is easier press it hard yes it is frozen so foam dry pack and wet set will there be any difference now?

I noticed when we did the dry pack that it seemed like all the Portland was rising to the surface. Yeah, it could be and you know the way we'll know we're going to break it just to open it. Honestly, about what I would expect, so you can see, it just looks more grainy. I wouldn't call it soft. I've seen softer concrete. I think you can. I think the way to get even worse concrete is if you mix it too wet. I think you could get a weaker concrete than this. I was frozen right up here. The ground was frozen, so we'll see if the bottom half comes off easier.

I don't think I'm going to get there. We just broke it, so I didn't notice. any difference between the top and the bottom, so it was easy, it broke, I noticed a hollow sound like it wasn't solid, it didn't sound, it's not as firm, it's not as solid and it's definitely not as high as psi, uh. Probably, if we took them to a lab and did a compression test on them, we would probably find that the yield strength is much lower than this, so when you mix the concrete well you get a higher yield strength, it's very similar to nailing a pole in the ground once you go through here, if the slopes up here are about a foot down, no matter how much the pole shakes the bottom, you really won't see much action, whereas this won't be sidewalk level. or entry grade concrete, what it is doing is it is becoming hard enough to adhere to the post and hold the post where it needs to be, ultimately, is it becoming harder than the soil around it?

I would have to say yes if we drove this pole and dragged it that hard it would be there, very very solid, it's not like this thing is completely falling apart, it's not super strong but it's definitely stronger than the ground it's on. we put it The only thing you don't know is what it will be like. 10 or 15 years from now this will probably degrade, crumble and deteriorate faster over time, but you'll probably be replacing the

fence

before then anyway, so you want to give that one a whack. I could do it. I don't want to have all the fun so you notice that ringing sound it definitely has a more solid sound like a more solid sound when you hit it you can actually hear it ringing through the post let's keep saying this is taking a little bit longer . work that that one I think he cheated actually definitely did something his cheating friend come on suck it come on did you break something?

However, I have this piece right here, oh okay, there's no frozen ground that really compromises how concrete this video is. Expensive SD cards aren't cheap, or you need to learn to be smaller to take up less file space or work faster, okay, we can't have you being so big and working slow, sorry, sorry, oh, you got a piece , yes, yes, here, well. I'm out of breath. Dry packed concrete is definitely not as hard as what the frost probably was up to here. I'm going to say that it had little to no effect on the strength of this concrete, so if you're an engineer and I'm thinking, well, I have to ask those guys to take a bunch of special measures and stuff to put that concrete in the ground. frozen, please reconsider.

I've never found a post we could frost that has ever failed prematurely. Oh, you have a piece that was also not in frozen ground, just so you know that piece was definitely in fog land. I have a piece. If you look at it, you can tell that one is not healed and the other is healed, so you can see that it is still trying to heal because it is. still the dark gray, you can see the water still on it, this one here you can see it's actually starting to turn into the standard color of a sidewalk, so it's starting to turn into that more cured gray color because it was mixed wet, it was wet, there it is.

There is nothing different between the concrete on the bottom of the post, which is from the bottom and the top, they look exactly the same and are just as hard. The frosted compromise that should have been broken should have fallen apart very easily. Well I'm also not saying anything about the foam being different from top to bottom, so this foam came from our local utility service, they use it on all their utility poles, so on a lot of land nowadays they just say heck with tamping. and they're just filling the holes with foam, so this foam is going to be very comparable to your sitka foam or your post lock foam, but we just got it from the utility company because we needed some quickly, so I don't.

I don't see any evidence that the frozen ground had any impact on any part of this foam. I don't notice any discoloration. I don't notice any soft spots. Nothing, so it's going to heal in the hole. It probably emits its own heat. I would do it. Imagine this is a thermal reaction much like curing concrete and that's something we don't talk about. Curing concrete is an exothermic reaction, so it provides some of its own heat and the soil around it will provide insulation. It's not going to freeze anymore and I think that's why you see this concrete not being compromised by the frozen ground.

One of the things to think about is the utility companies. Now many of them are going to put up foam-filled utility poles. I would consider it. a utility pole or a power pole much more critical than a fence post, if those things fall or fail it will be much more expensive if it is something that our utility companies have decided is okay to use then I would say It is safe to use in the fencing industry and we say it is giving pretty good results. The only thing I want to try is the side loading, but the same thing you think about those utility lines and the Blow Winds, I mean, they have something and they're 25 feet up in the air.

There's a lot of lateral loading on those utility poles trying to get that foam off that pole and if you have faith in it, I think we can. build some faith safely in the fence industry so this one this one fluffed up a little bit more this one flipped a little bit so we got a nice fluff I might trim it with the saw or something if this is if This is going to be someone's fence, so let's shake it, let's shake it here, ride it where you want to go, can you take it out, take it out, yeah, I can't do that, yeah, it's not if I can't rotate it.

I can't get him out hit him we'll hit him hit him hit him with your bag I'm getting wet let's add gravity I don't see him move lower your sword you're still cheating there you go there really always has to be that kid so if you're wondering why we choose to hit these posts with the sledgehammer, that vibration actually sends out a shock wave and has the greatest chance of breaking it free from the surrounding material, so whether it's foam or concrete, we see it a lot when we hit concrete with a jackhammer, so if we hit the actual metal, it will send a vibration, a shock wave through the post and it will crack the concrete very well, so just trying to give them the

best

opportunity to break free from the concrete and fail, so that's what it's about, I think probably I also broke the top, no I can't get it out, we'll need a lot of negative g's. luckily we have a negative g machine right here oh we got it to fail okay go ahead I think you're going to have to boot it up you might want to stay back here we go there you go we're talking. pure bonding power, obviously foam is the weakest, dry pack is second best and wet bag concrete is best, and we showed that in almost all cases it took us a lot more work to get the post out of the dry pack of the concrete. when we started pulling it ended up ripping the pole off with the ground frozen, it's just not going to come out on wet concrete, we couldn't get it to fail, the concrete is stuck tighter, but I think in a natural setting.

It's very safe to say that any of these are going to withstand the elements of nature. Do you have any? Do you disagree with that assumption or not? 100 Disagree with that statement 100 agree.The only thing that would warn people about this is the thought. that you can use a bag of concrete to do the job. I still believe you need to have concrete from the bottom of your walkway to a couple of inches from the top of the hole when you're thinking about your next project here are your options now you know which may be best which might not work as well for you foam is a lot harder to deal with because you don't have something like that, we can raise and lower our post again it's going to be something where you either need to set up your mail room and cut it out or you have to be safe and know what the elevations of each post should be as you set it up, until the next time you have a good day, yeah, that's the top. a donut is for if you hurt your butt, you can put it on your chair, well yeah, go ahead and sit on it, exactly, it might dirty my seat, actually, wait.