When Should you Call an Engineer for your Home?
Here’s a list of things that can happen and it’s best to get an opinion from an engineer first:
- Foundation Settling: This is an obvious one. If you can see your foundation is settling, please call an engineer first before you call a foundation repair company. It will cost you a few hundred dollars, but you might find it saves you thousands of dollars. An engineer doesn’t make money off the founation repair, they make their fee by the consultation. So, there is no incentive to exaggerate the problem. Sometimes you may not want to do a foundation repair, and an engineer can point that out. Also, many foundation repair companies use salespeople with no technical background. The “expert” the foundation repair company sends out may have been selling TVs at a big box store as their last job. By the process of getting a professional engineer’s license, an engineer has the experience and education required to judge what is needed for the repair.
- Retaining Wall Failure: You need to look for a few key indicators of retaining wall failure. Is the wall tilting? Are cracks appearing in the soil behind the wall parallel to it? Is the wall sliding? If it is wood timber or railroad tie wall are the timbers or the ties rotting?
- Are diagonal cracks appearing in your house? Diagonal cracks indicate structural distress. I can go into the structural mechanics of how that happens, but that’s a little bit deep here. Generally if you have structural issues, diagonal cracks will appear over the corners of openings, such as doors and windows. Diagonal cracks developing in exterior brick is not a good thing either – they usually indicate settlement, and sometime other types of structural failures.
Finding a Structural Engineer
How do you find a structural engineer? There are a couple ways. One way is to check out the web site of your state chapter of the American Consulting Engineers Council (ACEC). Just do a Google search for “ACEC” and your state. They usually provide a directory of engineers. If the engineering firm you call doesn’t do services for home owners, ask for a referral. Most of them keep lists of engineers that do work for homeowners. The other way is to do a direct search on Google for “Structural Engineer” and your locality. The problem with that method is the first page is generally sponsored links, and you also end up wading through a lot of contractors that will show up. Chatgpt seems to be a good resource for finding an engineer, the more description you put in the search, the better. Make sure you put in that you don’t want a contractor.
