Browse Forums Building A New House 1 Jun 13, 2007 4:03 pm Has anybody experienced building using a drop edge beam?
Due to slope of my land (3m drop over 32m width) I have been told that this is required to make up the short fall between the maximum cut and fill which will leave a 700mm shortfall. Are there any issues or restrictions when this method of building is used? And will the builder usually fill the land adjacent to the wall where the drop edge is used or will they leave this a shear wall, in this case approx 1300mm. Any experiences and/or suggestions are welcome... Cheers cfham Re: Drop Edge Beam 2Jun 13, 2007 11:12 pm Our site has about 1.8M drop (higher at the back). Not very clear about the details, we were told if we don't have drop edge beam at the front, it will just be lots of soil under the house. This won't look good and not very stable/secured for the foundation.
My understanding is, for a surface that's not flat, builder will need to cut the higher side and fill the lower side with soil. If the front part of the filled soil were not covered/blocked properly, it could be washed away. The drop edge thing is bricks + concretes, like a wall to cover the edge of the fill. The bricks on your house will then extend to the natural ground, with all the fills covered inside. Hope I didn't confuse you... Not aware of any issue or restriction about this as it sounds quite natural to me. And I think inside the drop edge beam it should be filled with sand. Hopefully our construction will start in July, I will try to post some photos of the part with drop edge beam on my blog for your reference. Cheers Allan http://building-our-first-house.blogspot.com/ Re: Drop Edge Beam 3Aug 12, 2009 12:15 pm Hi all, I am building on a land which will involving some cutting and filling because there is about a metre difference between the backyard and the frontyard boundary (backyard is higher in elevation). Can someone let me know whether a Retaining Wall and Drop Edge Beam are alternatives to each other (from Council approval point of view)? Under what circumstances should BOTH of them be required? Thanks very much! Re: Drop Edge Beam 4Aug 12, 2009 12:57 pm Quote: Are there any issues or restrictions when this method of building is used? And will the builder usually fill the land adjacent to the wall where the drop edge is used or will they leave this a shear wall, in this case approx 1300mm. Any restrictions would be placed by the Engineer in their design. The deeper edge beam is used to support the slab, due to the fall. The ground isn't level, so a slab cannot be placed directly onto it (as you aren't building a timber sub floor, which would be supported by brick piers, so you only see higher brickwork). DO you have a copy of the engineering drawings ? I could take a look at them for you if you want. Unless you build a seperate retaining wall parallel to the edge beam, they can't fill against this wall as it will be 1300mm above ground level. If you were to build a retaining wall on the boundary, you could then fill between the edge beam and the retaining wall, which is what's commonly done. How is the front of the house being finished ? How does your landscaping integrate with the wall (which would visibly start off at ground level and raise to 1300mm above ground level on the high side) Do you have front elevations you could post ? My current house falls 3mtrs across about 20 mtrs (and 6-7 metres front to back !). I built a retaining wall on the side of the house, and filled into it so the base of the house was level to the ground. I then created landscape retaining walls at the front garden beds to make up the difference in the street level. My front door is level with the footpath, and my front lawn is level with my front door. My main front garden bed however follows the fall of the footpath, and goes from 100mm to 1000mm high around my front lawn (hopefully you can make sense of all that !). This is on the high side of the block. On the low side of the block I have my driveway and garage, so I didn't need to worry about landscaping (but there is a retaining wall running parallel with the driveway to hold up the ground from the high side). Blog is now up - http://www.jbdave.blogspot.com/ Re: Drop Edge Beam 5Aug 12, 2009 4:12 pm Our block has a fall west to east of around 1.3 metres consequently we ended up with a DEB design. We also had an engineers design that called for piering down to rock. the process was to build up the height of dirt, in our case the builder brought some really heavy clay onto site, so that it overran the edge of the house slab by a metre and compacted to get a very solid rock hard base. Then some very expensive piers were drilled and set down to rock. The process was to then cut away at the edge of the Fill back to where the edge of the slab would be and to form up the drop edge beam. The levels at the top of the compacted clay were brought up to the correct level and sand was spread out on top, plastic sheeting and pier locations exposed, Pods in place and the whole thing was poured in one day to give a complete integral slab drop edge beam monolithic concrete cap, woudl eb the best way to explain it, and supported by the piers. I increased MPa to 25 and increased steel to SL 82 so that it was closer to an H class, it feels better more steel harder concrete. Where are the gotchas, Well the importation of soil for one, it was $50 per load to bring on to site and $350 to take off. An believe me when they cut away the one metre overfill there is a lot of soil to take away. The piers were my other gotcha, I had a lot of subterranean water and they had to go to grout injected piers. So my Droppies rise about 1.4 metres above natural ground level, ain't nothing going to move it. The DEBs have a step at the bottom and I will be finishing it with face brick up to the roof, so from teh front of the house it looks like brick all the way to the ground, you won't see the DEBs. Dan Hello everyone, After some suggestions and ideas about how to put a concrete path around the drop edge beam area on our new build. We are required to have a concrete path… 0 12873 The distance between my DEBs varies from 4.1m at the narrowest to 8.1m at the widest. 5 27310 I would like to build our new house with the rear section approx 1 metre out of the ground, I don't particularly like to go bearers and joists so concrete slab all the way… 0 3822 |