I drilled my cellar floor the other day to fit a ground anchor. After an inch or two of concrete, I hit a much darker coloured substances that seemed easier to drill. Any ideas on what it is and if the ground anchor's going to be held in well?
Congratulations, your house is built upon substantial reserves of oil. I suggest you call Shell immediately and get a pipeline installed down in the cellar, sit back and watch the millions roll in. You can save money too by converting your heating to run on oil, distilling your own diesel and never needing to buy another can of 3-in-1.
The bad news is that the ground anchor isn't going to hold.
I doubt it.
That's the zeppelin out of the question then.
That be the Peat?
I was going to say Bog, but thats crap.
The message from "Doki" contains these words:
D'yer know, these lightweight construction techniques have a lot to answer for. Having houses drift away on the breeze never used to be a consideration.
|I drilled my cellar floor the other day to fit a ground anchor. After an |inch or two of concrete, I hit a much darker coloured substances that seemed |easier to drill. Any ideas on what it is and if the ground anchor's going to |be held in well?
Poke a stick into the dark coloured stuff. If it is soft the ground anchor will not work. It may be earth, builders rubble, anything.
Could be coal or coal/soil if the cellar was used for coal storage then concreted over.
Surely that is only true if he owns the rights to the oil under his house. Just because you own the topsoil and the right to put a house on it doesn't mean you own any resources underneath.
Peer
Could it be a layer of pitch, put in for waterproofing, and then covered over at a later date by the concrete? If you lift the ground floor floorboards of my 1913 house, you find they rest on shallow brick piers, and between these is flat, black pitch, obviously poured in molten. Definitely would have very poor mecahnical properties!
David
A sad fact of English law! IANAL; but AIUI, you don't actually _own_ anything! You have the _right_ to _hold_ the land off the Land Lord in chief (the Crown). Some folk are _free_holders, they hold the land free from any feudal obligations, some folk are tenants and need to pay some fee to the Landholder above them. But the Crown has the mineral rights.
My deeds (the deeds to my property) state that my wife and I "hold" the land in fee _simple_; that , according to the Solicitor means that I have no feudal (fee) obligations; no need to provide sword/shield/spear to the moot; no obligation to plough the Lord's land; no need (due to some obscure mumbo-jumbo in the eighteenth (?) century to tithe to the established-church (Queen Anne's Bounty(?)); it's _simple_ geddit?
I can entail the holding; can (thankfully) mortgage the holding; but not extract any minerals from the Land -which I merely 'hold'; not 'own'.
Call the physics dept at your local Uni and tell them you've found the dark matter they're all looking for.
MBQ
Indeed. Most mineral rights are the Queens IIRC - in this country no one 'owns' any land, except the queen.
Its merely granted on an indefinite lease, for no money.
You don't state the age and type of the house, nor the geographic location. That information might help in suggesting what you may have found. However, based on the assumption that you are in a Victorian house, you will probably find that the cellar floor was originally compacted ash, possibly with clinker.
Ash was a freely available by-product of any coal-burning process, notably the production of town gas. Huge quantities were available and they made an ideal material for applications (such as oversite) that now use hardcore or 'scalpings' (quarry run).
The compacted ash was an ideal, cheap material for a cellar floor. But it has no structural strength, and will offer very little resistance to any pull-out force applied to a "ground anchor" (another imprecise term that does little more than hint as to what it might be intended for). One or two inches of concrete blinding was often installed over the ash to make a cellar more useful and easier to clean, but this has very little structural strength.
Perhaps if you were more specific about what you intend to do, it might be possible for someone to provide more definitive advice.
Do unis still have physics departments these days?
Be more likely to phone media studies and inviting them round to make a documentary.
Owain
It could be fly ash, which is sometimes used instead of hardcore. If so, it has little structural strength. I suspect you are going to need to dig out a small pit and concrete the anchor into that.
Colin Bignell
When we bought our house here in Dundee back in '99 the feu still held here in Scotland (now removed, see our Executive does get something done). Fortunately ours was held by the Dundee City Council so no silly fees for the right to paint your front door.
Peter
Including athletics tracks. Once upon a time sprinters carried little trowels, to dig themselves starting blocks in the cinder track.
Peter
Ah! Wilson ... fish and chips .... some toff or other .... black leotard .... those were the days .... Wizard, Hotspur, Rover ... :)
That's true. The running track at my school was made from ash and cinders - I recall it was very painful indeed if you fell.
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@blueyonder.co.ruk (Peter Ashby) saying something like:
I recall my father waxing venomous about Feu Duty some 30 odd years back. Fortunately a change in the law came about by which the houseowner could buy out the Feu for some multiple of the annual Feu - 13 times, I think. That caused another outburst of indignation.
Glad to hear it's been done away with totally.
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