How Frost Affects your Foundation

Many homeowners hear "frost" and bring in potted plants or plan on starting their car extra early in the morning. When they wake up, they expect to see nothing more than ice covering the grass in the yard and side of the home. However, frost is more than surface-level ice you see coating grass and vehicles outside. What homeowners cannot see is the frozen water that is below their topsoil. Depending on where you live, this frozen ground can be a couple of inches or even a few feet below the topsoil.

During winter seasons with consistently low temperatures, the frost line goes farther down until it reaches a point where the ground is not affected by freezing temperatures. Once the ground is frozen, the soil expands, putting pressure on your foundation. When this pressure changes with changing weather, home foundations can no longer support that pressure and can start to bow inwards on basements and crawl spaces. When walls bow, not only does it cause sticking doors and windows, but it also forms a large crack in your foundation. Warmer weather turns the same ice in the frost line to water that seeps through the crack in your foundation, causing your crawl space and basement to flood as soon as it melts. 

Homeowners can take steps to protect their homes from frost line damage by limiting the amount of water that gets into the soil around their homes. Using proper drainage systems and making sure no irrigation pipes are leaking are two ways to prevent excess water in the soil. But, if a homeowner is already seeing horizontal cracks along the frost line, it’s time to call in an expert to protect and stabilize their foundation. An experienced foundation repair contractor will have the tools to identify damage due to frost, along with the right wall repair products to fix the problem permanently.