If your home needs underpinning, two of the methods you will hear about are traditional concrete bored piers and modern steel screw piles. Both aim to transfer the load of your home onto stable ground, but they do it in very different ways, with real consequences for precision, disruption and certainty of result.
Concrete bored piers
Bored pier underpinning involves excavating beneath the footings and boring holes that are filled with concrete to create new bearing points. It is a long-established, reliable method, but it carries some practical trade-offs. The work is labour-intensive and time-consuming, requires significant excavation and access, and offers no real-time feedback during installation to confirm the load-bearing capacity or final depth of each pier. If further movement occurs later, adjusting a concrete pier is difficult. Bored piers can also settle if they are not encased in consistent material throughout the home.
Steel screw piles
Screw piles are steel shafts with helical blades that are mechanically drilled into the ground until they reach competent, load-bearing strata. Each pile is installed with real-time torque monitoring, giving the engineer measurable confirmation of capacity. A bracket connects the pile directly to the footing, so hydraulic jacks can lift and re-level the structure incrementally and precisely. Installation is compact and low-impact, ideal for tight-access sites, and every pile is engineered and certifiable.
How they compare
- Heavy excavation and access needed
- Slower to install
- No real-time load feedback
- Hard to adjust later
- Limited controlled re-levelling
- ✓ Minimal excavation, tight-access friendly
- ✓ Faster installation
- ✓ Torque-monitored, measurable capacity
- ✓ Bracketed to the footing
- ✓ Precise, controlled re-levelling
Which is right for your home?
Both methods have their place, but for the reactive-clay conditions common in our region, the precision, measurability and controlled lifting of screw piles make them our method of choice. For a fuller comparison, including resin injection, read screw pile vs other methods. The best next step is always a site assessment so the recommendation is based on your home's actual soil and movement.