Excavation or digging of the earth is done after doing the site marking process.
As per the engineer’s plan, you need to excavate the earth for sump construction and pillar standing.
Excavation is usually done with the help of JCB.
Some of them prefer to use a manual labour process. If you choose to go with fully manual process, then it will get costly for you.
I recommend going with both JCB and manual methods. You will understand why in this article later.
Before you start your Excavation process on your site, I recommend you remember a few things I will share here in this article.
In our first building, we used only JCB to do the excavation process. They did their job and left.
But during Footing concreting work, we realised something.
That is… due to a small mistake made by the JCB operator while excavating, some columns got connected to each other which are nearer. And because of this, it consumed too much cement while filling the concrete inside the trench.
Pillars got connected each other due to JCB work
It’s a burden for owners.
Don’t do like that.
Be careful when digging and properly guide the JCB operator not to dig outside the marking area.
If columns are too near, then chances of connecting both pillar footing will happen. In such cases, what I recommend is… Do 90% of the work by JCB and the remaining 10% by manual labour.
JCB doing earth excavation process
sump and pillar trunch done by JCB and manual work
Final pillar trunch work done by JCB and manual labour
This is what we did in our second building.
It helped in avoiding the wastage of cement by connecting two columns. Because we only dig/excavate the required size instead of making it larger than the necessary size.
The Logic is simple…
The bigger the trench/excavated hole, the more concrete it will consume.
So always be careful while excavating… never make a bigger trench than the required size.
This is the only thing you must remember while doing trench work for pillar standing.