How Can I Stop My Concrete from Cracking?

Are you sick and tired of looking at the cracked surfaces that surround your home? If so, then it’s time to replace them with new concrete. When replacing a concrete structure such as a driveway or back patio, there are measures you can take that will prevent the concrete from cracking in the future.

Add Steel Reinforcement

When pouring new concrete, the installers can add steel reinforcement within the slab. This steel will allow any small cracks that do develop over time to remain small by creating an even load transfer across the crack.

While this option will prevent large cracks from occurring, it will actually increase the amount of smaller hairline cracks on the surface of the concrete slab. It’s a tradeoff you must decide carefully on.

Add Control Joints

The most popular way to prevent cracks in concrete is to add control joints in designated areas of your concrete slab.

In the most basic of terms, these control joints are designed spaces in the concrete slab (giving the impression of multiple slabs). Having these spaces will allow the concrete to crack along/inside of these spaces, making any cracks that do occur to be non-visible.

So even though there might be a few cracks on your driveway or patio, they aren’t even seen.

Can You Completely Stop Cracks?

There are ways you can design your driveway to make cracks harder to form and more difficult to see. However, it is almost impossible to actually prevent concrete from cracking if there is a shift in the sediment underneath or if heavy machinery is too much for it to handle. This is why the design and installation of the driveway is of the utmost importance.