Heard a guy at the lumber yard say you should always set posts in concrete, no matter what

I was grabbing a load of cedar in Tacoma last week and overheard this old-timer telling a new guy to always use concrete for every single post. I've been doing this for a while, and I gotta say, I think that's bad advice for a lot of jobs. For a basic privacy fence on good, dry soil, a gravel base with proper tamping works just fine and actually drains better (which stops rot). Poured concrete can trap water against the wood and cause it to fail way faster. Has anyone else had a fence fail because the posts rotted out inside a concrete collar?

3 comments

3 Comments

drew_hart48d ago

Exactly, concrete's a death sentence for wood posts.

finleyl398d ago

Depends on how you install it.

-1

the_susan8d ago

Read a whole article about this last year that backed up what finleyl39 said. It really depends on the soil and how you shape the concrete to shed water. Just dumping concrete around a post is asking for rot.