Had a customer chew me out about post hole depth last summer and I actually changed how I dig

This guy insisted his 5 foot tall privacy fence needed 4 foot deep holes because his neighbor's fence fell over in a storm. I told him 30 inches was plenty for our area but he got real loud about it. After he sent me a video of a blown over fence in the next town over I decided to just do 42 inches deep on every job now. It takes an extra 15 minutes per hole but I haven't had a single call back about leaning posts since. Anyone else have a client who pushed back hard and turned out to be right?

2 comments

2 Comments

brian3031mo ago

You said "30 inches was plenty for our area" but that depends a lot on where you live. I'm not trying to be that guy, but 30 inches in heavy clay soil with bad drainage is completely different than 30 inches in sandy loam. Frost line matters too, if you're up north at all. In my area the frost line is 36 inches minimum, so 30 inches would just be asking for frost heave on a fence that tall. Sounds like that customer might have known something about local conditions that you didn't, or maybe his neighbor's fence really did fail because of shallow holes. Extra 15 minutes per hole is nothing compared to digging everything up and redoing it.

karen2751mo ago

My buddy Tom put up a fence last summer at his place outside town. He dug his holes 24 inches deep like some guide he found online said was fine. Come spring that whole section near his garage was tilted like a drunk at last call. Frost pushed every single post up a couple inches and he had to pull them all out and start over. Took him a whole weekend to fix it. He was real mad about it but honestly he should have checked the frost depth for his area first.