The Water Method, for removing Fence Posts!

It may be new to you, but we've been doing it for a long, long time.

Big Red Post Puller!

        A couple of times a year we show up with a crew of 3 or 4 guys to remove a Wood Fence. We break out the Milwaukee sawsalls, the flat bars & pry bars, the 2 & 3 lb demo hammers, and the sledge hammers. All the basic tools needed to remove the fence panels. We pry, hammer, and cut them away from the posts they are attached to, and into pieces small enough to be carried by 2 people. Who then pick them up and carry them to one of our flat bed trailers, stacking them for transport to the landfill. It is Federal law that all Pressure Treated lumber be disposed of at a landfill. You can burn or dispose of any other type of wood any way you want to.

        Next comes the task of removing the fence's posts. We have a myriad of tools and equipment to assist us in this task. Hand tools such as shovels, hardened steel bars with ends designed for digging, prying, tamping, and concrete busting. And some even more important devices that give us a great mechanical advantage when pulling those posts up. These are the Post Popper, used for metal posts, and the Big Red Post Puller, which is used for wood posts. We have a Bobcat that we use for Commercial properties, but we do not use it on most residential yards. Most of the soil in southern Indiana, and northern Kentucky (our service area) is of a brown silt loam called Miami, for those of you who may not know, that's the Indiana state soil. As you may know, it is particularly moist, fertile, and easy to till. However we sometimes run into some areas of really dense, hard packed clay, it makes us wonder how that stuff got up here from Tennessee, Georgia, or the Carolinas.

Hard packed clay Soil!

We remove 20 to 30 fences every year and we always run into 2 or 3 of them that have the extreme kind of hard packed soil that I am talking about. That's where the water method really comes in handy. For these areas that have this dense, hard packed clay, and these fence posts that have been in it for 20 years or more, it can be a real challenge to remove. Remember, you probably have around 160 lbs of concrete, or more attached to the bottom of the post. Even as great a device as the Big Red Post Puller is, it will fail to pull up this weighted post that the compacted red clay soil has a death grip on. Now as Professional Fence removers we know pretty quickly what we are dealing with, and this is the action we take. We start digging around the post a little wider than the concrete ball is. We remove all the grass and a few inches of soil, probably 2 to 5 inches if we can, and more if possible. We complete this on every post. Removing just this little amount on the type of soil we are talking about can be very hard but it is imperative that you do it. Then we fill that area with water. On hard packed clay it takes a while for any water to soak in. Clay is notorious for water running off of it. So it will take a day or two, or even three for the water to soak in. It may evaporate faster than it soaks in during the dog days of summer. We usually have 1 man stop by for the next day or 2 and refill the holes with water. Depending on how many days we let it soak and keep refilling it, the water will soak all the way to the bottom of the post making it much, much easier to dig it out, or pull it out using the post puller.
        This "Water Method" will definitely work on the hardest of soils. Good luck! Remember if you like our blog please subscribe!  Next up is an article is how to remove a concrete plug where the fence post has broken/rotted off..