I am building a free-standing hexagon gazebo around an existing circular concrete pad, so the gazebo will not have a wooden floor. The only weight that the footings will support is the weight of the roof. I plan to have footings around the outside of the pad to support the posts. My question is how deep do I need to dig the footings? I had planned to use 8 in. quick-tube forms for the footings.
How deep do the footings have to be for a gazebo
footings
Related Topic
- Using old roof footings for a ground-level deck
- Concrete – How wide does a 6×6 concrete post footing need to be using an elevated post base anchor
- Concrete – How to repair / reinforce deteriorated footings and subsoil below brick & concrete porch
- Am I required to use footings when building a deck or can I just have the posts resting on the ground? (Wisconsin)
- How to prevent decay in a deck post resting on the house footing
- Rental equipment selection for digging 52″ deck footings
- Concrete – What would be the potential pitfalls in pouring a concrete patio over deck footings and then securing the posts to the slab
- Concrete – What’s the best way to pour post footings under a patio slab
Best Answer
How deep is the frost line in your area? Deeper than that. You may also need to use post-footing-base flares to get adequate load capacity on the bottom of your footings, depending on the soil bearing capacity (what it can hold per square inch, in pounds) and the weight of the roof and any roof loads, such as snow.
This type of thing, possibly:
Image is from bigfootsystems, but lots of places make something similar, and the old-fashioned way is to pour a pad in the bottom of the hole and then set the sonotube on top of it (no fancy plastic flare required.) In "good" (from a load-bearing point of view) soils you may not need anything, if the area of the sonotube (about 50 square inches for an 8" tube) is adequate for the soil and loads. Bumping up to 12" at the bottom more than doubles the area, thus halving the soil loading.