Aurora RV and Trailer Pad Installation

Before we price a pad, we dig. Post hole digger, a shovel, sometimes a small bucket if the yard has room, and then we look hard at what came up. Sandy fill that drains? The build gets simpler. Gray clay that holds a thumbprint? Different job. Construction spoil with brick chunks and a buried strip of landscape fabric? Seen that plenty, and it explains most of the pads we get called out to replace.

Ground varies enough across Aurora that we won't spec a pad off a map or a neighborhood name. Here's the part people skip: a parked rig drops several tons onto a handful of contact patches and then leaves them sitting there for months. The dirt under that footprint is doing the real work. Concrete only spreads the load out so the dirt can handle it.

What the ground does under a rig that never moves

Traffic loads come and go. A parked fifth wheel doesn't. Soil under a permanent footprint keeps compressing long after it would have quit under a car, finding every soft pocket on the way down. That's why the classic failure is a dish or a crack across the axle line rather than general wear.

Water makes it worse, quietly. Snow piles against the tires, melts on a warm afternoon, soaks the subgrade, refreezes overnight. Thirty rounds of that in a season and the fines start migrating. Once fines move you have a void, and a void under a loaded slab is where the crack begins.

Base depth, and why a pad gets more than a driveway

Take the topsoil out. All of it. Black dirt holds water and compresses under load, and burying it under road base hides the problem for about two years. We dig past it to material that holds a shape, then build back up a few inches at a time, running a plate or roller over each lift until it quits moving under a boot.

Moisture during compaction matters more than people expect. Bone-dry base won't lock together and soaked base turns to pudding, so there's a window in between where the material knits and stays knitted. Where the subgrade underneath is soft, we roll woven fabric first so base rock and clay can't grind into each other. That one layer is why some pads still read flat a decade on.

What comes out of the test hole, and what we build on it

Everything that happens before concrete shows up

• Utilities located and irrigation flagged along the whole route
• Test hole dug, subgrade classified by what it actually is
• Organics and soft material excavated and hauled away
• Woven fabric over any subgrade that won't hold on its own
• Road base in lifts, each one compacted and checked
• Grade set so runoff leaves instead of pooling under the axles
• Steel tied on chairs, tighter where wheels and jacks land
• Conduit sleeve under the slab if power is anywhere in the plan

Where the water goes, and the months we like

A pad is a big flat surface that used to be lawn, and every drop landing on it now has to go somewhere. We plan that before we form. Usually a gentle fall toward open yard, sometimes a shallow swale along one side, occasionally a drain line where the lot boxes water in. Side yards in Southshore and Tallyn's Reach often carry runoff off two roofs already, and dropping a pad into that path just moves the puddle to the fence line.

Shoulder seasons win on timing. Late April into June, or September into mid October. Your rig is usually away or stored by then, the ground digs clean, and enough mild weather is left for strength to climb ahead of hard freezes. Autumn books up first, since nothing motivates a phone call like a whole season of your own tire ruts.

Cold placement is possible. Water heated at the plant, an accelerator with no chloride in it, blankets held down for days. The subgrade still has to be thawed, and that 28 day wait doesn't shrink because you're in a hurry. One habit worth keeping: rinse the undercarriage before the rig parks for the season. Whatever it picked up off the interstate drips onto the slab for hours.