A pad the size of a card table can take an expensive machine out of service. It usually warns you first.
Walk your property and count the concrete pads. Most people miss a couple. There's the obvious one under the air conditioner. Then a generator, maybe a heat pump, the slab a utility set a piece of gear on, a tank pad, sometimes a little apron under the trash cans. Every one of them is a small square of concrete holding up something you'd rather not replace early.
The good news about small pads is that they tell on themselves. Long before a technician says anything, the concrete has been sending signals you can read from a few steps away. Here's how we read them around Lakewood, and what each one says about how far down the real problem lives.
Nobody parks a truck on a condenser pad. The load is trivial. What these machines actually demand is that they sit flat and stay flat, and that's a much fussier requirement than weight. Compressors are built assuming oil drains back where it's supposed to. Condensate is supposed to leave a coil in one direction. Fans are balanced around a shaft that's meant to be plumb.
Tilt that assembly a couple of degrees and nothing fails today. What happens is slow: a line set takes a permanent bend near the fitting, condensate pools instead of draining, a fan bearing wears on one side, and the service tech tells you the unit is aging poorly for a machine its age. So when we look at a pad, the first question isn't whether the concrete is cracked. It's whether it's still sitting where it started.
| What you can see | How far down it goes | Can the pad stay |
|---|---|---|
| Unit tipped, with a bow in the refrigerant lines | Support under one edge, not the concrete itself | Usually. A sound pad can be lifted and reset level |
| Daylight under one edge of the slab | Soil washed out from underneath, water is active | Yes, once you find and fix where the water comes from |
| A crack running out of the conduit stub | Surface deep, from a penetration with no isolation | Yes if it's tight. Seal it and keep an eye on the width |
| Water ponding around and under the pad | Site grading, not the pad at all | Yes. Regrade around it, the concrete is a bystander |
| Flaking and pitting across the top surface | The outer layer only, from salt and freeze-thaw | Yes, and stop putting deicer anywhere near it |
| Anchor bolts loose, rust rings around them | Vibration working the anchors in the concrete | Depends. Re-anchor if there's sound material left |
| The whole pad has rotated or slid away from the house | Base failure, or frost getting underneath it | No. That one gets rebuilt from the dirt up |
Send a photo taken level with the pad, not from above. We can usually tell you the answer before we drive out. (303) 569-4046.
Equipment lives in the worst real estate on a property. Side yards. Under the eave. Right beside the downspout somebody never extended. Condensate lines drip in the same spot for years. On the older streets around Belmar and Applewood the side yard is narrow and the drip line from the roof lands almost exactly where the condenser sits, so we plan for that instead of pretending it isn't happening.
Underneath, the fix is unglamorous: dig out the soft material, place and compact base rock, and pour a slab thick enough to stay one piece, with a light mat of steel because a small pad has no room to crack gracefully. Then bring the top a couple of inches above finished grade so water runs off rather than under. Up on the Green Mountain side we add a step, catching whatever runs downhill before it reaches the pad at all.
Still unsure about something?
Call the crew at (303) 569-4046 and we will talk it through.
Get a free, no-obligation estimate from a crew that knows Colorado soil, Colorado weather, and how to finish concrete that lasts.
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