What ground screws are

A ground screw is a helical pile — a galvanized steel shaft with one or more spiral flights at the bottom — driven into the ground with a hydraulic motor. The flights pull the screw down and engage the surrounding soil, and the shaft becomes a slender pier capable of carrying surprisingly large axial and lateral loads.

They are not new. Helical piles have been used in marine and infrastructure work for over a century. What is new is their arrival in residential and light commercial — where they are now the right answer in cases the industry used to solve only with concrete.

Speed and disturbance

A concrete footing takes days. Forming, pouring, curing, stripping — even a small one occupies the schedule for most of a week and the site for the same. A ground screw is installed in minutes. A deck on screws can be ready to frame on the same day the foundation goes in.

The other half of the story is what does not happen. No excavation, no spoil pile, no concrete truck, no curing time. On a finished property — an existing garden, a paved driveway, a remote lakefront — the absence of disturbance is often the deciding factor.

A ground screw replaces a week of concrete work with a morning of installation — and leaves the site looking the way it did when you arrived. — UHUSA practice notes

Where screws fit

The sweet spot is light-to-moderate loads on awkward sites. Decks and patios; pergolas and outbuildings; solar arrays in remote locations; fences and boundary structures; modular and tiny-home foundations; temporary or seasonal installations that need to be removed cleanly. On all of these, screws are usually faster, often cheaper, and almost always cleaner.

Where they do not

Heavy permanent residential and commercial structures still usually want a concrete foundation. Very soft soils can take the screw without engaging it. Sites with shallow obstructions (rock, old utilities, debris) can refuse a screw before it reaches load-bearing depth. None of these rule screws out, but they all change the engineering conversation.

The site evaluation

Specifying ground screws begins with a soil assessment. The right screw — flight diameter, shaft length, and number of flights — depends on what the soil can offer. Once the site is understood, the rest is logistics: which screw, how many, where. The crew that installs them is small; the equipment is light; the inspection is quick.

For a project where the foundation choice is open, we can scope ground screws against a concrete alternative. Get in touch.