New privacy fence bowed down from wind

[lzicc]

I just installed about 300' of 6' vinyl, solid privacy fence last week. I augered down about 3', put the vinyl post in the ground and pour about a bag of concrete in each post, I did mix the concrete first, then filled the rest of the hole in with dirt. Today I came home and allot of the fence is bowed down now. It's was extremely windy today. I can't believe that actually happened though. Is this normal to happen? I am going to have to dig each post out and fill the hole with concrete to fix it.

 

[Gary Fowler]

I always fill the hold completely with concrete and round up the top so water drains away. I have never used vinyl post though but would expect them to be the same. Since concrete doesn't stick well to vinyl, you may want to drill at least one set of holes in it and insert a piece of rebar thru and thru so it extends into the concrete on both sides. A double rebar 90 degrees apart would be better.

 

[ColoradoBound]

I thought normally you needed to put the vinyl post over a 4x4 that goes in the ground with the vinyl post

 

[lzicc]

I wish I would have filled the holes with concrete. I didn't do that with the initial fence I put up and it didn't move. I put that up in the spring. I guess the dirt had time to settle. This fence you don't put 4x4's in.

 

[Industrial Toys]

Things ought to be built five times stronger then need be, old skool, but that's not the world we live in anymore. That sucks!

 

[lzicc]

Now I have to dig each post out and fill with concrete. It's funny, when bought the fence, they guy said that I should only need like a half a bag of concrete per post and I wanted to go with 1 bag to be sure. Boy was I fooled. We did have winds gust up to 50 mph yesterday when this happened. I just want to make sure if I dig the holes back out and fill with concrete that it will hold. I don't want to do this a third time. The ground I put this in was soft from all of the rain we had prior to putting the fence in.

 

[ray66v]

If you live where the ground freezes, you should fill with concrete until you get about 4-6" from the top.

If you put concrete all the way to the top, over time, the frost will pop the posts out of the ground.

I don't know how big an auger you used. But, if you use a smaller auger, you can pack 304 stone around the line posts, and only cement the end posts. It's very windy here, and that's all I did when I reset my neighbors fence, after it was incorrectly installed and blew partially over.

3' may not be deep enough in your soil. Ground gets real soft when it's saturated. If you have poor drainage, and lots of water, the wind is going to win.

 

[jack707]

I would of went down 4 or 5' .

 

[jim44]

Are your posts loose in the ground, or just bent at ground level? It seems to me that it's really expecting a lot for vinyl posts to hold up a solid fence like that in windy conditions. Are you SURE about not needing to use the 4 x 4s?

 

[lzicc]

The post are loose in the ground. You can see that the ground is really soft. None of the post bent or broke, the ground around it had too much give. I can pull the fence post back into place. The post themselves are 5'x5' so a wood post wouldn't do any good. Even at that, the top and bottom rail of the fence stick into the post a few inches from each side, so you couldn't put a 4' x 4' in there.
The post them selves only go into the ground about 29". I put pea gravel in the bottom of each post then put the post in and poured an 80lb bag of concrete into the whole, then filled the rest with dirt. The holes I dug were 12" in diameter. That gave me room for some play when setting the fence.