With forces like these in play you should limit your retaining wall efforts to walls under 4 feet tall 3 feet for mortarless stone.
4 foot concrete retaining wall design.
Excavate the trench to about 3 feet wide and to the desired depth generally 12 inches.
Particularly retaining walls can assist you on keeping the soil on one side of the structure enabling a lower floor level on the other side of the wall.
A 4 foot high 15 foot long wall could be holding back as much as 20 tons of saturated soil.
Additionally it is important to check with and adhere to local building codes prior to any construction even when walls are shorter than four feet.
Line out the foundation trench on the ground.
In the past years people frequently used concrete for inexpensive retaining wall ideas since it functions well solid and dependable.
The typical installation procedure for a simple retaining wall less than 4 feet tall on good soil is described in this article.
Of compacted base 1 in.
It is advisable to get local building department approval for the design however.
Double the wall height to 8 feet and you would need a wall that s eight times stronger to do the same job.
Also as walls get taller they get exponentially more difficult to design and build.
An 8 foot tall retaining wall must be eight times stronger than a 4 foot tall wall.
Step succeeding courses back 3 4 in overlap vertical joints at least 4 in.
Tall wall excavate a trench deep enough to accommodate 4 to 6 in.
Tall walls create high potentially dangerous drop offs that may need a fence or other type of safety barrier.