Bore pile and piling contractor in Bali

We work with two families of pile. Machine-bored piles, Ø30 to 60 cm, drilled with a mini rig, cased or slurry-supported where the bore wants to collapse, reinforced with a full-length cage and cast in one continuous pour. And strauss piles, hand-augered at around Ø30, needing no crane, no wide gate and no turning circle for a truck — the tool for a plot at the end of a Seminyak gang where a rig would never arrive at all.

Depth comes from the ground investigation, never from a round number. Sondir refusal, SPT counts and layer thicknesses tell the engineer what each pile can carry, and we install until that stratum is reached rather than until the programme says stop. Concrete volume per pile is logged against theoretical volume, because a shortfall or a large overbreak is the earliest signal of a hole that misbehaved — far better found on the day than under a finished column.

When piles beat a bigger footing

Piling is not automatically the expensive route. Once competent ground sits three metres or more below formation, mass concrete stops making sense: you are paying for excavation, shoring, dewatering and cubic metres of concrete whose only job is to reach depth. A ring of Ø40 piles carrying the same column load frequently costs less, takes a fraction of the time and puts far fewer trucks on a narrow lane.

The second argument is slope. On the plots above Bingin, Uluwatu and the Ayung gorge, a spread footing needs a bench cut into the hillside — which means retaining whatever you just cut, then draining it. Piles let the structure step down the slope on its own legs, with a fraction of the earthworks and much less disturbed ground to stabilise afterwards. Where the two approaches genuinely compete we price both, with the earthworks and haulage counted honestly on each side.

Strauss piles, and their honest limits

The strauss pile — a hand-augered bore, typically Ø25 to 30 cm, reinforced and cast in place — exists because much of Bali is unreachable by machine. Gangs a metre and a half wide, courtyards behind a family temple, an extension inside a hotel that is still trading: a crew with a tripod and augers gets there when a rig cannot, works quietly and leaves no track marks across your garden.

They are not a universal substitute, and we would rather say so before you buy one. Hand augering stalls in gravel, coral rock and cemented layers, and practical depths run to roughly eight metres. Capacity per pile is a fraction of a machine-bored Ø40, so the count rises and the pile cap grows with it. Where ground or loads exceed what hand augering can honestly do, we price the machine option instead — including the real cost of getting a mini rig through your gate.