Concrete cracks as it cures and as it takes up load, so most cracks are ordinary. The ones that matter are growing, and a crack that is growing matters more than a wider one that has been still for a decade.

What a Phoenix crack is measured against

There are 642,867 housing units here, and 343,369 homes here are lived in by the people who own them. A crack in any one of them is read the same way: by its direction, by the pattern across the whole house, and by whether it has changed since it was last measured. This page cannot say what cracked a particular house. A dated reading, repeated, is what does.

The reasoning behind that

Width is the test people reach for and it is the weakest one available. A hairline crack opening steadily is a more serious finding than a wider crack that has not changed in ten years, and the two are indistinguishable in a single photograph. Direction carries more information than width. Diagonal cracks running from the corners of doors and windows are the classic record of one part of a structure sitting at a different height from another. Vertical cracks in the middle of a wall are frequently shrinkage. Horizontal cracking in a wall is a different mechanism again and is the one most worth having looked at. The pattern across the whole house matters most of all. Several symptoms clustered in one quarter of a structure is a finding; the same number scattered evenly is usually the building being a building. This page will not tell you what your crack means. Describing the categories is honest; diagnosing a house nobody has seen is not.

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