Garden gate hell!
scdettmer69
Posts: 16
No idea whether anyone can help me but nothing ventured nothing gained. Firstly, I live in Germany (this is pertinent). Attached are photos of the garden gate of the house we bought last year. It is in a terminal state. Now, normally I would purchase two posts, new gate etc and dig big holes, fill em with concrete. However, in Germany there is a predilection toward using post sleeves (also a pic. I couldn’t rotate pics]. I am a little lost with them. Will they be strong enough (posts have hedge either side so gate only has posts for support). Do I set the sleeves in the concrete first or put posts in with supporting bolts and then in concrete? Basically (as you can probably tell} I am somewhat clueless. I have tried sourcing 2.4 metre posts but they are either not available or ludicrously expensive. Any advice, hints, tips, comments are all gratefully received. Oh, you can also get sleeves you just hammer in which is probably why every other fence I see has a rather precarious hold on remaking perpendicular! Cheers 
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There's a problem with the photo uploading, so I've turned it for you.
I got some of those post supports, as I thought it would save me digging around thirty holes that I needed for my boundary fences, but found them worse than useless because you either need to dig out a hole in the usual way, and then the thing is slack so you need concrete anyway, or you need to hammer them in, using a special gadget to stop the top distorting, and it takes a huge amount of effort, especially if the ground is rough and stoney like mine is lower down. That'll be why you're seeing some dodgy looking ones!
I expect there isn't an easy solution for you if you can't get posts of a suitable size at a good price. Can you get lighter weight posts and bolt them together, or use steel angle brackets to join them? What about some steel posts of some kind - would there be anything like that available?
You can buy a gadget that fits inside the metpost so you can hammer it in.
30 years on the pergola is still standing. No sign of rot on any of the posts and both methods seems to have worked well.
Here's one of the Metposts put in 30 yrs ago -
Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
The Metposts do work well, but they need concreted to be really effective IMO, just as you've done. I've just given mine to my ex hubby for a section of his garden. I had no chance of getting them into my solid, stony, clay sub base for my fence. It was hard enough due to the concrete footings for the pavement outside.
There's a huge shortage of concrete products here in the UK too - don't know if it's the same in Germany. I had to replace fence posts recently and it was a PITA not being able to get the Postcrete. Saves a lot of effort.
We definitely need to see photos - even if it's not perfect