Fence Posts, upside down or not?

[Jstpssng]

We lived in Glennallen, AK for a year. It's between Anchorage & Fairbanks. The utility companies would put a multi-layer sleeve on their poles when they set them. Several layers of some type of plastic sheeting. The idea - the frost would attach to the outer most layer and just slide it up/down on the inner layers - with the seasons.

Must have been of some benefit - it was used on all their poles.

I've heard of something similar here for concrete when putting in pipelines... they simply put down a big piece of plastic, pour the structure then wrap the plastic up like a big Christmas present. A friend who is pretty clever cuts the bottoms off 5 gallon buckets and puts them around posts before burying them, so that the bucket moves rather than the posts. The mistake that my father made was not using sona tubes, the concrete conformed to the shape of the hole, which was bigger on top than on bottom.