3 Jan
2014
3 Jan
'14
12:46 a.m.
On Thu, Jan 02, 2014 at 08:10:54PM -0000, Robert Jarratt wrote:
[...]
I am concerned whether the floor of the upstairs room
where I now have it can
bear the weight. I have placed it right next to a load bearing wall to ease
the strain on the joists. Can anyone tell me what sort of weight a normal UK
upstairs floor can bear? If my guessed weight is anything close to the limit
I will weigh parts of the machine to get a more accurate idea of the actual
weight.
You'll be wanting BS6399, which will set you back an eyewatering ?64.50 if you
buy it from the British Standards Institution, or you can check out this
naughty copy: http://mkchariths.webs.com/BS-6399-Part-1.pdf
Anyway, given your upstairs room is almost certainly officially a bedroom, the
said standard states that it should have been designed to take a minimum of a
"uniformity distributed load" of 1.5kN/m^2 or a concentrated load of 1.8kN.
Why the standard gives force rather than mass is anybody's guess, but that is
of course equivalent to 150kg/m^2 for all of your machines in there, and 180kg
for a single machine. For people still living in the 1950s, that's 30lb/sqft
and 400lb.
Even without a copy of the standard, 200kg is clearly not unreasonable. I weigh
just over 100kg[0] and bedroom floors need to be able to take two people plus a
double bed. (Or this being the enlightened 21st century, three plus a
king-sized bed.)
[0] This is mainly due to me being above 95th percentile height, with my love
of pies being almost incidental.