I was just wondering about floor load and weight limits for a wine refrigerator in a regular wood frame house if the refrigerator is not on a cement slab but instead on an upper floor. Is this a silly thing to worry about? I was just wonderin’ after my thread about bottle weight. 1000 bottles at 2 lbs each (heavy bottles) plus 750 mls * 1000 btles * 2.2/1000 to convert to “our” system is another 1,650 pounds give or take, plus about 650 pounds for the unit gives me total weight of 4,300 lbs. That’s a lot of weight. Proportionately lower for small units, but multiplying by 1000 was easier even though we do not use the metric system.
Is it going to sag the floor, or nothing to worry about.
It isn’t just the weight of the bottle, but also the pressure points the unit is placing. If it has four feet vs. rails or whatever, the PSI will be quite high.
So, let’s take 1000 bottles at roughly four pounds each…4000 pounds…plus the unit…4650 pounds. If there are four feet that are say 1 inch square, that is over a half ton resting on each foot. Better be a pretty robust floor.
There are a lot of factors to consider… that’s a lot of weight. I wouldn’t worry so much about sagging (you won’t be putting it in the middle of a room I would suspect). I’d be more worried about the shear strength of the 2x’s and nails of the joists and the fridge falling right through the floor.
We looked into this when we bought our house. It was partially built out already and after discussing it with the builder, we decided to have him reinforce the floor in that part of the house. Lost a little ceiling height in the basement below but I think it was worth it. 17 years with no sign of sagging at all.
Well, Jay, don’t forget that you have to add the weight of the person standing in front of it to look for a bottle. I know you’ve been dieting but . . .
That said, it’s an interesting question.
Why don’t you have an engineer look at it? It’s not that hard to support it with an extra lolly column or two in the basement or a support wall that you can put up and build a shelving unit in front of or something. I though about it too, but my house has those old time beams that look like railroad ties - they’re over 3 inches x 10 and somewhere around 16 inches on center.
Or maybe just move it to the basement? As I recall, you recently had your house re-done, so you wouldn’t want to do it again!
So here’s a source for information on live loads, dead weight, etc., and instructions for how to figure it. A little complicated tho.
Yeah, definitely a good question, but I don’t think one can generalize. Floors in houses are supposed to be built to support 40 psf of “live” load (people, furniture, appliances), but that’s with the load spread around a given room (of course, in a large room you can load a lot of stuff in).
But loads are definitely an issue when you have heavy items–I worked in law firm where they had to have specially reinforced rooms for files because the density was so high.
I’d check with a structural engineer. The solution can be pretty easy if you have access below–sister a couple of joists or the lolly columns as suggested. You may end up paying the engineer more than the contractor.
BTW, I wouldn’t worry about holes from the legs. Flooring is pretty strong. A woman in pointed heals exerts a massive amount of pressure on that particular part of the floor but doesn’t fall through. (assume the heals have a total of 1 sq. inch, so a 120 lb woman would be exerting over 10000 psf.
Jay, if you still subscribe to Parker there was a very lenghy and detailed thread on this topic years ago (before WB existed) that should give you all the answers you’re looking for. Nothing new has emerged in terms of engineerings calcs of design loads since then.
I participated in one of those old threads as I had the same questions a few years ago.
Can’t recall all the details, but the gist was there was little to worry about.
I had 2200lbs+/- spread over a 3.5’x2.5’ corner (near the inside corner of two supporting walls, with 6 evenly spaced feet about 3" round.
I used the numbers of 500 bottles by 3.5lbs + the unit which is 440lbs to come up with the static load. No other major furniture nearby and 1, perhaps 2, average people standing in front very occasionally.