got a mate who’s looking at gutting and extending his house in northumberland. hes drawn up some plans and was showing me them, but i dont know what im looking at really 🙂 he said he was struggling with knowing what size I-beams to put in, so i said id ask on here. you never know, i dont think theres ever been a question on here that nobodys known the answer to 😀

obviously a bit more difficult to explain than to look at a drawing but ill try to put it into words.
he wants to use a 6.8m I-beam across one part of the house, spanning a gap from a wall to a steel column. this will have another I-beam, 8.5m going from another wall and meeting it in a ‘T’ shape.

the beams will have to support a 2.8m high wall and obviously a roof on top of that.

the walls are/will be a mix of concrete block and stone, and are 400mm thick including a 100mm cavity.

basically, what he wants to know are, what size the beams will need to be, and how deep the foundations will need to be for the steel column supporting one end of the ‘T’.

also the ‘bottom of the T shape’ will be resting on a 600mm thick stone wall, and hed like to know how much overlap the beam would need to have on the wall.

anyone up for that?

thanks a lot 🙂

findanengineer.com

After a tough week at work pay someone to come out and look at what your mate is after, can’t answer foundation queries without knowing the ground conditions, becoming appalled at how many folk in the industry seem to think an engineer should be able to design foundations with no or limited si info. Not a dig at you, Friday rant that’s all. Oh and find a competent contractor….

If you can get hold of the appropriate eurocodes, can understand them and don’t fall asleep you should be ok. There is a fair amount of expansion in the ones I’ve seen.

He might need calculations by a competent engineer to get building control to sign off the project. Sometimes, if the inspector has a proposal put to them (which your mate could try and put together from the aforementioned eurocodes) they will confirm if they’re happy with it and sign it off that way instead. They may also give some advice on what they want to see for the foundations. Those beams are fairly large spans, they’ll probably be deeper than he expects.

Best option as twistedpencil says: pay an engineer to do it.

My mate asked me to do him some very basic calcs for some mods to his self build some years ago.
Did him a report showing all the calcs, & being a Mech Eng I showed all the working out etc.

Had a call one day, from the council’s engineer, as he couldn’t understand what he was reading.
He had them double checked by a firm they use, who said all was good.
When I spoke to the chap at this firm he said the council’s “engineers”.simply pump everything in to a free program called Supabeam. They don’t even pay for the full version.
😕

But as above, those are some significant spans, & that corner post needs to be done properly.
Get a firm in.

As above. Proper calcs needed. Picking up 400 wide wall is not a standard job founds or steel wise.

must admit, i dont understand pretty much anything youve said, but ill pass it on 🙂 think the general opinion is for him to pay up and get someone in so ill let him know that.

oh, and twistedpencil, sorry if it caused offence, didnt mean to, just trying to help a mate out.

Sadexpunk – no offence taken, just a tough few weeks compounded by some worrying contractors that I’m dealing with. Didn’t mean to come across as a grumpy old bugger.

What your mate is planning is way more than a beam to open up a room. He’ll sleep a lot easier if he gets professional advice, it might cost a bit more than he planned but it’ll be worth it.

Takisawa2 – most building control calcs that get checked don’t appear to be done by ‘qualified’ engineers. The ones from reasonable size companies get passed without a review as they should have qa procedures and PI! The ones that get checked tend to be the fag packet ones, I’ve seen some rubbish forwarded for approval. It’s damaging to the profession to allow anyone to ‘have a go’ at the calcs.

I submitted calcs to the LA last year for a mate, fully eurocode compliant, wish I hadn’t bothered as the LA checking engineers seemed to question all of the calcs, I think as a way for the chap to learn the eurocodes 😉

ALWAYS pay for engineers advice for stuff like this. Sometime they cock it up. Never use pals for Hooses.