Info for keeping aquariums in apartments - load bearing capacity of floors.

[mattybecks]

I would like to start off by saying I am not a structural engineer nor do I work in the construction industry or anything like it.
The research I have done and found was just my own, as I live in an apartment and want to get the biggest aquarium I can get! It would be highly appreciated if I make a mistake, or have read engineering specs wrong to be corrected in as easy to understand terms as possible, to make sure anyone looking for information about this in the future has some solid ground to stand on.

There is not to much "solid" information on the forums when the questions was raised about the load bearing capacity of floors, and when doing some google searches I found lots of people asking these questions, with no real answers being given besides guesses (some very educated guesses mind you), so for the sake of making life easier and for those in future, I have attached some simple charts I found which may help if you are looking for load bearing capacities of your floor.

Please note this is for cement floors. NOT WOOD. I have not lived in the areas of the world that use wood for apartment/second story flooring so these specs dont apply for anything made from wood which would obviously hold far less than concrete/cement flooring. (there was a fair amount of info on wooden flooring online)

This info is from a construction company here where I currently live (Dubai) who supplies hollow core cement slabs for both residential apartment buildings and industrial purposes. The constructions specs/standards in the GCC countries I believe are the same as in Europe, and is stated on their website. Precast for Buildings (dubaiprecast.ae)
(I believe hollow core slabs first started been used in 1935 in Europe. By keeping the cores hollow, this made the slab much lighter than a massive solid concrete floor slab of equal thickness or strength. )
No matter where I go around Dubai, for the 7 years I have been living here, there are construction sites everywhere. I see countless examples of these hollow core slabs being used in numerous apartment buildings.

For the guys in construction:
"Hollow core slabs are made from zero-slump concrete with C60 compressive strength. The prestressing tendons are indented 7 - wire low relaxation strands with a strength of 1860 N/mm2."

I smallest/thinnest hollow core slab available.






Assuming a standard living area in a studio apartment (6m x 4m), with the walls on either side being load bearing walls - I believe a safe weight these floors can hold (assuming your aquarium is in the middle of the apartment and not right next to the wall is about 2200 kg? (max at 5400 kg?)

Does this seem correct to anyone who knows how these charts read?

I currently have an apartment living area of the above specs, and I have an aquarium that weighs 1500kg against the one load bearing wall, and another aquarium in the middle of the floor weighing just under 500kg.

I have a friend who stays on the 2nd floor (not my building, another one, but very similar) who keeps 1 x (240cm x 60cm x 60cm) = 2000kg aquarium + a standard 180gal (1500kg) and 4 x 55gal tanks.
When I asked him about how he calculated how his apt floor would hold the tanks, he said he didnt actually think about it. He just got the tanks. They have been running for a few years now and the floor hasnt collapsed, so I thinking either the hollow core slabs are alot stronger than I am reading from the table or maybe the slabs are alot bigger than the minimum requirements of the images I have attached.

I will post below in a reply the other slabs specs which are commonly used. I just wanted to assume the smallest/minimum requirements. I will post the specs for the next three (there are 6 in total) of the smallest ones.

I dont know which of three is more commonly used in apartments.

 

[mattybecks]

 

[mattybecks]

 

[mattybecks]

in my 6m x 4m living area, 4th floor apartment. I currently have about 2000kg happily sitting on the floor. (1 x 1500kg freshwater and 1 x 500kg marine)

I am keeping 1500kg (against the wall) unchanged, but want a bigger tank in the center of the floor (more than 500kg).

How big can I go on the second tank?

 

[mattybecks]

To give you some visuals, these are the tanks against the wall, and the one in the middle that I want to upgrade.

 

[jjohnwm]

Interesting construction methods there. I am an industrial electrician but worked for several years on various high-rise residential projects in the past. When I moved into one of these buildings myself, I asked one of the engineers working for my employer questions about the strength of the floors as it related to my aquariums. He laughed out loud and asked how many gallons of water I would be keeping. When I replied "about 1400 gallons, spread over three rooms" he stopped laughing, but told me that I would have absolutely no concerns...but that he wanted to see my tanks.

That building, like all the others I worked on, was poured concrete slab construction, i.e. the floors and walls were solid concrete re-inforced with rebar. I'm not familiar with the hollow-core slabs you are describing, so I wouldn't hazard a guess as to their comparable strength. For your own piece of mind you should perhaps approach an engineer for a definitive answer. Personally, I think that the hollow-core construction will be somewhat weaker than solid poured concrete, but probably still provides you with a huge margin of safety for your intended loading...but that's just my uneducated opinion, based on gut feeling and the fact that a failure will not be in my own dwelling...

Please update us with whatever you discover!

 

[Matteus]

Neat info you are sharing here. I don’t know if any of this info applies to where I am living because my house is made of wood rather than concrete.

I have successfully kept 180g and 120g for years on these wooden floors with no issues this far even after moving the tanks out.

one thing I noticed that may be off a bit here is your measurements of weight. From what I understand is a gallon of water equals 8 lbs and change. So I typically round it up to 10 lbs just for ease of calculation and to err on the safer side of things. So with that being said a 180g tank would weigh roughly 1800lbs which is closer to 800-850 kg which I think means you have lots more room than you were previously calculating.

 

[Fat Homer]

Just my two cents having lived in Asia where pretty much all apartments were built using concrete floors…

in residential apartments, i had a 200G tank without any real issues and probably could have gone up to 300G if i really wanted to except wouldnt be able to transport the materials into my apartment…

I also know when i was working in a factory building designed to store and hold heavy machinery such as large scale printing machines etc they had floor weight limits of something like 2000KG per SqFt iirc…

so really depending on the type of building and how they were intended to be used when being built is what determines the load bearing weight the floor can handle and why there is rarely a definitive answer online as its rarely a one size fits all type of situation…

 

[mattybecks]

Interesting construction methods there. I am an industrial electrician but worked for several years on various high-rise residential projects in the past. When I moved into one of these buildings myself, I asked one of the engineers working for my employer questions about the strength of the floors as it related to my aquariums. He laughed out loud and asked how many gallons of water I would be keeping. When I replied "about 1400 gallons, spread over three rooms" he stopped laughing, but told me that I would have absolutely no concerns...but that he wanted to see my tanks.

That building, like all the others I worked on, was poured concrete slab construction, i.e. the floors and walls were solid concrete re-inforced with rebar. I'm not familiar with the hollow-core slabs you are describing, so I wouldn't hazard a guess as to their comparable strength. For your own piece of mind you should perhaps approach an engineer for a definitive answer. Personally, I think that the hollow-core construction will be somewhat weaker than solid poured concrete, but probably still provides you with a huge margin of safety for your intended loading...but that's just my uneducated opinion, based on gut feeling and the fact that a failure will not be in my own dwelling...

Please update us with whatever you discover!

Thanks for the response jjohnwn, I will keep you guys updated on this

 

[mattybecks]

Neat info you are sharing here. I don’t know if any of this info applies to where I am living because my house is made of wood rather than concrete.

I have successfully kept 180g and 120g for years on these wooden floors with no issues this far even after moving the tanks out.

one thing I noticed that may be off a bit here is your measurements of weight. From what I understand is a gallon of water equals 8 lbs and change. So I typically round it up to 10 lbs just for ease of calculation and to err on the safer side of things. So with that being said a 180g tank would weigh roughly 1800lbs which is closer to 800-850 kg which I think means you have lots more room than you were previously calculating.

Thanks man. Calculations arent my strong point haha. I used this tank calculator to get my weights:
Tank Weight Calculator (hamzasreef.com)