Second Floor Fish tanks – beam loading for the non-engineer

[arodini]

Nice write-up. It's too late for me to find this thread as I've already placed my 180g in place and filled it Sunday night. Still a good reading though. My tank is also running parallel with the joists and it was sitting on only one single joist! However both ends of the tank will be on load bearing walls, well one end is only on the tip of the 2x4 wall while the other end is completely loaded on the 8" thick masonry wall. So I added another 2x10 joist under the tank. The span of these two joists are technically only 5' because they are supported by the 2x4 wall that is in the middle of the masonry wall and the steel I-beam (10' span) where the joists end. I'm not a structural engineer, but my buddy who is a commercial building designer/engineer told me that it's going to be fine the way it is now after the new 6' joist being added.

When I filled up the tank, I heard some wood stretching sounds that made me a bit nervous! lol Then I kind of beat myself in the head of not adding another joist to the other side of the old joist while I was at it (with a little more difficulty but still could be done!)

Do you think I'm safe with this, daleros? Oh wait, he hasn't been on here for ~3 years...http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/forums/member.php?40583-daleros

 

[birdhawk23]

Can somebody verify my elementary school math please? lol

Full Tank Weight = (265 * 10) + 400
3050/7 feet
435 pounds per square foot

14 foot beams * 40/lbsft2
14 * 40
560 Safe beam load

So this verifies that I am safe to have a 265 gallon aquarium in my second story apartment if properly placed?
Thanks for this sweet ass write up!

 

[12 Volt Man]

Calculate the lbs per linear foot of the stand ---- full aquarium / stand length

when you are calculating this, are you assuming that the contact of the stand to the floor is full contact?

ie if your stand has 4 legs for example, its not tank weight divided by linear feet.

its only tank weight divided by the actual contact area of the stand and the floor.

in fact, its like this with all stands.

few have full surface area contact to fully distrubute the load.

this is where some confusion and some miscalculations can come into play.

eg. a 180g tank has a 72x24" surface area with an approximate weight of 2000 pounds.

but that full surface area is not transfered to a 72x24 area of the floor because most stands are perimeter contact only.

it might actually only be transferred to a (72+72+24+24)*1 inch area, assuming a 1 inch perimeter support on all sides.

how does all of this fit in with beam loading? I guess it depends on how many beams the contact area of the stand to the floor actually rests on?

eg. if my stand has 4 legs I might only be loading up 2 beams for instance?

my 150g for example, has a steel stand with only 4 legs.

 

[birdhawk23]

Luckily, my 265 is a full flat bottom. Currently sitting (waterless) on the second story apartment floor haha

 

[HungDang]

nice job! I vote this to be in the sticky section!

 

[Motoxer777]

makes cense to me.