Can my second floor hold heavy equipment?
Rooms situated over wide, unsupported spans—like a 22-foot garage with no interior walls—raise serious structural concerns for heavy setups. Without knowing the exact capacity, people hesitate to install their equipment out of fear it will crash through the floor into the garage below.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Calculating distributed load and pounds per square foot live load
- 2Ensuring heavy items are placed across joists
- 3Spreading the storage out towards the edges of the space
- 4Placing weight strategically where it transfers down through walls
- 5Hiring a structural engineer to run the calculations
- 6Listening and looking for creaking, cracking or sagging
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I am wondering how much weight it can support.”source ↗
“I already have about all I’m going to store up there but now have some concern”source ↗
“Concerned me since there aren’t any walls in the garage so it’s just 22 ft across wall to wall.”source ↗
Where this came up
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