I’m not asking how much it can take before it collapses but how much weight can it take that will not cause it to sag over time. I would like to put a 15.7 cu. ft. refrigerator that weights 147 pounds in a second floor bedroom that I converted into a game room, but only if it won’t cause the floor to sag over time. The floor is plywood supported by 2x8 joists
Up against a wall where the joists meet the wall, where the joists are running under the refrigerator front to back, there won’t be any sagging.
if the house was made to building codes there would be no problem.
I’m asking because I already have sagging where some heavy furniture is. Are the areas where the refrigerator is in the kitchen is usually reinforced with extra joists or bracing?
A kitchen refrigerator is up close to the wall. Thats the strongest area because the joists are attached there.
There isn’t any special blocking or support. The joists are held by joist hangers. 16 inch on center. Some older structures have them 24 inch on center. Which gives a bouncy floor.
I have heard that water beds were a problem because they are so heavy. They should be on a slab floor. Refrigerator should be fine. It weighs less than a adult man.
It really shouldn’t matter where in the house you put 147 pounds. If 147 pounds in the middle of a span is causing it to sag, you have other problems that you need to deal with. People weigh more then that. Okay, people don’t just park it in one spot. How about beds, no one worries about where they’re going to put their giant bed, with a mattress, and two people on it.
147 pound fridge…shouldn’t be a problem no matter where you put it.
OTOH, when someone on another message board found a 600 gallon fish tank on craigslist really cheap I felt obligated to remind him that the water plus the gravel plus the decorations plus the equipment plus the second tank, plus the glass plus the stand was going to be well over 5000 pounds. How do you feel about putting an F250 in your living room?
I have a 100 gallon tank in my basement (empty, used to be a lizard tank). I always said if I ever used it for fish, I’d put a couple of supports under it. Just a few 2x4s from the floor joists to the concrete floor below. It would be up against the wall and I’m pretty sure it would be okay, but it’s cheap insurance.
ETA I saw an Ask This Old House a while back where Tommy was looking at an old house with a sagging kitchen floor. It was sagging the most in front of the fridge. He said that’s common in old houses because of years and years of not just the weight of the fridge but also a person standing right there in front it as well. In that house the the joists weren’t connected properly AND a bunch of them were split. He glued them together, reattached them and sistered them.
Come on, 147 pounds. That’s the weight of a 16 year old. Would you have any concern about putting a 16 year old in that room? As a game room, I’d worry about a pool table, but a refrigerator?
How about the contents of the fridge? Would that be another 100 pounds?
Something like a bed is spread out over a large are , a fridge is very compact and heavy. How many feet per square foot can a floor handle? (without sagging over time)
A 147 pound fridge is not heavy.
But you say you’re already having some sagging issues so maybe you should have a contractor come out and take care or them or have an engineer take a look at the house. If you’re worried about the fridge, you could make sure the area that you’re putting it in is level/flat to begin with and then sister the joists under it first. That shouldn’t be too hard to do on your own if you don’t have to level it first.
The design load for a residential structure is 40 lbs per square foot. That doesn’t mean that you can only put 160 lbs on a 2x2 (4 square foot) area though. That means that the floor has to be designed to support 40 lbs per square foot placed over every single square foot.
Your fridge is sitting on a few joists. Let’s say for example your room is 10 feet across just to make the math easy, and that your fridge is 3 feet wide. You can ignore the rest of the floor because it’s not doing anything to hold up your fridge. The joists that the fridge is sitting on have to be able to withstand 40 lbs per square foot over that entire 30 square foot strip (3x10). Or in other words, they have to be able to hold up 1200 lbs.
Now granted, the worst case scenario of sticking all the weight in the middle of the floor isn’t the same as spreading it out evenly, but even then your little 150 lb fridge isn’t even close to causing a problem.
It’s really hard to put enough weight onto a floor to cause a sagging problem. Most normal furniture won’t do it. Unless you’ve had something rather extraordinarily heavy on your floor, you might want to have a structural engineer come out and look at your existing sagging. Furniture alone shouldn’t do that. I would worry about a foundation problem or some other structural problem with the house.
Agreed. The food and ice in a normal size fridge can easily add 60-100 lbs. Assuming you are doing calculations they need to assume the object is 250 lbs not 147 lbs.
Can a floor hold 250 lb in fridge size dimensions ? I’m looking at this fridge "GE 18.1 cu. ft. Top Freezer Refrigerator "
Yes. As stated previously residential design loads are 40 lb/sq. ft. So you need 6.25 sq. ft. to stay at or below that value. Homedepot.com says you’re at 6.29 sq. ft. so you could cover your floor with full refrigerators and be fine.
But how would you open the doors?
Need I remind everyone that we’re not dealing with “a floor”. We’re dealing with the **OP’s **floor.
A floor which he said is already sagging.
tar21, there’s far too many variables here. You can take **engineer_comp_geek’s ***assumption *that your floor was A) built to code and B) doesn’t currently exceed the weight specs of that code, but that’s your gamble.
In the interest of safety, maybe you should take a peek at those joists? If they’re sagging already, there may be something going on.