# Is my floor strong enough for my wine?



## paulfielding (Feb 5, 2016)

I have a stub end of a hallway in my basement, I plan to install cheap wine shelving from floor to ceiling there. (roughly 3' wide, 8' high). I'm hoping to use as efficient shelving as possible to try to get an order of magnitude of 300ish bottles (haven't done all the math yet, so the number may vary).

The floor consists of DriCore subfloor tiles, with a thin layer of foam padding on top and then a floating engineered hardwood floor on top of that. This is all over top of concrete.

The question is, will the DriCore support the weight of all those bottles? I'm just concerned that the plastic channeling under the floor might not withstand the weight. Here's the panels:

http://www.dricore.com/en/homeowner.aspx

Should I consider cutting the floor out to the concrete before putting in the shelves? I'd prefer not to (it's a recently renovated basement), but will if I have to.

Thoughts?

Paul


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## AZMDTed (Feb 5, 2016)

I can't tell from what you have provided, the key comes down to the surface area of contact between the rack you're using and the floor. It's a matter of psi. To be safe you could always add a cut sheet of 3/4 plywood under the rack on top of the floor. I don't know if that would meet your cosmetic needs but it would help distribute the load over a greater area and give more assurance that the contact points of the rack would not break through. It really depends on the rack. Does it have 4 feet transferring the load to the floor, or a larger surface area. Anything that distributes the load to a larger surface area of the floor will help, as long as it doesn't make the rack unstable.


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## Floandgary (Feb 5, 2016)

Would venture to say that the subfloor panels would support about anything short of a bank vault!! To help out though I'd try to distribute the weight of the shelving as much as possible. That is to say put a foot on the legs of the unit, or simply lay a piece of 5/8" plywood or MDF slightly larger than the dimensions of the unit just so all of the weight is not on your flooring through the skinny legs. Guess it to be @700 lbs. Get 4-5 people to stand in that spot.


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## AZMDTed (Feb 5, 2016)

I'm going to go out on a limb here and do some math for you. Let's say you go with 300 bottles and assume that each bottle weighs 3 pounds, that's 900 pounds. Now let's assume the rack itself weighs 30 pounds, so the total load is 930 pounds. The Dricore Spec sheet says that they tested displacement at 10% Strain, which they identify as 39.75 psi. If we divide 930 pounds by 39.75 pounds per square inch we will find that we achieve that stress if the rack contact area is 23.4 square inches. That's assuming even weight distribution. I don't know if the displacement listed in the spec sheet is good, bad or indifferent, but it's the only spec I have. Assuming that is a 'safe' load, then you need to have, or build up to, about 24 square inches of contact area to be at their tested spec, more area of weight distribution will mean less pressure on the floor. 

But it's been a very long time since I did static load problems in college. If it were me I'd go overkill on it if I was worried about leaving marks or cutting through the floor and cut a sheet of 3/4" plywood to put under the rack, assuming it transfers the weight through both ends and not 4 separate corners of the rack. 

I will defer to anyone else on this also, so don't blame me


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## paulfielding (Feb 5, 2016)

I'll have to double check the contact, but if I recall correctly it's relatively small feet (it's just simple wood racking. I'm not too concerned about visuals (my long term goal is to create a nice wine closet, I'll worry about visuals then - this is the cheap "for now" solution), so I'll probably try putting down a 3/4" plywood base and maybe even further distribute with additional boards under the feet.

Thanks folks!

Paul


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## sour_grapes (Feb 5, 2016)

I looked up the same spec that AZMDTed did, and came to the same conclusion.

I like his solution. I might be tempted to go somewhat simpler and just put two 2x6's under the legs, say, one going along the back of the rack, one going down the front (or, alternately, the left and right sides).


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## salcoco (Feb 6, 2016)

the tech specs further on in the web page say testing with a load of 1700lbs ft was a deflection of 300mm, which is .03 cm. one inch is 2.54 cm. I think anything you can place on the floor will be okay.


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## sour_grapes (Feb 6, 2016)

salcoco said:


> the tech specs further on in the web page say testing with a load of 1700lbs ft was a deflection of 300mm, which is .03 cm. one inch is 2.54 cm. I think anything you can place on the floor will be okay.



Unfortunately, 300 mm is *30* cm, which is about 12 inches.

However, you have to know what that test was and how to interpret it. The Dricore literature says it is from ASTM 1621, but that is almost certainly incorrect. (That test is for compression.) It is probably from ASTM C203, which measures flexural strength. Furthermore, the Dricore specification does not say that the deflection was 300 mm. It reports the "deflection *at* 300 mm." (Emphasis added.) 

Basically, you take a strip of the flooring, and clamp it to a fixture so that 1 foot sticks out, unsupported. Then you measure how many pounds you have to push down until it breaks.


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## hounddawg (Feb 7, 2016)

he's spot on about laying down a 3/4 underlayment over your finish flooring to distribute your weight bearing load, as for cosmetic's you can stain the piece of 3l4, use a BC piece of ply wood turning up your sanded side, if you stain or paint your shelving you merely do the same to your 3/4 piece of underlayment and it'll look as designed that way if looks matters to you
Richard:: 




AZMDTed said:


> I'm going to go out on a limb here and do some math for you. Let's say you go with 300 bottles and assume that each bottle weighs 3 pounds, that's 900 pounds. Now let's assume the rack itself weighs 30 pounds, so the total load is 930 pounds. The Dricore Spec sheet says that they tested displacement at 10% Strain, which they identify as 39.75 psi. If we divide 930 pounds by 39.75 pounds per square inch we will find that we achieve that stress if the rack contact area is 23.4 square inches. That's assuming even weight distribution. I don't know if the displacement listed in the spec sheet is good, bad or indifferent, but it's the only spec I have. Assuming that is a 'safe' load, then you need to have, or build up to, about 24 square inches of contact area to be at their tested spec, more area of weight distribution will mean less pressure on the floor.
> 
> But it's been a very long time since I did static load problems in college. If it were me I'd go overkill on it if I was worried about leaving marks or cutting through the floor and cut a sheet of 3/4" plywood to put under the rack, assuming it transfers the weight through both ends and not 4 separate corners of the rack.
> 
> I will defer to anyone else on this also, so don't blame me


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## Tnuscan (Feb 7, 2016)

paulfielding said:


> I have a stub end of a hallway in my basement, I plan to install cheap wine shelving from floor to ceiling there. (roughly 3' wide, 8' high). I'm hoping to use as efficient shelving as possible to try to get an order of magnitude of 300ish bottles (haven't done all the math yet, so the number may vary).
> 
> The floor consists of DriCore subfloor tiles, with a thin layer of foam padding on top and then a floating engineered hardwood floor on top of that. This is all over top of concrete.
> 
> ...


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