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Re: [APD] Aquarium Weight in Apartment



I am not an engineer and I don't know anything about your
particular floor.  But. . . 

The total weight on the floor is not going to be problem in
a modern building built to typical building codes.

The real issue, imo, is the concentration of the weight
over a small surface area of the floor.

Even then, it's probably not going to be a problem with the
size of tank you're talking about.

Sometimes you can tell which way the floor joists run --
the joists are the "beams" under the floor that run across
from one side of the room to the other and hold up the
floor.  It's best to  have the tank situated so that its
long length runs perpendicular to the joists. That way it's
weight is directly borne by the most joists.  The benefit
of this is that the amount of stress-in-bending caused by
the tank (essentially, the amount of sag) will be
distributed across the several joists instead of just one. 
The floor will be less springy to walk on and have less
sag.

How the heck can you tell which way the joists run in the
floor of a second story?  A few ways. Often, one end of the
joists will be sitting on an external wall -- the joists
definitely have to sit on a load bearing wall and the
external walls are that.  But that's not guaranteed method
of detection.

If you shine an incandescent lamp at an angle across the
ceiling below, you can often see the traces of the seams
where the wallboard is nailed to the joists, giving a
telltale sign of which way the joists run.  This doesn't
work nearly as well if you have lath and plaster, which
woul dlikely be only in very old construction.

With an electronic stud detector, you can find the joists
by following the directions that come with the unit -- you
can get one of these at a hardware store and they're
relatively inexpensive these days.  You can get even less 
expensive stud detectors that use a magnet to detect the
wall board nails -- these are not as easy to use as the
electronic type -- once you find a row of nails, you've
found the joists.

After you set up your stand and tank and make sure it is
level, test fill it just to the outer edge of the top tim
and check for level again.  You will probably notice some
sag that wasn't there before you filled the tank.  Drain
the tank and adjust the levelling to accomodate the
expected sag.

Good luck,
Scott H.
--- Shane Kaiser <shanek at sbcglobal_net> wrote:
> 
> I want to put a 90 gallon or 110 gallon tank in my second
> floor apartment.
> The apartment I live in is only 2 years old. The question
> I have is will the
> floor hold the weight of a filled 60" x 18" 90 or 110
> gallon aquarium? Any
> ideas or experiences out there?


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