My spouse and I were coordinating on the installation of a new purchase in our house. He had decided where he wanted it (upstairs) and I knew where it belonged (downstairs). When we finally had it in the house, we both re-evaluated our plans because of how heavy the darn thing was.
Like the engineers we are, we calculated the load weight, determined the pounds per square foot, switched that number to pounds per square inch and hit our bookcases looking for information on what the different materials in our house could handle. Each with a different book in hand, we both came up with similar answers (it wasn’t even close to the limit of what our floors could handle). We could put it anywhere we wanted.
Side note: I considered emailing MoreThanAnElectrician for a “real” answer, but decided we had plenty of safety factor from our “book” answers. He can tell you about all the mistakes he has to clean up from those darned “book-learned” engineers without enough real life experience. Let us hope we don’t become one of those stories.
So, we continued the installation . . . upstairs.
Whoops!
There are many times when we have situations that do not need and engineer because of the “experience factor”, but about once or twice a week, we come across a situation where we know we need to see someone to calculate what is in our brain. It happens regularly. We definitely curse engineers more than we praise them, but you already know that!