Ground Hog Day 2015
We celebrated Ground Hog Day
today by taking the day off.
Our friend Richard made this
cool drawing on how we might change the way our IBC
water tower is going together.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Moving the horizontal beams further apart so that the support the edge of the IBC is definitely a good idea. And while adding the vertical pillar between the midpoints of the horizontal beams is a good idea, going diagonally from the midpoint of the top beam to the concrete blocks on the edges would be even better. That configuration is stiffer and more stable.
But you should also make the horozontal beams shorter. The pillars should ideally be next to the IBC. Structurally it doesn't make much sense to have the columns as high as they are.
A minimal structure would have corners of the IBC resting on top of the 4x4 columns, with horizontal beams forming two rectangles around the top and bottom of the columns. Add some diagonal braces and you'd be done.
Hi Roland,
Roland: Good points. From what I see your and my main point hasn't been heard yet?
The design looks cute but when the wood gets old or some of the joints get weak a catastrophic failure will likely occur with who knows what damage to the things nearby. Hopefully not people.
There is nothing like observing other failures to teach fail safe design. The tank will become, once it is filled with water, a VERY VERY heavy object. IMHO It needs strong support and also fail safe backup support.
Hi All,
Let's see 660 gallons at about 9 lbs. per gallon.
Right around 3 tons.
The weight of a car more or less.
Not a big deal for some I suppose?
I wouldn't want it to fall on my toe or Anna's or Mark's for that matter :).
John
Stacking IBCs would certainly be OK.
According to this brochure [PDF] you can stack up to four IBC's in a static situation. Even in a truck you're allowed to stack them two high when they're filled with water.
Note that this is valid for new IBC's with a steel base like the one shown on your pictures. When the steel is rusty or if there are broken welds or rivets the safe load will go down in a hurry.
Putting a steel IBC directly on wet soil is probably not a good idea in the long run.
W.r.t. overbuilding; Basically every structure is overbuilt. It's basic engineering practice to design structures for three times the nominal static load. Only in e.g. aircraft engineering where weight is of the essence and lots of effort is put into testing and discovering actual loads lower safety factors are used. And for e.g. off-shore equipment where conditions can be rough and replacement very expensive it is not unheard of to use a safety factor of 10.