Hi All, Throughout this year I've been looking at and pretty much exhausted every way of doing a cost effective loft conversion in my mid terraced 80's 2 bed. Everything is against me, not much room for stairs, open plan lounge requiring sprinklers, trussed roof etc. so its just pretty much a no go without a huge rejig of pretty much the entire house. However I would still like to use it for storage purposes and basically board out the middle of the W in the rafters and get some stuff up there out of the way. The problem I have is that the cold water storage tank is in prime position in the centre of the W so I was wondering if there is any reason why I cant move it closer to the eaves, maybe even getting an eave tank. My concern is the weight distribution of the tank on the trusses and not sure it i could just move it to the other side of the W. If I can get it out of the way I plan to run joists perpendicular to the ceiling hangers (the span is only 3.6M), hung off the party walls with joist hangers and make a suspended ceiling in the centre section. CM
You need to ensure there is adequate support under the tank, I would guess there is a wall or other structure under the current tank position?
You'll need the roof structure to be designed anyway (trussed roof harder than conventional), so this is just another aspect to that process.
Depends on size of tank, a 40gall tank weighs about 150kg if this spanned 2 rafters the load on a rafter would be 75kg which is an adult male. Do you have any concerns when you are climbing around the joists in your loft?
Thanks for the replies, On reflection I'm just going to leave it where it is and board out for storage. For the areas past the truss supports to the eaves which will just be used for storage do you think I should cross joist perpendicular to the ceiling hanger/joists to stiffen the floor up or just straight on top with glued 18mm loft boards? For the central section where I can stand up and where it might have a bit more traffic I'm thinking of hanging 8x2 timber off each of the party walls to create a suspended floor and board over that. Then Multifoil insulation under the rafters and a light and it should make a decent clean storage space.
What is your boiler type? Is it a combi? If so you could (and should) remove the entire cold water storage tank and put the entire house on mains water pressure ... you'll gain space in your loft, be able to drink from every cold water tap in the house, have a decent shower without the need for shower pumps, remove a fault prone shut off valve in the header tank, do a better job of loft insulation, and many more benefits. I've done this to around 10 houses in the 15 years I've been in the UK, and never had a single disadvantage to offset the numerous advantages.
No I have a cylinder in the kitchen under the stairs, no boiler as I am electric only. I recently did my bathroom and extended it into the airing cupboard which meant I had to move the hot water cylinder so i looked into an unvented system, however given that I am no allowed to install myself I opted to move the vented cylinder downstairs and fit an awesome shower pump, so the tank has to stay in the loft. CM