Hello folks, Possibly a bit of a random question here, but here goes. I've recently acquired myself a 640 litre fish tank that I'm planning on putting in my living room. I completely neglected to consider the weight of the thing before buying it, and I'm wondering if my floor will hold it. Unfortunately the living room is the only downstairs room with a wooden floor. The tank is 6 foot wide with a flat base rather than legs so the weight would be distributed over 4 joists (I think they're 16" apart), and it would be up against a solid brick wall between me and my neighbour. To further complicate matters, on the opposite side of the room which is 3m wide at that point, there's a piano and an organ which are close to 200kg each. So, is sticking another 700kg (ish) on my floor going to make it collapse and flood my house? (I suspect it will!) Any advice appreciated, Andrew.
Pictures are always useful... but assuming you can support the bottom of the tank properly, why not have some friends around, and stand them on the floor where your fish tank might go, and see whether or not they fall through it? Perhaps not very good friends if you're worried...
In the absence of any engineers, I’d reinforce your floor joists and notch 4x2 props under them bearing down on the subfloor.
640 litre tank will weigh about 650kg. Domestic floors are generally designed for a uniform imposed load of ~150kg/m2 (30lb/ft in old money). Even allowing for an unloaded space in front of the tank equal to the tank size you're probably pushing it, but as previous answers it's not possible to give a definitive answer without knowing the joist size, span and spacing. If you're lucky the room size might mean that the sleeper walls (assuming it's a suspended ground floor) are closer together than necessary making the floor stronger than necessary.
In the real world you are highly unlikely to have any problem. The chances are there will be sleeper walls and the organ & piano won't actually affect the area you are looking at and you are at the end of the joist either way. Design codes for timber are based on deflection not strength so the issue would be the floor bending too much not breaking. I'm actually sitting in my office looking at floor to ceiling book cases loaded to the gunnels and wondering if I'm brave enough to work out their loading (first floor)
Thanks for the replies everyone, much appreciated. I'll try and get under there over the weekend and see exactly what's there. My only slight issue is, I've just finished redecorating the living room and my other half might kill me in my sleep if I start ripping floors up now! Assuming I survive, I'll report back with my findings.
So I've done some poking around and here's what I have (see attached diagram (not to any kind of scale!)) The room is 2.52m wide The joists running front to back are 2"×4" spaced at 14" on centre. As luck would have it, 1.4m from the back wall there's a solid wall supporting the joists, which is pretty much where the middle of the tank will be, so I'm assuming this wall will be more than capable of carrying the load.