Flooring Sheets are readily available at retailers such as Bunnings and Mitre 10 as well as every timber merchant but are they suited to your Mezzanine Floor project? We will look at the various Flooring sheets available on the market, their general use and what we use and recommend in our Mezzanine Floor Designs.
As a general rule, two types of load capacity are considered:
kPa which is the Uniformly distributed load – This is load that is spread across a large surface area.
kN which is the Point load – Think of a fridge that’s entire weight is on 4 x small feet.
Plywood Flooring Sheets
Typically, Plywood Flooring sheets are more expensive than Particleboard Flooring which is why they are not as common, particularly in a residential setting as they are just used as a subfloor and hidden from view so why pay more than is needed?
Where Plywood Flooring sheets come into their own is with a Mezzanine Floor Design or any other commercial requirement where we are governed by load capacities that are far greater than what is required when building residentially.
Residential: 1.5kPa and 1.8kN
Offices: 3kPa & 2.7kN
Office Storage Space: 5kPa & 4.5kN
General Storage: 5kPa & 7kN
As you can see, the load capacity of a Mezzanine Floor is far greater than that of a house and we need to ensure that we design our Flooring sheets correctly to suit these requirements.
Plywood Flooring is available from your big box retailers such as Bunnings and Mitre 10, but you will be limited by what they supply as the different types of plywood flooring required for commercial projects and Mezzanine Floors varies and is not as common as your typical residential flooring sheets.
We use and recommend International Panels for our Flooring Sheets – They are based in Loganholme, QLD – Just north of where are located on the Gold Coast and just south of Brisbane where we complete a fair amount of our work. They have every plywood product you can think of including all the different grades, thicknesses and options for Pine and Hardwood depending on the application.
They manufacture the tongue and groove into the Plywood Sheets on site and can also cut to size or CNC the sheets if required.
When designing our Mezzanine Floors, we generally work off 3kPa and 5kPa load capacity coupled with a point load of 4.5kN. These loads are going to cover 99% of requirements in a real-world scenario. You are almost 3 x the capacity of a residential house with these!
For Example: 21mm Plywood F11 with Joists @ 400 Centres would result in 36.9kPa and 5.5kN which is way above the kPa needed and exceeds the kN requirement.
Beyond this, if the Mezzanine Floor is going to be used in a heavier duty application such as Pallet Storage, then we must design to 2.4kPa per metre of storage height and a point load of 7kN – We are getting really strong here and will be using 25mm Plywood sheets.
For Example: 25mm Plywood F11 with Joists @ 400 Centres would result in 49.5kPa and 8.6kN which is way above the kPa needed and exceeds the kN requirement.
There are some nuances of Plywood that need to be considered: On the load charts you will see there are Panel Codes. These refer to thickness of the sheet overall, thickness of the face veneer and the amount of veneer layers.
For Example: 21-30-7 is 21mm thick Plywood with 3.0mm face veneer and 7 x veneer layers.
Something to consider with Plywood Flooring when building your Mezzanine Floor, particularly with the Pine versions are the weight of the sheets themselves. You will find a 21mm Plywood Sheet is around 33kg which is 40% less than a 22mm Particleboard Sheet which makes them much easier to work with in the construction of the project.
We use Plywood Flooring for most of our Mezzanine applications as it is lighter, stronger and in our opinion a better product.
Particleboard Flooring Sheets
If you have a look on any residential construction site, you will find Particleboard Flooring – Typically in the form of 19mm Yellow Tongue or 22mm Red Tongue. There are also other colours available such as Burgundy and Beige, these are basically just different suppliers differentiating their product to the others.
Particleboard Sheets are usually 3600mm in length and 800mm or 900mm in width. When you get to Blue Tongue which is 25mm thick, it drops down to a 600mm width to reduce the weight of each sheet so it can be moved around on site easily and isn’t excessively heavy.
Particleboard Flooring is available as standard or termite treated which is relevant for Residential construction and something the Architect or designer will consider at the design stage.
Residential load capacity requirements are 1.5kPa Uniformly distributed load (kPa) and 1.8kN Point Load (kN) and Particleboard Flooring suits this. Joists spacings vary depending on the sheet thickness and will be designed according to the chart referenced below – For Example: 19mm Particleboard with Joists @ 450 Centres would result in 8.1kPa and 2.5kN which is well above what is required.
A Mezzanine Floor in a Residential setting can also be designed to suit this Floor Load however we usually opt for a 3kPa or 5kPa Uniformly distributed load and 4.5kN Point which is what is required in a commercial setting – You can really load these Mezzanine Floors up.
For Particleboard to work with this load capacity we would need to use 22mm Flooring with Joists @ 300mm centres or 25mm Flooring with Joists @ 400mm centres. We need to then establish if the cost of the joists at these spacings coupled with the cost of the flooring sheets required is a good solution for the end user of the Mezzanine Floor.
The short answer is Particleboard is suitable for a Mezzanine Floor installation if you space your joists accordingly. Whether or not it will be the most cost-effective solution will vary on the size of the Mezzanine.
Conclusion:
Plywood Flooring and Particleboard Flooring will suit your Mezzanine Floor project if the joists are spaced accordingly, and we use both on our projects.
Plywood Sheets in 21mm F11 with joist spacings at 400mm is the most common design as this covers the load capacity of most projects whilst not having to drop to 300mm spacings which adds to the cost of the steel and labour. We also find that our customers prefer the look of Plywood sheets and when asked whether their flooring preference on their Mezzanine Floor build is Particleboard or Plywood, the answer is generally the latter.
Links:
Carter Holt Harvey Ecoply Link: https://chhply.co.nz/assets/Uploads/EcoplySpecificationInstallationGuideCurrent.pdf
EWPAA Structural Plywood Design Guide
https://ewp.asn.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/EWPAA-Structural-Plywood-LVL-Design-Guide-v5-FINAL.pdf
EWPAA Particleboard Flooring Design Guide
https://www.australianpanels.com.au/documents/EWPAA-particleboard-flooring.pdf
