Snow / Wind load on John's plans

[youngins]

John,

Do all of your plans meet or exceed the requirements my county requires for snow/wind load:
Snow Load: 30lbs/square foot
Wind Load: 90miles/hour

Thanks

[jraabe]

The plans I produce are not engineered for a specific set of local requirements. They use best building practices and materials that have been proven by time to be structurally sound. In general the roofs are either trusses (which are designed for your local wind and snow load by the truss company), or are using single rafters like 2x12's that are over designed structurally (deeper than needed for the load but there for the needed insulation depth). This is generally sufficient for all but the heaviest mountain snow loads.

Your building department plans checker will be familiar with working with stock plans and evaluating whether or not local loads are sufficient to require additional hold downs or engineering. Any stock plan you get from any of the magazines or websites may need to have modifications required by the plans checker. That is their public servant paid role, to help you make these local adjustments.

This happens even if you pay $15,000 for a custom design from a local architect. However, you may not know about these adjustments since the builder or architect did the negotiation with the plans checker.

When you do your own submittal you have to play that role. The booklet that comes with the plans tells you what to expect and how to work with the building department if you have not done this before.

[glenn-k]

Our public servant agency sent back our completely engineer designed drawings for the bigger house project requesting the electrical plan and wet stamping and signing of all copies.  They completely skipped asking about critical structural issues that I had to call the engineer about later.  As I suspected the field inspection servant did catch some of it and I had to get an RFI (request for information) signed and stamped by the engineer after I drew up what I wanted to show for the inspector.  Took about 15 minutes of the engineers time that way and all questions were answered to the satisfaction of the Public Service Agency.

I also drew in changes we wanted to field make , that I knew the engineer would OK and slipped them in with the rest of the things he was signing.   Kinda like our government does when making new laws they know we don't approve of. :-/