Shelving – Know its Limits

To avoid shelving breaking in the workplace it is important to make sure that you’ve thought about what you intend to store on it; this will determine what type you should choose.

To make things simple we have grouped all our shelving into suitable weight categories to help you determine what shelf capacity you need.  The weight of the objects you intend to store on your shelves is one of the most important things to consider when choosing what to buy.

Here are our three main weight categories of shelving in stock with some ideas of what you can store on them.

Light Duty Shelving – For Offices, Stockrooms & Lightweight Industrial

Light duty shelving can be used in offices, stockrooms and in industrial areas where lightweight items need to be stored.

For example, our budget steel shelving has a weight bearing potential of up to 175kg.  This means that it is ideal for an office environment where you would need to store paperwork, lever arch folders and other office things such as pads, pens and general stationery.

Don’t use it for anything heavier than the weight you have been told it can hold though. We’ve all made the mistake of just assuming something will hold; it won’t, it’s not designed to. This can become more than just an inconvenience; it can be a hazard in the workplace which can cause injury.

Medium Duty Shelving – For Warehouses, Garages & Medium Weight Industrial

Medium duty shelving such as these shelving units typically hold up to 340kg and are suitable for industrial environments, like warehouses and garages.

We appreciate that our customers do have very diverse working environments; therefore we provide a useful chart underneath our products to allow you to scan through and choose the unit most suited to your needs quickly and easily. This information identifies the size of the shelving unit and the maximum weight it can take.

“UDL” stands for Uniform Distributed Weight – this is the weight the shelf is designed to take if the weight is evenly spread across the whole shelf.

Heavy Duty Shelving – For Factories, Warehouses & Heavy Weight Industrial

This category of shelving is for objects of more than 300-350kg and is ideal for warehouses, garages, factories and other heavy-duty industrial environments.

Typically, you would invest in heavy duty shelving if you wanted to store products in a garden centre or a warehouse storing pallets.

Heavy duty shelving is often used in combination with lifting and stacking equipment as the items stored are too heavy for a person to lift without help.

This extra heavy duty unit can store loads of up to 710kg. In order for you to be able to be up and running with it, the unit has a boltless assembly and only needs a simple rubber mallet to make sure everything is slotted into where it should be.

Do you have questions about shelving and racking?

We hope this helps you to decide what sort of shelving you require for your workplace! If you need any more help, contact our friendly team.