Solutions and products - Rural construction - Light garage for heavy machines

Keeping expensive vehicles and farming machines (e.g. combine harvesters) in garages not only extends their life cycles, but also ensures appropriate conditions for servicing and maintenance tasks.

Buildings made of sandwich panels are frequently encountered on farms in highly developed countries, but are not that popular in the Polish countryside, where similar facilities are constructed mainly of heavy construction materials, such as concrete blocks or hollow bricks. Main advantages of sandwich panels include relatively low construction costs, very short time required for investment completion and numerous purposes and applications of such buildings: the simplest structures can be used as garages for tractors, cars and farming machines, the number of which on an average farm is continuously increasing. The same building made of sandwich panels and used as a garage can be easily adapted into a warehouse, a granary, a mushroom growing room or a facility of any other purpose. If you want to learn more about lots of opportunities offered by this method of construction to modern farmers, please take a look at the project presented below.

Specification and technical data of the building:

Purpose: multiple purpose garage/warehouse
External dimensions: 23,06 x 12,20 m
Built-up area: 281,33 m2
Usable area dimensions: 22,50 x 11,70 m
Usable area: 263,25 m2
Building height at the ridge: 6,93 m
Roof inclination angle: 20´/36,4%
Gate openings
Otwory bram:
- front gate - width: 4,50 m, height: 4,30 m
- side gates - width: 4,00 m, height: 4,20 m

Construction: construction type: ZET hall; one-level and one-room building, without supporting pillars inside the hall; structure components made of cold-bent galvanised steel profiles, factory-perforated, assembled with anchor bolts and foundation screws of modules of the length of 4,50 m each.

Walls: prefabricated walls of polyurethane sandwich panels (Balextherm ST 80) of thermal conductivity at U=0.28, mounted on the structure components with self-tapping screws; panels are made of sheet of the thickness of 0.50 mm, galvanised and protected with polyester coating.

Roof: prefabricated roof of polyurethane sandwich panels (Balextherm D 80/125) of thermal conductivity at U=0,27; panels are made of sheet of the thickness of 0.50 mm, galvanised and protected with polyester coating; panels are mounted with self-tapping screws.

Foundations: made according to the custom construction design, depending on the requirements and ground conditions on the particular plot; the hall may be located on spot footings, strip or slab; for halls that are supposed to function as garages / warehouses, foundations slabs of thickness and reinforcement adapted to expected load are recommended.

Floor: for halls that are supposed to function as garages / warehouses, trowelled cement floor is sufficient.

Gates and doors: generally available in the market, depending on the investor’s choice; due to lower costs, the project presented herein assumes that the door will be located in the main entry gate.

A garage/warehouse is built of ready-made components supplied by the manufacturer directly to the construction site. You can design a larger or smaller building by adding or removing single module of the length of 4.50 each. The manufacturer creates a design of the building construction adapted to the needs of the particular investor free of charge, within the total order value. The design is a basis for the construction design attached to the application for a construction permit, which usually takes no more than 2 weeks. The production of all the blocks (components) of which the building is constructed takes 4-6 weeks. Depending on the size of the hall, its assembly takes 5-7 working days of a team consisting of a few workers.

The structure of the hall enables its custom arrangement to suit individual needs of the investor. It can be divided into smaller rooms by partition walls (it is possible, for instance, to arrange a separate workshop, rest and refreshment room or office); you can also furnish suspended ceilings (the structure can bear load up to 10 kg/m²). The interior can be lit by natural light owing to ridge skylights and windows in the walls. They have be planned during the elaboration of the construction design or produced later, which is relatively easy and cheap in the case of this type of structures.

The building presented herein has insulated walls, since it is intended to be heated. The heating system depends on the individual preferences of the investor. It can be assumed that in winter, the temperature inside the hall should be slightly above zero degrees Celsius, while in a separate workshop, the temperature should be higher, in order to provide comfortable condition for workers. If the hall is supposed to function solely as a garage and warehouse for storing equipment and as such does not require keeping the temperature inside on a constant level, its walls and roof do not have to be made of thermally insulated panels, but can be constructed of trapezoidal sheet, e.g. BTU55 of galvanised steel of the thickness of 0.50 mm in polyester coating. It enables significant reduction of investment costs. However, one should remember that such a hall will not be universal and suitable for many diverse purposes and its adaptation to any other applications in the future will require additional expenses connected with covering the walls and the roof with sandwich panels.

Aleksandra Wojciechowska
Source: Dom i Zagroda 3/2008

The article published courtesy of the Dom i Zagroda farming, constructions and renovations magazine.