If your business involves industrial warehouse racking, you’ll find the guidelines for its operation in HSE76.

Advice regarding the fixing of your pallet racking system is clear. “Where necessary,” says the guidance, “racking should be securely fixed to the floor.”

What’s “necessary”?

As you might expect, one person’s ‘necessary’ is another’s optional, so the HSE advice adds some detail as to the circumstances where your Warrington pallet racking will be expected to be fixed. Specifically:

“Free-standing racks (ie not fixed to the floor) should not be used in areas where lift trucks, order pickers or other mechanical handling devices are used.”

Additionally, the guidance states that, where your Warrington pallet racking system is subject to vertical loads (from the weight of each pallet) and horizontal loads (from the forces involved when loading and unloading pallets into the system) the rack system should be fixed to the floor. Whilst the HSE provides fixing ratios based on height to depth of the racking system, the simplest and safest course is to simply fix all uprights.

> Take a look at our different types of racking systems

Exceptions

There are some exceptions to the HSE’s rules of thumb. Where your Warrington industrial warehouse racking is fixed in some other way to part of the building, the requirement to fix the uprights may reduce. That is, however, dependent on the areas of the building used as fixing points having been ‘proved’ by structural calculations as capable of handling the forces and stresses involved. If they haven’t been so proven, the safest option will remain to fix all uprights, irrespective of the number of fixings elsewhere along the rack.

Requirements are also less onerous where forklifts or other forms of mechanical handling equipment are not involved, although for the majority of industrial pallet racking systems in Warrington, such instances are extremely rare.

Call Rack-Master

The design and installation of your industrial warehouse storage in Warrington involves a complex combination of load tolerances, accessibility requirements and safety considerations. We’ll help ensure your pallet racking is fit for purpose.

To plan your next installation, or to ensure your existing Warrington pallet racking is safe, call Rack-Master on 01422 300 644.

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