Industrial mezzanines
Add a floornot a building
A mezzanine turns the height above your operation into floor you can stand on. OTS designs it, engineers it, supplies it and installs it — and treats it as what it is: a building project that happens to be made of steel.
Two ways up
Taller racking and a mezzanine answer different questions
Both spend the same cubic metres over your head. Only one of them creates a place where people work, and that difference is the whole project.
| Racking, taller | A mezzanine | |
|---|---|---|
| What it holds | Unit loads on beams. Product only — nobody stands up there. | A floor: product, packing benches, a pick module, sometimes an office. |
| How you reach it | From the aisle, by lift truck. | By stair — and by whatever lifts the product up, which is a separate problem with its own answer. |
| What governs it | Structural design. Where the National Building Code applies, racking is designed to CSA S16. | Structural design, plus how people get off it and what a solid deck does to the fire protection above and below. |
| What changes it later | Moving a beam or adding a level. Both go through an engineer before, not after. | A change of use. A deck built to hold stock is not automatically a deck people work on. |
A mezzanine is a floor people stand on.
It changes how a building behaves in a fire and how people leave it. That is why it is engineered and sealed like a building rather than ordered like a shelf, and why the drawings come before the steel.
Before any steel is ordered
What gets engineered
Span and height are the last two questions, not the first two. These come first, and any one of them can move a column.
- What goes on it
- Stock, order picking, packing benches, an equipment platform, offices over the floor. Each is a different load, spread differently. A deck sized for cartons is not a deck sized for a pallet drop zone and a machine.
- The slab underneath
- The columns land the whole structure on a handful of small footprints. What the existing floor can take is part of the design, and it often sets the column grid rather than the span doing it.
- Getting up, and getting out
- Stairs, guardrails, a gate at the pallet opening, and the walk from the far corner to a way down. How many stairs there are and where they land is decided by the building code and by the authority reviewing the drawings, not by the steel.
- What the deck does to fire protection
- A deck is a floor for everything on it and a ceiling for everything under it. Sprinkler coverage and lighting below are answered before the layout is fixed, because either one can move a column after the fact.
- The permit set
- Sealed drawings, prepared to be submitted and reviewed. Plan the project around a review, not around a delivery date.
- What it lands on
- If the deck is carried by racking you already have, that racking is now holding a floor. Its capacity has to be recalculated and re-sealed: a configuration change is a re-certification, not an adjustment.
How the project runs
From the use to the as-builts
The use, in detail
What goes up there, how it arrives, how it leaves, and who works on it. Everything downstream is a consequence of this conversation.
Engineering and drawings
Structure, connections, stairs and guarding, calculated and sealed by an OIQ-member engineer at Optim-Structure, our sister engineering firm.
Review and permit
The sealed set goes to whoever has to approve it. Questions come back, and we answer them rather than forwarding them to you.
Supply, install, hand over
Our own or contracted crews erect it, and you keep the sealed drawings and the as-builts. If anything changed on site, the as-builts say so.
FAQ
Questions we get
No, and it is worth being blunt about it. CSA A344 is the user guide for steel pallet racking. A mezzanine is not racking — it is a floor, and what governs it is the building code, the authority that reviews the drawings, and the engineer who seals them. If a supplier cites a racking standard for the structural design of a mezzanine, they are citing the wrong document.
Sometimes, and it is the first thing to check rather than the thing to assume. Racking asked to carry a floor is carrying loads it was not calculated for, so its capacity has to be recalculated and the structure re-certified by an engineer. If the numbers do not work, the mezzanine stands on its own columns beside the racking instead, and the racking goes on doing the job it was designed for.
Assume yes and plan for the review. A mezzanine adds occupied floor area inside a building, which is exactly the kind of change an authority having jurisdiction wants drawings for. We prepare the sealed set; how long the review takes belongs to the reviewer, and no supplier can promise you otherwise.
The steel, yes. It is bolted rather than poured, and it comes apart. The approval does not travel with it: a new building is a new slab, a new review and new sealed drawings. Budget a move as a re-installation rather than as a transport.
Related
Talk it through
Start with what goes on the deck
Book a call with an advisor. Bring the use, the building and whatever drawings you have — the sizing follows from those three.