A great way to calculate the amount of pallet racking you need is, to begin with a given distance of racking, often called a “run.” A “run” is a given distance of racking that can be used to create a pallet rack storage arrangement. A run’s distance is represented by the available warehouse floor space that will be used to install the continuous stretch of pallet racking. Runs can incorporate a stretch in a large fulfillment center that’s several hundred feet long or a few bays of racks along a storage wall. A medium or large application may include several runs of pallet racks. You need to bear in mind that merely knowing a run’s length doesn’t mean you will know exactly how many pallet racks you’ll need.
Most pallet rack systems are composed of two vital pieces – horizontal cross beams and upright frames. Both pieces come in a variety of sizes. Some measuring will need to be done once you know how long your run is. Pallet rack beams come in several standard lengths, including 4’, 8’, 9’, 10’, and 12’. There are some companies that also offer non-standard sizes you can choose from.
Measuring the Length of a Pallet Rack Beam
In order to figure out the length of your beams, you need to consider what you plan on storing first. For the purposes of this blog, the example we’ll be using are two standard pallets 48” deep x 40” wide per beam level. A beam level 96” in length will be used to help situate the two 40” wide pallets. We’ll also say, for the sake of our example, that the space we have is a 100’ run.
How to Calculate Pallet Racking Length
We can begin our calculations now that we have our two main variables. First, there is 100’ of space with 8’ segments. You will divide 100 by 8. Because we do not have half of a bay to work with, we’ll round this number down to 12. Therefore, 12 bays at 8’ wide (12 x 8) equals 96’, which is close to our 100’ goal, but we’re not finished yet. Next, we’ll need to calculate the width of the upright frame columns.
These 12 bays will need 13 frames each. The width of the upright is around 3” in most cases. We’ll multiply 13 (frames) x 3 (inches) to get 39” which is 3’3”. We now have 99’3” of racking. Unfortunately, 99’ won’t cut it if you need a racking span that’s exactly 100’ in length. But if your application will allow you to stay within the 100’ mark, 99’3” should work fine.
To find out how many beams will be needed, we’ll take the number of beam levels for each bay and multiply this number by two. The answer will then be multiplied by the number of bays we have. For example, if we have two beam levels for each bay, here’s how it will look:
2 (beam levels/bay) x 2 (beams/level) x 12 (number of bays) = 48 beams
How to Calculate the Number of Desired Wire Decks
The last step is to calculate how many wire decks we’ll need. In the case of our example, this problem is pretty easy to solve. Two 46” wide wire decks are needed for each 96” beam level, so the number of beams will match the number of wire decks we need. This is not the case for all beam lengths though. For instance, for 12’ beams, we’ll need three 46” wide wire decks for each beam level, so we would multiply the number of beams by 1.5 to get the number of wire decks we need for our project.
Like magic, with a couple of easy math calculations, we are able to calculate the number of wire decks, beams, and frames we’ll need to construct our run. While this process may seem simple (most of the time it is), before you settle on the amount of materials you need to order, contact us first. We provide free design consultation to help make your warehouse layout design more efficient, offer valuable information, or even double-check your calculations to make sure they are correct.
Check out our Pallet Calculator. It will show you the number of pallets you can store in a given space.
