OTT Structural Engineering?

[Radian]

12 hours ago, mvincentd said:

Maybe work backwards from your choice of glazing.  If you want and are prepared to pay for a frameless joint of glass to glass you are going to have to accept a ‘pole’ in that corner, maybe approx 200mm inbound from the glass ( I’ll take a wild guess at a 168 x 6.3 CHS).

If the glass is part of say a sliding door scheme (can’t imagine 6m of fixed panes) what is the manufactures profile.  Mine are  175mm so cladding a 200mm H beam out to say 300mm wouldn’t make a world of difference to ones perception of the view out especially when diluted by the extent of glass you have flanking it.

 

Hi mvincentd, yes there's a mix of fixed and sliding units. I would have been very happy to have a CHS pole in the corner if had been offered it by the SE but this is the reason I asked about the 203 UC here as it's been the only solution on the table.

[TerryE]

16 hours ago, Radian said:

Hi @TerryE I get what you're saying here. However there's a great deal to be said for the quality of natural light that results from floor-to-ceiling glazing. This area is to be used as a day-room that will get extensive use all year round. Far better I think than a typical bolt-on conservatory.

 

If you really feel that the light and view are what you want then go for it.    My caveat would be to reiterate that this will still complicate  thermal management that you should actively address in your design to mitigate the living environment issues:

• You will have an area of approaching 25m² of glass at a U-value of perhaps 0.8 that will give an additional  ~400W heat loss in winter so you will need some form of in-room heating (a radiator or room-specific UFH zone) to keep the room comfortable for about 6 months a year.
• On a sunny spring / autumn day (low elevation sun) you could be getting up to 10kW of solar gain through the windows if you want unfiltered natural light.  No space built even to minimum compliance with current BRegs can take this sort of heat.  High-reflective glass can mitigate this up to 5×, but this could destroy that "natural light" feel.  External shuttering is there for a reason in most Mediterranean homes.  The other alternative is some form of forced air exchange / cooling, but 10kW is a heavy load.  Whatever you do, you will need to manage the thermal environment actively if you don't want the room to get into the 30s and even 40s °C.

16 hours ago, Radian said:

BTW, I know you from your generous contributions to NodeMCU/LUA. I've lost count of the number of ESP8266's I've embedded with that firmware into various projects over the last few years.

 

Thanks for this.  Nice to hear.   BTW, we will be putting out an upgrade for SDK3.0 which means that the Lua application programmer will have 57kB available RAM as well as the up to 256Kb Lua program space offered by LFS.  Not bad for a £2 chip

[Radian]

Just to update: This has now been resolved by employing a second SE who has reviewed the calculations and switched the 203x203 UB for a 100 SHS. This meets with both the steel suppliers and my expectations. The other beams remain as they were. The 6m long 175x100 UB (which some here thought might be inadequate) only has a role in tension as the roof truss system takes 100% of the vertical loading. The beam itself has nothing attached to it above or below.