The Farmers Mart Dec/Jan 2014 - Issue 31

FARM BUILDINGS YorkshireSteelBuildings.co.uk Quality Buildings...Made in Yorkshire Farm Buildings are changing… Farmers need to be aware that the Regulations controlling the design and manufacturing of Agricultural Steel Framed Buildings is changing in 2014. The changes are significant and will affect any steel portal framed building produced in a factory in the UK. Jonathon Jessop from Bedale based shed builders Yorkshire Steel Buildings explains the main issues:Q. Why are the Regulations changing? A. There are two things going on here. Firstly there is a new European Construction Products Regulation in force that states that “steel building frames”, (that is to say the portal columns and rafters that make up a building) have to be “CE Marked” from 1st July 2014. This means that the production of the frames must be assessed and passed by an Independent Body as fit for purpose. In reality this means your building manufacturer will have to implement a raft of quality control measures, procedures, qualifications & inspections to ensure that they are producing steel buildings which are to a high enough standard to achieve the CE Mark. It will be a criminal offence to supply a steel 62 Dec/Jan 2014 FarmersMart frame without this CE Mark from July next year. The second thing that is changing is the British Standard for designing Agricultural Buildings is being amended as a result of the aforementioned European Regulation change and also on the back of hundreds of Farm Buildings collapsing under snow over the past few winters. BS5502 Part 22, (the Standard in question), is changing so that there will only be two main classifications of Farm Buildings:Class 2 buildings will be those Agricultural buildings occupied for less than 6 hours per day at a maximum occupancy of 1 person /100m² with up to a maximum of 10 people in the building. Class 2 buildings must be single storey other than small mezzanine floors. They must also be located no higher than 200m above sea level. Finally they must have no loads applied to them other than normal environmental loads, i.e. wind & snow. A Class 2 building will be built to last 20 years and i

The Farmers Mart Dec/Jan 2014 - Issue 31 | Page 62