Railing/Balustrade types, usages and legal requirements
There is much confusion and many rumors in the market place regarding the legal requirements for railings or balustrades.
This breaks downs to a few subjects
What materials are allowed?
What height is required?
What loadings are these
balustrades meant to withstand and how are these applied, tested or calculated?
What categories are there for different
railing or balustrade usages or areas?
The information below is an attempt to simplify and translate into layman's terms what is basically stated in BS6180:1999 Barriers in and about buildings Code of practice. The information on the loadings is taken from BS6399-1:1996 Loadings for buildings - Part1: Code of practice for dead and imposed loads
What materials are allowed?
There is no limitation per se which material can be used as the balustrade structure, obviously the material chosen must be
1)Rigid and strong, be able to resist and not bend under pressure.
2)Durable and suitable to the area they are to be applied to.
Plastics are not usually used for balustrade structures, but rather metallic elements such as steel, stainless steel or aluminium. Wood is and has been a popular material but maintenance becomes an element to take into consideration.
Sometimes the balustrade structure includes and is the barrier, such as in the case of bars or perforated metal panels. And in many cases in the modern build use is made of glass as infill panels.
When using glass you are obliged to use what is designated as safety glass, this can be either toughened (Heat treated to close to 700' Celsius and cooled quickly creating a strong layer on both faces of the glass while locking inside the glass a lot of tension making it approximately four times stronger to impact than regular float glass, toughened glass in meant to "break safely" and shatter into thousands of small, and therefore, not dangerous little bits) or laminated (Two glass panels with a plastic or resin based interlayer that is allowed to break under impact but must not allow the impacting body to penetrate the panel)
In the United Kingdom toughened glass is the most used glass in
balustrades. Whereas in Europe single pane toughened glass is not allowed. Only laminated glass is allowed.
Thickness and type of glass depends on the area it must protect and impact class required and size of each single pane used, more on this in the section relating to loadings.
