Decking support posts?

[Jim77]

Good Morning everyone, I've just joined.
For a while I've been reading every post relevant to decking on all 42 "In the Garden" pages

I want to replace our lawn with hard landscaping for two reasons. 1 - now that we are retired I want to reduce the work in the garden - mainly lawn maintenance. and 2 - since houses were built on the farmland behind us the water level has risen and ruined our grass anyway.

I want to build a 4.8M x 4M freestanding low level deck away from the house. I have removed the lawn in the area and about 100mm of the soil. I intend using support posts in concrete to support the joists. How many posts and at what spacing for a solid deck using 4X2 joists? And if I decide I can go a bit higher how many support posts and spacing for 6X2 joists?

Thank you
Jim

PS please forgive my mixing Imperial and Metric dimensions

 

[Thermo]

no hard and fast rule really. We start with a post at each corner and then put one roughly every 1-1.50m. After that we do a bounce test and put extra ones in where needed. Obviously less are needed with 6 x 2

 

[Jim77]

Thanks for your quick reply Thermo. So probably about 20 posts? Do I have to relate the spacing to the overall joist spacing, say multiples of 450mm?

This is the area.

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• Jim77
• 12 Jun 2008
• 1

Jim

 

[WabbitPoo]

As the man said, put some in, do a bounce test, put more in as required. There are no "rules" as such.