Hi all, It's my first time using these forums so go easy on me! :-) I am after some advice/opinions on temporary works, namely designed timber hoardings. Historically we have always used subcontractors to build these hoardings. They would provide us (the PC) with an engineered design for the job which we would then get checked/approved by an independent engineer. Only once this design was approved would we then allow work to begin (I know this exceeds BS5975 and HSE guidance which say it can be a "non-independent" engineer check but as a company we decided to go one step above to be safe). Now however we are going to be installing these hoardings ourselves which has caused me some confusion in the whole design/design check process (Please note, these are all very similar "free standing" hoardings for site compounds in store carparks and not complex designs). What i have considered is the following: Design: We commission a handful "generic" engineer's designs (ie one where the posts are concreted into holes, one using barrels where we cannot penetrate the ground etc...) all engineered for the worst possible average wind conditions in the country (which i believe is somewhere on the south/east coast) Check: For each job we then pick the appropriate design use a second (independent) engineer to formally approve it. Has anybody else done it this way? Would it be an issue in years to come when we are using a 10yr old hoarding design (bearing in mind though that we'd be getting an engineer to check/approve it every time)? Any advice/opinions would be greatly appreciated!

There's no fundamental problem with having a generic design and merely picking it off the shelf, and actually now is a pretty good time to prepare one - we've just had a new set of design codes (Eurocodes) after about 30 years of talking about them, and there's no immediate expectation of any fundamental revisions. The latest BS 5975 (BS 5975:2008+A1:2011) incorporates the Eurocode (BS EN 1991-1-4:2005+A1 and the UK National Annex (NA)) wind loading. In addition to the things edwardh noted regarding what varies wind loading, there's also distance to the sea, and the effect that he's noted about masking from surrounding features can get quite complex - how far into town are you, how high is your building relative to surrounding buildings, how far is your building from surrounding buildings). The down side of generic design is that if you want to cover everything in the UK (top of a sea-edge cliff somewhere in Shetland to a site ringed by buildings in central London) you have a massive range of wind load - Shetland is 50% faster basic wind speed than London, so a factor 2.25 on wind loads if sites were similarly situated, but somewhere high near the sea has four times the wind load of somewhere low remote from the sea on top of that, and the other factors all add on. So, in reality, since you don't want your central London sites to be designed ten times (or more) stronger than they need to be, just so you can put the same design onto Shetland sea cliffs, you're probably not going to have one UK-wide 'works anywhere' design, so you will need someone that understands the significant factors to consider the locations and confirm that your generic design is appropriate.