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What to tell your engineer

Free. No account, no email, nothing uploaded.

What are you thinking of doing

The commonest one, and the one where the engineer’s fee is smallest if you turn up prepared and largest if you do not.

Measure before the visit
Photograph on your phone Free, and it saves a second visit more often than anything else here.
Find out
Ready to brief 0 of 13
13

things left to sort before you call anybody.

What moves the fee

  • Whether the wall is genuinely load-bearing. If it is not, you may need no engineer at all, and that is worth knowing before you pay for a visit.
  • How many storeys and what roof form sit above it. Each one is another load path to work out.
  • Whether a padstone or spreader is needed at the bearings, which depends on the masonry and the reaction.
  • Whether temporary propping needs designing rather than just doing. On anything carrying two floors it usually does.
  • How much of the answer you have already established. An engineer measuring your house is an engineer charging you to measure your house.

What turns it into a bigger job

  • A chimney breast in or above the wall. That is a separate structural problem and it is not a small one.
  • The wall runs under a purlin, a binder or a spine wall in the loft.
  • Existing cracking, doors that stick, or floors that slope towards the wall.
  • Somebody has already taken part of it out.
  • It is a cavity wall internally, which usually means it was once an outside wall and the house has been extended.
Building control
Yes. Removing or altering a load-bearing wall is notifiable building work, and building control will want the engineer’s calculations. Doing it without is a problem at sale, not just in principle.

An engineer measuring your house is an engineer charging you to measure your house. Most of what makes one quotation twice another is information you could gather in an afternoon.

This is a preparation checklist. It does not decide whether a wall is loadbearing, whether a crack matters, or what anything should be sized at. Take the answers to somebody qualified to look at them.

Worked out on this device, by this page. Nothing you typed was sent anywhere or stored, and closing the tab loses it.

Next in the same job

Print a drawing to scale
Tells you a 1:50 A1 becomes 1:141 on A4, before you scale off it.
Metal weight calculator
A whole cutting list, not one bar.
Steel grade reference
What the suffix actually means, and why it is not strength.
UKUSCA

An assistant, not a replacement

If you want to know what to tell your engineer you need, and to have an idea what to look at for costing, this will help. Replacing professional consultancy is not what it is, and it is not trying to be.

That sounds like a limitation and it is nearly the opposite. Most people who go looking for a beam size want something else entirely. They want to know whether the job is viable, roughly what it will cost, and what to have ready before they pay somebody to look at it.

A calculator answers the question you typed. This answers the question you have.

Why nobody can tell you a beam size from a website

Worth being specific, because "get an engineer" on its own sounds like arse-covering.

The span is the easy half. What decides the section is the load: whether the roof bears on that wall, whether there is a wall above it, whether it carries one floor or two, whether a purlin or a binder lands on it as a point load, what the floor above is made of.

Get the load wrong and the section is wrong by a factor, not by a margin. And the person who got it wrong has no way of knowing, because the tool asked them a question and they answered it confidently.

That is a different thing from a quantity calculator being a bit out. It is why this section of the site counts things, measures things and reports published tables, and does not size structure.

The fee is mostly information you could have gathered

Quotes for the same job vary enormously and most people assume it is the engineer. Usually it is not.

An engineer measuring your house is an engineer charging you to measure your house.An hour on site establishing which way the joists run, how many storeys are above, and whether anybody has taken part of it out already is an hour on the invoice, and it is an hour you could have spent yourself with a tape and a phone.

So each job here lists what moves the fee, up and down. Some of it you control completely. Some of it you cannot control but should know about before you get a number and a surprise.

Every item has a reason attached

A checklist without reasons gets skimmed and skipped. So each item says why it is being asked for, and some of them are the whole job:

  • Photograph the ceiling showing which way the joists run. Joists running into a wall means it is carrying them. No other photograph tells an engineer as much in four seconds.
  • Find out whether the roof is cut on site or trussed. On a loft conversion that is the biggest fork in the road, because trussed rafters are a designed system and altering one alters all of them.
  • Note any tree that has recently been removed. On clay that causes heave, which is a different mechanism from subsidence and needs a completely different answer.
  • Put a coin in the shot when photographing a crack. A crack photograph with nothing for scale is nearly useless, and the width is how severity gets classified.

Six jobs, including one nobody else writes for

Removing a wall, a single storey extension, a loft conversion, chimney breast removal, cracking and movement, and structural steelwork, gates and balustrade, which is written from the fabrication side because that is the trade this site comes out of.

That last one raises something most clients have never heard of and every fabricator should have: structural steelwork placed on the market needs EN 1090 certification under a factory production control scheme. If your fabricator does not hold one for the execution class the job needs, that is a problem far better found now than at handover.

What it will not do

It will not tell you whether your wall is load-bearing, whether your crack matters, or what anything should be sized at. Those need somebody who can stand in the room.

What it will do is make sure that when they do, the visit is short, the quote is fair, and you can answer whatever gets asked.

Alongside it: metal weights and steel grades for pricing the steel itself, concrete volumes for the foundations, and printing a drawing to scale before you measure anything off it.

Common questions

What size beam do I need?

Nobody can tell you from a website, and the honest reason is that the span is the easy half. What decides it is the load: whether the roof bears on it, whether there is a wall above, whether it carries one floor or two, whether anything lands on it as a point load. Get the load wrong and the section is wrong by a factor rather than a margin, and you would not know. What this page does instead is get you to the point where an engineer can answer it in one visit.

Do I actually need a structural engineer?

If the wall is not load-bearing, often not. Joists running into it, a wall directly above it, or it running front to back through the middle of the house are strong signs that it is. Establishing that before you pay for a visit is worth doing, and it is the first thing on the checklist for exactly that reason.

What does a structural engineer cost?

For a straightforward domestic beam, typically a few hundred pounds. The spread between quotes is wide, and most of it is not the engineer: it is how much work they have to do to establish things you could have established. An engineer measuring your house is an engineer charging you to measure your house.

What should I have ready before they visit?

Measurements of the opening and what is above it, photographs of both faces of the wall and of the ceiling showing which way the joists run, and the answers to a handful of questions about the age of the building and what has been altered before. The tool lists them per job with the reason attached to each, because a checklist without reasons gets skipped.

Is this a substitute for getting an engineer in?

No, and it is not trying to be. It is the thing you do before you call one so the call is short and the fee is fair. Everything on it is something you can find out yourself with a tape measure and a phone.

Why does it not just give me a number?

Because a number is what you asked for and not what you need. A section size off a website that has never seen your house is a number you cannot use, cannot get signed off, and cannot go back to anybody about when it turns out to be wrong. Being ready for the conversation is worth more, and it is something a website can do.