Walkway batten spacing criteria

Video transcript

Good morning and welcome to the next Kattsafe Tek Talk.

Today I’m going to be going over a few little tech tips about walkway.

Firstly here we have a situation where we’ve got a cross over skylights. You’ll notice we have three battens. So in some situations we can have two battens and we’ll show you that next but, one of the better applications is to have 3 battens, as you can see here, one, two, three. But the critical thing I want to show you is that the batten is fixed to the metal deck on this side and that side of the skylight so there’s no fixings in this area of the skylight and then we have three battens across. And, the next situation I’m going to show you is how we would do it using two battens.

Alright, so here we have the two batten situation. Now, the critical thing here when you have two battens is that this batten here and here should be at least 100mm in from each edge because that is where you walk. If you have it too far to the outside then this here will be too flexible.  So, just to recap you must make sure that the fixing is into the steel deck on each side, not going through the skylight, because that can crack when it expands and contracts and if you’re using two battens make sure that it comes in 100mm at least from each side and you’ll notice the difference and it’ll make it a lot stronger. Also recommended to put EPDM or a rubber foam seal underneath the batten to stop it damaging any of the skylights underneath.

OK next I wanted to show you an application we have a situation here where we’ve had to raise the walkway and because we’ve raised the walkway the standard walkway batten is now no longer high enough. So, what we done is we’ve used a batten with a piece of RHS inside to raise it slightly and that will then get us over all these situations here that we have for solar panels.

Then you will see this situation we have here which is another bridge method. So you can see the RHS underneath and then we’re using channel upside down on top and that will then bridge that skylight. So that is another very good recommended method to bridging skylights when you have to raise the walkway.

Just giving clarity on the spacing between battens. So in the past we’ve always had battens at 670mm from centre to centre. However what wasn’t made clear is that when you have multiple spans we can increase that span to 700mm. So we have updated our information and our installation manual to show that the battens can be at 700mm centre to centre on the battens when you have more than a double span. So, if you’ve only got a single section of walkway, a single piece, then 670 the maximum. And the other thing is with that 700 that means on the clip lock type roofs we can now use that at the spacings because the 700 clip lock is every third rib or something like that. So just bear that in mind walkway can span the 30mm mesh can now span 700mm between battens.

Ok, so the next thing we’d like to show you is wherever there’s a joiner bar we always specify that the joiner bar is a maximum 200mm beyond the batten. However in some situations 200mm may still be too much as you can see here that is still very flexible. So, having another batten in that area just before that is something that will need to be inserted especially if it is a weaker type of roof. So 200 is still just a guide but in some applications it may need another batten. So, just to show you exactly where those screws should go, we normally put one in this corner and one in the opposite side so that it allows for expansion and contraction of the walkway.  So we put the screw through that walkway batten into the webbing of the walkway, and then on the opposite side. Cause this bit of walkway’s been cut we don’t have one there but we can put it here.

Alright so there you have it.  So there’s the walkway batten in place so it’s tek screwed, it stops walkway batten from moving that still allows the expansion and contraction.

Thank you.