How to Build a Warehouse That Won't Damage Your Inventory
Your business relies on the health of your inventory and your assets. Keeping them secured in a dry, safe building will help your business run more smoothly and efficiently.
By following basic warehouse design principles, fabric buildings are ideal warehouses for all types of stored products.
Warehouse Design Considerations
Legacy buildings are constructed using sturdy ExxoTec™ fabric on a rigid steel frame. The frame creates unlimited design flexibility with clearspan space.
With this design flexibility, every aspect of the building is customized to meet your project spec and help maximize the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of your warehouse. With options that result in more useable square footage, you make the most revenue from your building while managing costs.
Auxiliary systems, including conveyors and cranes to load and move large items, can be safely suspended from the building frame. Keeping these systems off the floor means you have more useable storage space. By adjusting the size of each individual steel frame, the Legacy team can design a building around your specific operation and the ideal location of your overhead loads.
Take a video tour of a bulk storage warehouse with conveyor.
Engineering also answers the question of how to build a warehouse that is wider, longer or even taller. Higher sidewalls mean more space inside to operate heavy equipment or to install racking all the way to the exterior walls – maximizing your square footage.
Large sidewall entrances are available with optional jackbeams. Endwall entrances can include overhead or rolling doors of any size. Adding these large openings allow safe access to the building for equipment or large components which may be necessary for your operation.
Airtight Building Solutions
Steel buildings are constructed of inflexible sheets bolted together with thousands of tiny fasteners. Legacy’s fabric building panels are permanently welded together to create one continuous membrane without small fastener holes. This tight seal keeps the elements out, even in extreme conditions.
The tiny fasteners and seams on steel buildings are also a common source of air leaks – which mean that conditioned air escapes the building while the outside air flows in. This fights against climate control systems, making them less effective and multiplying your heating and cooling costs.
Why Natural Light in Warehouses?
In uninsulated buildings, the light of the sun shines through ExxoTec™ fabric – creating a bright interior, free of shadowy dark corners. This natural lighting allows you to save on the costs of lighting systems installed and maintained, and it creates a superior environment for stored material.
See the light inside a Legacy building.
People have a natural attraction to sunlight. Workers will find the interior of a fabric building a more pleasant and productive environment, giving the feel of the outdoors with the weather protection of indoor space.
Insulated Fabric Buildings
Insulated Legacy buildings are available to provide the highest level of climate control. While insulated fabric buildings lose the advantage of natural light, they use a bright white liner to reflect and magnify the interior lighting.
Combined with the tight seal of fabric buildings, an insulated fabric building will create the specific climate needed to store sensitive material.
Security in Fabric Buildings
Protecting inventory typically means a security system to stop theft. While there is no building type that is immune to security concerns, fabric buildings can be as safe as any other type of building.
Because of Legacy’s straight sidewalls, sidewall cladding of any variety such as metal, precast concrete, etc., can be added to address security and architectural criteria. And by adding security alarms, floodlights and other common security features you can make a fabric building as safe as any other building with windows.
With these warehouse design ideas, fabric buildings help you get the most out of your investment and run a cost-effective warehouse for years to come. Get more information about fabric buildings with translucent roofs that can change the way you store your assets.