The benefits you gain from commercial shelving provide both the motivation and the return on investment that justifies purchasing them in the first place. The diversity of options in commercial shelving is extensive, ranging from smaller, compact commercial shelves and racks to heavy duty industrial commercial shelving systems.
The reason for all this diversity is to provide the most efficient conversion of floor space and vertical cube space into an optimum environment for one or more specific types of contents. As a rule of thumb, any item or container that features symmetric or proportional dimensions and has at least one flat surface can be stored on some sort of commercial shelf. This is because shelving systems themselves are rectangular in design and provide horizontal storage space in ascending rows.
Some cylindrical containers (such as barrels with substantial girth) can be stored on shelves provided they too have a flat surface on the end with a sufficient radius to balance and support their weight. Irregularly sized materials such as tubing, pipe, furniture, sheetrock, and flooring supplies normally require more specialized storage areas such as those provided by cantilever racks.
Because the most important aspect of storage is balancing and securing the load, weight actually plays a secondary role in determining which commercial shelves you need to buy. Most 18 gauge and 20 gauge steel shelving units can easily support 400 to 450 lbs in weight.
This is normally sufficient for the average crate or box, and because these commercial shelves feature sufficiently compact builds to be positioned in a number of places, anything from stockrooms to the entirety of a wall can be efficiently consolidated and organized with as many of these units as you need to stack and store materials, products, supplies, tools, and even paperwork. (Some of our smaller units routinely find their way into the offices of managers who use them for easy access to drawings and materials that need to be worked on throughout the day).
Very large, industrial-strength commercial shelves, of course, are meant for more heavy duty storage. If you are storing parts in large crates, any number of industrial strength shelves can help you safely and efficiently do this. Your choices are best determined by considering three factors when making your selection. The first is safety. With very heavy or large metal containers, make absolutely certain that you invest in a commercial shelving system whose weight capacity exceeds the total weight of items.
Maxing out a brand new shelving system is never a good idea. A worker may be completely unaware that the shelf has already reached its maximum capacity of safe use and inadvertently exceed safe limits, creating instability in the process. The thing you need to consider is convenient material access. If you only need to retrieve items from the front of the shelf, closed back shelves or commercial wide span systems offer you some of the most powerful storage units in existence and the added stability of resting against a wall.
Open ended systems, however, are often required for items that have to be retrieved by a team of people continually throughout the day, such as you see in many assembly lines. Finally, the actual length, height, and depth of the commercial shelf you invest in really should be assessed in terms of floor space/vertical cube space conversion. The total dimensions of a shelf are not always indicators of the actual interior, usable storage space.
To make certain every square cubic inch pays your back for your investment, talk to your material handling specialist about usable storage space, weight capacity, accessibility, and methods of ensuring the unit remains stable and secure in every conceivable scenario.
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