Timber cavity battens

[m_struct]

What loads are timber cavity battens on the exterior wall of a single family residential building designed for? Refer below. Note there are no blocking in the wall.
[li]Wind[/li]
[li]Seismic[/li]
[li]Dead[/li]
[li]Live[/li]
What live load (if any) would is the batten designed for? Ladder leaning against the wall? Like a handrail barrier load spanning between studs?

 

[KootK]

I don't design in NZ but my guess is that the batten design would be dominated by:

1) Wind perpendicular to the wall and, in particular, the fastenings in tension for that.

2) The dead load of the supported cladding system as a gravity load.

3) Seismic might come into play if the cladding is stone or something with real mass to it.

It may well be that these things are prescriptively "designed". You'd have to rely on somebody local to tell you that though.

 

[m_struct]

It was light weight cladding. And you are correct KootK - the design was governed by wind suction (pull out of fixings) plus small DL pullout from eccentity.

Just wondering if there is also a live load to consider such as a person leaning against the wall or a ladder leaning against building. These load situations with small loads can be easy to over thing.

 

[KootK]

These load situations with small loads can be easy to over thing.

Trudat. I find that it's much easier to design your average 50,000 lb thing than your average 2 lb thing. Our standards and research tend to be more geared towards the large. I've dabbled in glass and curtain wall engineering and, in that space, I only ever saw things explicitly designed for a live load of the sort that you described when the element needed to be designed as a guard rail of sorts.

You might try moving your question over to the NZ specific forum here. We've got people for that, Agent666 in particular.