Too much weight?

[pitchshifter]

Since moving into our new house last year I've been slowly beefing up our food stocks. Most of my new kitchen is drawers, so the most useful storage for stuff I want to stack is in 2 double-door wall cupboards. I keep my tins in one of these, and have over 70 full size tins, plus multiple smaller tins of tuna/sardines/anchovies stacked in there at any one time (I rotate and re-stock with my weekly shop), plus a few bags of flour/sugar/yeast. Recently my mum visited and made some comment about there being too much weight for a wall cupboard. Do you guys think there's anything to this? Surely those cupboards are built to take some weight?

[jennyjj01]

Seriously, I think she's right to be concerned.
It's all down to how well it was constructed and installed.
Your typical double width kitchen wall cupboard is hanging on just two brackets held by a total of 4 to 6 screws.

You can soon figure the total weight by reading the can labels and totting it up. What is harder is checking how well it's fitted.

https://www.awakitchencabinets.com/kitc ... apacities/

[grenfell]

Funnily enough this very topic has come up on another forum I use albeit a more building related one.
I'd agree with Jenny although there isn't a black and white answer as such , there being variables . Wider cupboards seem to be worst simply because there's fixings for a given width. Plus construction can do little to stop the thing sagging. It's not helped by how the sides are jointed to the backs and the whole thing being just chipboard , assuming we are talking about big standard kitchen units. Putting extra fixings in the backs may help to a degree as can putting metal brackets or supports to the sides.
Personally I'd use the wall cupboards for storing lighter weight stuff , dried food for instance and if one wishes to store a large number of heavy tins then I'd use the floor standing units as the weight is transferred directly to the floor. It's been said on here before but the space beneath the units can be used . Kickboards only clip on and access is pretty simple . No limits to weight and has the advantage that prying eyes don't see things either.

[jansman]

Modern houses are crap. My youngest has just ( paid?) a quarter of a million for a brick and cardboard house. But... you live where you can. Our Victorian gaff, with walk- in pantry, fireplaces, well and massive garden only has single skin walls and electric back up heating. The kids didn’t want that though. Had to have a chipboard kitchen; not pine and quarry tiles.

[jennyjj01]

don't forget the little pins that hold the adjustable shelves. If they're metal, they won't break but might deform the hole. If plastic, they are not so strong.

If shelves sag, all bets are off and it will collapse.

I've had a (badly fitted) single 600mm wide wall cupboard fall off the wall. It wasn't overloaded and it crushed the steel bread bin to oblivion.

A well fitted quality cabinet should comfortably take a person's weight, if evenly distributed.

[jansman]

When we moved in here it had a lovely looking ‘fitted’ kitchen. Only took a year before cabinets fell off the wall , and chipboard sagged. I got a carpenter to build us a proper, solid wood set up. Didn’t cost any more than the chipboard equivalent. It is an awful construction material, but it is symptomatic of our throwaway world I am afraid.

[grenfell]

I've had a (badly fitted) single 600mm wide wall cupboard fall off the wall. It wasn't overloaded and it crushed the steel bread bin to oblivion.

Prrobably zoom 20 years ago I was doing some work at a kids home. One of my jobs was replacing the boxing around a pipe between two wall cupboards and was just a case of tapping it back on. As I was doing the job the one cupboard came off the wall and it was full of crockery . I looked at the mess and when I turned round the caretaker was stood in the doorway. I just thought I was in so much trouble when he started laughing. Seems he had come into the room quietly and seen the whole thing and said the look on my face was priceless. The cupboard was hung on buttons which in builder speak are two blocks that dovetail together , one screwed to the cabinet the other to the wall. Really good vertical support but there must have been lateral movement over time and the blocks just stopped being lined up.

[Arwen Thebard]

In thirty plus years of fitting kitchens I've only ever seen wall cabinets come away from the wall once and that was due the installers (Not us ) using the wrong sized wall plugs and screws. It would have to be a pretty flimsy chipboard cupboard to fail from the weight of what was placed on them. (First time for everything though now that Ive said that..... )

[pitchshifter]

Thanks for the replies everyone! I think I'll weigh some tins and stuff and do an estimate of the weight in there, and if it's less than 250lbs or so (which I think it will be) then I'll carry on as I am. The link that Jenny posted suggests max capacity of 500-600lbs which seems like a lot! I think the kitchen was fitted 7 or 8 years before we bought the house, and seems to be of good quality (although definitely chipboard). It's holding up well, joins are neat, nothing broken or loose etc. though obviously really difficult for me to tell as I haven't chosen the kitchen or seen it being fitted...

I do have a large floor cupboard in which I already keep a lot of tins (around 10 12-packs of tinned tomatoes!) along with larger packs of dried pasta, rice etc. That cupboard doesn't have shelves though, and I'm thinking of building some shelves into it which would make it more useful for storing multiple tins of different types. Then I could potentially move my dry stores into the wall cupboard and it would be a bit lighter. I'm not prepping for a prolonged event, but I do like to keep a good stock of food in, for example 2-3 full 3kg bags of pasta plus one in use. They'd fill a whole shelf in the wall cupboard and would almost certainly be lighter than a full shelf of tins.

[featherstick]

My dad used to do chin-ups on shelves and cupboards he'd fitted to test them.

Wouldn't do that in a modern kitchen.