Modular Home Engineering

Modular home engineering design and certification

A modular home is built in a factory and finished on your block. Walls go up under cover instead of in the weather, trades work in one place instead of driving between sites, and the programme stops being hostage to a wet fortnight. The result is a shorter build and less time on site.

The trade-off is that decisions move earlier. A conventional house can absorb a change of mind halfway through framing; a module that is already on a truck cannot. The structural design has to be right before the first module is built, not resolved as it goes up.

Modular construction also produces less waste. Off-cuts are reused across a production run, and the materials ordered are the materials used.

How structural engineers help

A modular home is engineered twice: once for the life it will lead standing still, and once for the few hours it spends being lifted, driven and craned into place. Those are different problems. A frame that is perfectly adequate under gravity and wind can be racked out of square by a badly placed lifting point, so transport and craneage loads are designed for explicitly rather than assumed away.

We design the module structure and the connections that turn separate modules into one house, and we design the footing system that receives them — set to the site’s classification under AS 2870 and its wind classification under AS 4055, the same as any other home. Because the footings are built before the modules arrive, set-out tolerance matters more than it does on a conventional build, and the documentation is prepared with that in mind.

We then provide the certification the approval process requires — structural drawings and calculations, and compliance certification for the structural design so your building certifier and your council have what they need.