Victorian terraces are common in many inner suburbs of Sydney such as Paddington, North Sydney and Balmain. Originally they had cast iron lace balustrades around 800 to 900mm height. These days the building code (BCA) requires 1.0M minimum height for balustrades, so using replicas of the original casting to replace damaged or badly corroded original work can be problematic. We have developed systems to deal with this but one often overlooked aspect is compliance with Australian Standard 1170.1
The standard requires amongst other things, that a balustrade is able to withstand certain loadings or forces to be safe. Imagine if a group of people were having a party on the balcony and at some point a number of people were leaning on the balustrade. As has happened many times, the balustrade fails and people can be badly injured or killed if the fall was from a height. This is especially important on shared house rental properties where there is less awareness of the risk by tenants and the owners may have no knowledge of how a balcony is being used.
From our observation, many off the shelf balustrade systems are not tested and are not compliant with the Australian Standard in regard to their ability to withstand loads. For this reason, we only use engineer certified balustrade systems and recommend clients make sure anyone quoting on new work provides that certification. Not only must the balustrade itself be compliant but it must be fixed to the walls or columns securely enough to withstand the code’s load requirements. Old terrace walls are notorious for being weak and crumbling, so in many cases, the standard brackets and fixings have no chance of being strong enough.
It’s just another reason why we insist on only quoting from specified drawings. Many of our competitors seem to have no awareness of the need to comply with both the BCA and Australian Standard 1170.1 when doing cast lace balustrades on Victorian terraces. If comparing quotes, make sure certification and compliance is guaranteed.