Thread: Supporting bearers perpendicular to concrete pool

Hi,

I've hit a snag in constructing my pool deck. The pool is a partly out of ground concrete pool and the deck design has the boards running in the same direction around 3 sides of the pool. As such I have to mount bearers perpendicular to the pool walls on 2 sides. First side was OK with plenty of clearance and so I was able to support the bearers (2/140x45 TP) at the pool on lengths of 140x45 dynabolted to the pool wall. The problem is that on the other side I have the pipes for the pool filter return to contend with. Ideally, I need around 439mm to work with ( 19 decking + 140 joist + 140 bearer + 140 bearer's bearer), but I only have 365mm before I hit the pipes. It seems I have 3 options - 1) raise the bearers and their supports 140mm and mount the joists in-line - should work but involves lots of buggering about cutting short joists to length and lots of joist hangers, many of which would need to be stainless steel (it's a salt water pool and the plan specifies SS fixings within 1m); or 2) raise the level of the bearer's bearer by 140 and mount the the bearers in-line with the bearer's bearer - this would mean single runs of joists, but I can't work out how to mount the bearers in-line especially considering any bracket would need to be SS in theory (could I use a couple of modified SS joist hangers ?); or 3) I could forget the SS requirement and use heavy duty HDG angle brackets in place of the bearer's bearer and supplement the HDG with extra protection (DPC/vaseline/bitumen paint/etc)

What do you think ? My preference is for either option 2 or 3 as I understand that the continuous joist spans will give me a stronger deck and should be quicker to build. For what it's worth, I'm doing this deck 'legally' and using a private certifier to get the necessary approval. The certifiers have been pretty helpful to date, offering advice when asked ( we had some minor design changes and some problems with the post holes collapsing in the wet weather) and my gut feeling is that if I over-engineered any of the above options it would probably be OK from their point of view. However I don't want to have the whole thing knocked back by making the wrong choice. I'd be interested to here the advice and experiences of others here.

Cheers
Peter