You probably have a new house that requires roofing, or maybe you will replace the current roofing. If you are in either situation, you can’t simply rely on your contractor to count one. Your budget is also affected by this aspect, so that’d be best if you also get yourself knowledgeable, at least in terms of knowing ‘how many trusses do I need?’
How Many Trusses Do I Need?
To be simply put, a roof truss is defined as a structure designed to withstand the roof’s weight. In terms of a gable roof, the truss is the triangular part you can find on the roof.
The truss is basically made to two parts: the ‘members’ and the intersections. However, what do these details mean?
- Members are the wood whose one end is joined to make an intersection. In case of a gable roof, the length of the members is even. Often the members are also called as rafters.
- Intersection is where the end of the ‘members’ meet.
So, to know how many trusses you need, you should see the length of the roof itself first. To understand it, you will need to do the procedure below.
- Grab a companion to help you measure the length of your roof.
- Have two ladders to work with, and then take one end of the measuring tool while your friend takes another end.
- Hold the measuring tool while climbing the ladder.
- As you reach the roof, you can now place the measuring tool to each end of the roof. Now you get the length of your roof.
- Now it is time to measure the width of your roof. To do so, you will need to do the similar procedure as we have mentioned to measure the length. So, you need to move the ladders onto the width side and get the measurement with the help of your friend.
- After the previous step is done, you can now have the data of both length and the width of your roof.
Now that you have gotten the data of both length and right of your roof, what comes as the following procedure?
You can directly call your roofing guy and just mention the measurement result, but that’s not what we are trying to achieve here. If we do the counting ourselves, we need to know what size we are getting for the trusses in-between space.
For your information, trusses typically use 2-4 inches of spacing. However, if you are using advanced designs for trusses, you can make it sparser, like 8-12 feet.
Counting the number of trusses will be possibly be done easily if you do it with a roof truss span calculator. That’d be easier to do, and you don’t need to count this and that—just prep the measurement, enter the value, and voila!
How Many Trusses Do I Need for a 24 x 24 Garage?
To count how many trusses do I need, you need to prepare the measurement as mentioned before, which is the length of your roof, the width of your roof, and the in-between spaces between trusses. That way, you can directly know how many trusses you need to purchase using a calculator.
According to one roof truss span calculator, for a 24×24 garage (unit in ft) and an in-between space of 4 inches, you will need to prepare a total number of 73 trusses. You can reduce the number of trusses by making the in-between spaces sparse, but it means you need to deal with a more advanced truss design.
So, I hope the explanation above answers your question of ‘how many trusses do I need.’ Now you know how many should you prepare, hence you know how much to budget as well.
