roof trusses, how much weight?

[Mosey]

I'm considering building a 20x24 garage with 14 foot ceilings. I want the high ceiling so I can (hopefully) put in a hydraulic car hoist on one side someday. The other side will be where I’ll park my Boomer so it will not need such a high ceiling, it will only need to be 8 feet high. So, I'm trying to figure out a way to utilize that extra 6 feet of space, and what came to mind is to build a loft on that side. However, I don't want to use any support beams in the center, I want to keep it all open. I'm planning to use 20 foot pre built roof trusses. Basically, I just want this loft to hang from the roof trusses on that side. Can I get roof trusses designed to hold a lot of weight like this or are they just designed to hold the weight of the roof? If so how much weight can they hold?

 

[Green_in_MI]

You can get trusses designed for most any purpose you can imagine. The problem is only in the cost. A good lumberyard will usually have truss company suppliers that will do design work for you if you buy from them. Truss salesmen often carry a laptop with design software that can probably meet any of your requirements. I suggest you call to some of your local lumberyards and ask if they have truss suppliers that will do this. Or just call a truss company and they could tell you who they retail through. The truss company might only do just the design if you pay for the engineering costs.

 

[Piccioni]

I used trusses in the rather large house I built. The largest span is about 45 ft with no bearing walls.

I believe you are talking about attic trusses, a standard variant, but I've never used one. I believe they are designed for standard floor loads, which I think is 100 lbs/sq ft.

Trusses are also pretty cheap (my 4000 sq ft roof was $10K cdn in trusses) and easy to install, although it gets wicked if you have lots of hips and valleys, at least until you figure it out.

All trusses are engineered, mostly by CAD, and you only have to provide a very rough drawing of what you want to get a quote - they do the tricky design bits. I have all kinds of architectural ceilings, etc., and it was really easy to get the trusses made for them. Get a quote at the local lumber yard and most of your questions will be answered.