Given how much OCD I have about naming variables and writing unit tests, I think if this was in front of my house, I'd take a sledgehammer to it. Fences shall be straight, damnit.
Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
51–60 of 278 posts
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#52I feel like everyone this far is missing something, or perhaps just I am. I understand that a wavy wall will be stronger than a straight wall of the same thickness, therefore if you need that additional strength it technically uses fewer bricks to reach it. That said, if the alternative is a 2 layer straight wall, is the wavy wall equally as strong? Or is it just stronger than the single layer wall? Without knowing a…
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Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#53> As for the mathematics behind these serpentine walls and why the waves make them more resistant to horizontal forces like wind vs straight walls, check out this post by John D. Cook.
The linked post does not explain why the walls are more resistant to forces. It just calculates the difference in length.
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#54I feel like everyone this far is missing something, or perhaps just I am. I understand that a wavy wall will be stronger than a straight wall of the same thickness, therefore if you need that additional strength it technically uses fewer bricks to reach it. That said, if the alternative is a 2 layer straight wall, is the wavy wall equally as strong? Or is it just stronger than the single layer wall? Without knowing a…
"Strength" is used to refer to things like wind hitting the wall, not a car. That is, the wall toppling, not breaking. So the wavy wall with its wide base is quite strong.
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#55I feel like everyone this far is missing something, or perhaps just I am. I understand that a wavy wall will be stronger than a straight wall of the same thickness, therefore if you need that additional strength it technically uses fewer bricks to reach it. That said, if the alternative is a 2 layer straight wall, is the wavy wall equally as strong? Or is it just stronger than the single layer wall? Without knowing a…
Well, tbf the article doesn’t even try to explain how wavy walls are stronger than straight ones, or how fewer bricks are needed.
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#56"Popularized in England" - maybe popularized, but such walls are by no means popular or common.
"The county of Suffolk seems to be home to countless examples of these crinkle crankle walls. On freston.net you can find 100 wavy walls that have been documented and photographed."
Although it's not explicitly said, let's suppose that every one of those wavy walls is in Suffolk. The population of the county is 761 350 - let's assume there are 100 000 homes (although there is the city of Ipswitch, it's otherwise largely a rural county where single-family homes will be common). So only roughly one-in-one-thousand homes in Suffolk has such a 'wavy wall'. Elsewhere in the country probably even less - e.g. I've never seem one.
Any for everyone complaining about mowing - do you actually have grass all the way up to your boundary wall? In my experience it's pretty common to have a flower bed running all the length of the boundary, so mowing would not be a problem.
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#57I feel like everyone this far is missing something, or perhaps just I am. I understand that a wavy wall will be stronger than a straight wall of the same thickness, therefore if you need that additional strength it technically uses fewer bricks to reach it. That said, if the alternative is a 2 layer straight wall, is the wavy wall equally as strong? Or is it just stronger than the single layer wall? Without knowing a…
It's a matter of stability more so than "strength", no? Having never attempted to push over a brick wall, I'd guess that it'd be easier to do so for a straight double wythe than a wavy single... but yeah, baseless intuition here!
The base of a double wythe wall is still only like 7", which if you're stacking say 84" of brick on top of that... seems pretty unstable to me.
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have plenty of space but you're tight on money, it's an ingenious solution.
Good point. I'd say if you're tight on money I'm not sure a wall should be at the top of your to-buy list.
I have a few acres of land and annoying neighbours. Stuff like this is relevant (though in the end I just went with hedging, which is cheaper and good enough for privacy)
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#59This feels a bit like diet clickbait... "use fewer bricks than a straight wall"* *A straight wall of the approximal strength and length of a wavy wall, not just length. My counter would be that from a practical perspective the amount of space wasted by the wavy design seems to negate the usefulness of the design. Probably makes the lawn crew dizzy when mowing it too!
The 'space wasted' on an estate of many hundreds, if not, thousands of acres is minimal. Given that often the bricks used were made and fired on site, it definitely saved on resources and labour.
There's a stately home close to me that has a very short run of one of these walls, and the remains of the old brick kiln up on the hill side. If you know what you're looking for, you can also still see the hollows in the ground where the clay was dug, now fill of trees and bushes.
Re: Wavy walls use fewer bricks than a straight wall (2020)
#60> As for the mathematics behind these serpentine walls and why the waves make them more resistant to horizontal forces like wind vs straight walls, check out this post by John D. Cook. The linked post does not explain why the walls are more resistant to forces. It just calculates the difference in length.