Warning about UK stair Min./Max. Settings

[Christiaan]

If you're a UK user applying Min./Max. Settings to their stairs, please be warned that the current Saved Set for a UK building regs "General Access Stair UK" is incorrect. The max. riser is currently set to 220 mm, when it should instead be 170 mm. The max. tread is also set to 300 mm but should be 400 mm.

 

 

[JuanP]

@Christiaan Making our R+D team aware of this post. Did you submit a bug about it? 

[Christiaan]

5 hours ago, JuanP said:

@Christiaan Making our R+D team aware of this post. Did you submit a bug about it? 

yeah, it's already sorted for 29.0.4 Juan 👍🏼

[thinkingpencil]

For info. Thought I'd add an excerpt from Approved Document K 1.3. Showing all categories of stairway and their max/min parameters.

[shorter]

my feeling is that users 'should' be familiar with the standards they are using and set them themselves and not expect a software vendor to set them for them.

 

this setting should be off by default unless explicitly set by the user.

[Kevin C]

Agreed - The 'UK stair' is technically incorrect, and doesn't really exist.

 

The approved Document posted above applies to England only. Different rules and standards apply to different countries within the UK.

[RMH]

Warning with changing this - IT DEPENDS ON YOUR UK BUILDING PURPOSE GROUP!

Domestic is different from education/ assembly etc. 

 

Also, how this is calculated differs slightly with what region of the UK your building is: Scotland/ England/ Wales/ or Northern Ireland each have different Building Regulations and approved documents.

 

Lets not confuse England with UK!

 

 

[RMH]

On 4/4/2024 at 9:16 AM, thinkingpencil said:

For info. Thought I'd add an excerpt from Approved Document K 1.3. Showing all categories of stairway and their max/min parameters.

To stress this, can thinking pencil (and the VW team responding) scroll to the front page of this document... before committing to any changes. 

 

In Tuaisceart Éireann/Northern Ireland, stairs are covered under parts H and R of the approved documents. Scotland has a different (and I prefer) clearer set of guides. Unfortunately I've not experienced the system in Cymru, but believe it has its own requirements. 

 

If the tools are to be changed for the UK market, I'd support that (and will always welcome presets that are market aware, like fully metric resources), make it all the UK not just one part.

[Christiaan]

I gave feedback to Vectorworks to update these settings and, mea culpa, I didn't consider that these settings only apply to England & Wales! 

 

I was coming at it from a starting position of VW libraries including UK (metric) and US (imperial) stair libraries, including "UK com" and "UK res", but that the min/max settings for these stairs didn't actually comply with any standards.

Quickest and dirtiest way to resolve this would be to rename the content as England & Wales, but that certainly wouldn't read as well as "UK" next to the "US" stairs. Providing min/max settings for all the different building regs in the UK would be overdoing it, because it would also involve creating duplicates of all the stair types in the library for each set of building regs.

 

On 4/15/2024 at 10:05 PM, shorter said:

my feeling is that users 'should' be familiar with the standards they are using and set them themselves and not expect a software vendor to set them for them.

A valid argument but Vectorworks is in the business of providing localised content for the US and the UK, including stairs, so it might as well be correct and based on a standard.

 

On 4/15/2024 at 10:05 PM, shorter said:

this setting should be off by default unless explicitly set by the user.

If you place a stair, using a 'standard configuration', without choosing a stair from the library, then I agree. But if choosing a stair from the library which is named "res" for residential or "com" for commercial, then the geometry of those stairs should be based on a real standard. Even if the min/max settings are off, the fields need to be populated with something.

[bcd]

6 hours ago, Christiaan said:

England & Wales, but that certainly wouldn't read as well as "UK" next to the "US" stairs

Just run with Wales & England. 'WE' - sits nicely beside 'US'

[shorter]

8 hours ago, Christiaan said:

I gave feedback to Vectorworks to update these settings and, mea culpa, I didn't consider that these settings only apply to England & Wales! 

 

I was coming at it from a starting position of VW libraries including UK (metric) and US (imperial) stair libraries, including "UK com" and "UK res", but that the min/max settings for these stairs didn't actually comply with any standards.

Quickest and dirtiest way to resolve this would be to rename the content as England & Wales, but that certainly wouldn't read as well as "UK" next to the "US" stairs. Providing min/max settings for all the different building regs in the UK would be overdoing it, because it would also involve creating duplicates of all the stair types in the library for each set of building regs.

 

A valid argument but Vectorworks is in the business of providing localised content for the US and the UK, including stairs, so it might as well be correct and based on a standard.

 

If you place a stair, using a 'standard configuration', without choosing a stair from the library, then I agree. But if choosing a stair from the library which is named "res" for residential or "com" for commercial, then the geometry of those stairs should be based on a real standard. Even if the min/max settings are off, the fields need to be populated with something.

 

Still think this is for the practice to determine not a software vendor who will take no responsibility for it being wrong.

[Christiaan]

7 hours ago, shorter said:

 

Still think this is for the practice to determine not a software vendor who will take no responsibility for it being wrong.

The stairs are going to be upgraded to proper Vectorworks Styles, so perhaps this will be a good opportunity make it all more rational and simpler. 
https://www.vectorworks.net/en-US/public-roadmap?url=stair-reengineering-2025

[FranAJA]

I agree with Shorter, stairs should be universally modelled, avoiding regionalism.
The fact that VW tends to go too far into country-specific details could be a limitation and may create problems if building regulations are updated but VW does not update the tools due to other priorities.

Edited September 13 by FranAJA

[Christiaan]

I'm a little agnostic, but I'm going to argue in favour of Vectorworks providing this kind of content, because good library content is where Vectorworks has historically had a weakness and good library content can really speed things up for users, particularly new users. Both in terms of having ready-made content that can go in one's model, but also having ready-made content that one can learn from and adjust to one's liking. I would also argue that Vectorworks' UI is one of the most intuitive in the industry but that Vectorworks is often let down by its lack of good, reality-based library content.

 

On 9/14/2025 at 10:35 AM, FranAJA said:

may create problems if building regulations are updated but VW does not update the tools due to other priorities.

 

This will be easy to deal with when Stair Styles are introduced. Not only will Stair Styles provide named objects that remain named objects (instead of being unnamed instances created by red symbols), but we'll also have the Description data field directly visible in the Settings window.

A Stair Style might go in a folder called Metric, might be called Straight Single Landing - Solid - Eng Gen Acc, and the Description field could provide precise information about which standard the stair is based upon: Stair settings derived from Approved Document K, 2013 Edition, England. Min/Max settings derived from Table 1.1. This way if the standard is ever updated, users can see that the existing library content is based on an older standard.

Providing library content based on real-world examples, standards and catalogs is better than providing generic content. Not only for  users, but also because Vectorworks engineers and library content builders then gain direct knowledge and experience of real-world constraints, which can feed back into the development of objects.

Vectorworks doesn't have to provide Stair Styles that cover all standards under the sun, but the Stair Styles they do provide should be based on real world constraints. A user can take a stair and edit it to their liking, but at least they know that it's based on some reality to begin with.

 

[shorter]

I suppose I can't really talk since my class libraries are still shipping with Vectorworks despite them being woefully out of date.

 

Or is that the case in point? 🤔

[Christiaan]

I was looking at those the other day wondering if they need an update 😆

[shorter]

@Christiaan watch this space...

[Hugues]

FYI, this issue was reported 2 years ago and was fixed with VW2024 Update 4.

[Chris Baccala]

Hi all,

We can modify this nomenclature on the min/max settings resources, and the red Stair Types symbols, to say "UK(EW)" instead of "UK", as a simple solution. 

This can be done in one of the VW2026 updates.