> And yet you're blaming LA County for this. Civil engineering work is required to be done by engineers. > if you don't like those laws go out to the boonies an

> And yet you're blaming LA County for this. Civil engineering work is required to be done by engineers. > if you don't like those laws go out to the boonies and you can build whatever you want, however you want. Did you even read my post? Here. Quoting: "However, because I am not a Civil Engineer, I had to hire a firm to, effectively, duplicate my work. Physics is physics, right? That's OK. No problem." Let me repeat that last part: "That's OK. No problem." > Your architect friend would be wrong on that...For point of comparison, the average concrete foundation is 200 lb/square foot, or about 480,000 for a 1-story 2,400 square foot house You are grotesquely misinterpreting the link you provided. That's the weight per square foot of an entire house, including footings, slabs, tile roof, etc. > Because self-styled architects are constantly messing up on the math and physics. Very funny, considering the above. I mean, just a little bit of critical thinking and math shows how crazy the 480,000 lb number is. For easy math, a 2,500 sqf house is 50 x 50 feet. Assuming a density of 133 lbs/sqf for concrete: That slab, at 4 inches thick, comes in at 110,833 lbs. Now assume a full footing all the way around the slab. That means each footing is 50 feet x 1 foot wide and 28 inches below the slab. I'll ignore the intersection of the footings just to keep the math simple. Each footing weighs 15,517 lbs. That's a total of 62,067 lbs for footings and 172,900 lbs so far for the house. Depending on code and type of construction additional footings might be required on the interior of the slab-on-grade construction. I'll just round the 127,000 lbs to 200,000 lbs, again, for rough numbers. The 480,000 lbs number you came-up with is absolutely ridiculous. Like my wife (a doctor) likes to say: "Your Google search isn't equivalent to my medical degree." Regarding what my friend said about my project. First of all, it was a figure of speech, not a precise calculation. "Dude, you could build <insert whatever makes you comfortable here> on that much concrete!". Yes, it was an absolutely ridiculous amount of concrete. It didn't stop at 64,000 lbs. There's a full-on 55 x 45 foot slab, 6 inches thick, with lots of rebar and other details. If we are going to go on raw concrete weight --which isn't the right metric-- it's about 230,000 lbs. EDIT: For Architects/Civil Engineers who might be reading this. We live in an area that has been classified as a high fire risk zone (wrongly, in my opinion, but there's nothing I can do about it). This gives LA County license to go absolutely insane with some of their requirements. They turned what should have been a relatively simple ground-mount solar project into an absolute nightmare.