Ask what a pipe yard is for and most people answer "keeping the rain off". Then they spend the budget on the roof and the cladding, and the product is still damaged — because the losses in a pipe yard do not happen on the top of the pipe. They happen in the last half metre at each end, at the two points where the pipe touches something, and on the ground it stands on.
A joint of line pipe arrives with its value concentrated at the ends: a bevelled face ready for welding, sometimes a thread, often a coating that terminates there. Everything that ruins a joint later — corrosion under the coating, a dented bevel, an ovalised end that will not line up on site — starts at a contact point that nobody designed.
1. The end is the expensive part
A pipe end is a machined geometry. It is also the part that gets dragged, dropped, stood on end and used as a lever.
Three things matter and all three are detailing decisions:
The bevel or thread needs to be off the ground and off the rack. That means end stops or shaped cradles, not a timber offcut placed by whoever unloaded the truck.
The coating needs to terminate somewhere designed. A coating that is cut back at a random point during handling leaves a bare band that no subsequent coat will adhere to properly, and that band is where the pipe will fail first in service.
The end needs to be identifiable. A yard that stores forty diameters of similar-looking pipe and cannot read the end marking will eventually weld the wrong joint into a line.
None of that is expensive. All of it is invisible on a general arrangement drawing, which is why it does not get built.
2. Where the pipe is supported decides the pipe, not the rack
A joint is a beam. Put the supports too far apart and the pipe sags under its own weight; put them under the wrong point and the section ovalises; put a hard edge at mid-span and you have created a stress concentration in a wall that is only a few millimetres thick.
The working rule is to support near the ends and keep the free span short relative to the joint length — not to distribute supports evenly because even spacing looks tidy on a drawing. For long joints the governing case is usually handling, not storage: the pipe is picked near mid-span, both ends droop, and the shape it takes in the air is the shape it keeps.
That is why the rack layout and the handling method have to be settled together. A rack designed around evenly spaced cradles will not suit a handler that lifts from one end.
3. Contact points: the detail that decides whether the coating survives
Bare steel on coated pipe is the most common avoidable loss in a yard. The damage is local, it is under the coating where nobody looks, and it appears as corrosion two or three years later in exactly the place the client inspects.
Soft-faced supports solve it and introduce their own problem: timber rots, rubber perishes in sun, and both get kicked out of position. The durable answer is a shaped support that holds the pipe by geometry rather than by friction — a cradle that the pipe sits into and cannot roll out of.
The same logic applies to stacking. Pipe stacked in pyramids rolls; pipe stacked in cradles with chocks stays. Chocks that are bolted down before the racks are fabricated work. Chocks added afterwards become loose wedges.
4. Stack height is a stability question before it is a storage question
Tier count is usually set by the area available. It should also be checked against the two things that fail first: the bottom pipe ovalising under the column above it, and the stack walking sideways when a machine nudges it.
Both are functions of the support pattern and the restraint, not of the building. A yard with tall stacks and no restraint is a yard that will have an incident, and the incident will be blamed on the operator.
5. Open or covered: the real difference is water standing, not rain falling
Covering a pipe yard is worth doing, but not for the reason usually given.
Rain that falls on a pipe and runs off does very little. Water that stands in the pipe — because the ends are not capped, or because the yard falls the wrong way and the bottom tier sits in a puddle — does a great deal. So does ultraviolet, which degrades some coatings long before the steel is at risk.
The practical order is: get the ground right and the ends capped first, then decide whether a roof is affordable. A roofed yard on a bad slab still ruins pipe. An open yard with good drainage and capped ends loses far less than its owner expects.
Ground is where open yards fail. A loaded handler turning all day presents a high wheel load on a small contact area, and turning loads are what delaminate a slab surface. Outside the shed the same applies to hardstanding: compacted gravel holds until the wet season, then ruts, then water standing against the bottom tier.
6. What I want before drawings
- Joint lengths, diameters, wall thicknesses and weights, and how many tiers are expected.
- How the pipe is handled — gantry, bridge crane or mobile handler — and where it is picked up.
- Whether coated pipe is stored, and what the coating is, because it decides the support faces.
- Whether ends are bevelled, threaded or plain, and how they are protected in the yard.
- Stack heights, and whether stacks are ever worked by a machine pushing into them.
- The wind speed to be used, taken from the applicable code at the project site rather than a round number, plus the open-end detail — a long shed with two large openings behaves as a wind tunnel as well as a shelter, and the fixings at the open ends take the load first.
A pipe yard is judged by the joints that come out of it, not by the roof over them. Design the ends, the contact points and the ground, and the building around them becomes a simple decision.