How much weight can a kitchen drawer actually hold?

People rarely weigh what goes in a drawer, and the numbers surprise. A stack of dinner plates is about 6kg. A cast iron casserole is 5kg on its own. A deep pan drawer with a couple of casseroles, a stock pot and a few pans is over 20kg without trying, which is most of a standard runner's rating before the drawer itself is counted.

Step by step

1. Find the rating rather than guessing.Runners are sold by length and by load rating, and the rating is usually printed on the packaging or stamped on the runner. Standard domestic runners cluster around 25 to 30kg; heavy-duty around 45kg and up.
2. Read it as a dynamic rating for the pair.The figure is for the two runners together, carrying the load while the drawer is being pulled and pushed. A static shelf rating and a dynamic runner rating are not comparable numbers.
3. Weigh a representative drawer once.Put the contents of your heaviest drawer in a bag on the bathroom scales. It is worth doing once, because the answer is usually larger than anyone guesses and it settles the argument.
4. Understand what fails first.Almost never the runner snapping. The bearing cage deforms, the runner takes a permanent droop, and the drawer starts scraping the front below it. Second is the drawer base sagging out of its grooves. Third is the front fixing tearing out.
5. Know that the rating assumes correct fitting.Two runners that are not level with each other, or not parallel, put a twisting load into a mechanism designed for a straight one. A perfectly rated runner fitted 3mm out will fail well under its number.
6. Load low and spread.Heavy items in the lowest drawer, spread across its width rather than piled at the front or in one corner. Weight at the very front of a fully extended drawer is the worst case for a runner.
7. Upgrade rather than accept a sagging drawer.Heavy-duty runners in the same length are a straight swap on side-mounted systems and cost little more. If a drawer is genuinely holding 30kg of pans, fit runners rated for it.
8. Check the base as well as the runners.A 3mm hardboard base under 25kg will bow and eventually drop out of its grooves regardless of the runners. A 6mm plywood base, or a rail glued across the underside of a wide drawer, fixes that separately.

Tips

• The classic symptom of chronic overloading is a drawer that runs perfectly when empty and binds when full. Empty it and test — that single check separates a load problem from a mechanism problem.
• Cutlery drawers are light. Pan drawers, tinned food drawers and crockery drawers are the ones that reach the number.
• A drawer full of appliances that come out twice a year is a bad use of a heavily rated pan drawer. Weight that never moves belongs on a shelf, not on runners.

Common mistakes

• Comparing a runner rating with a shelf rating — A shelf carries a static load with the weight always in the same place. A runner carries a moving load, sometimes fully cantilevered out of the cabinet. The two numbers do not mean the same thing.
• Fitting one new runner alongside a drooping old one — The new one is straight and the old one is not, so the drawer binds and the new runner takes the twisting load. Runners are sold and replaced in pairs for exactly this reason.

Questions people ask