It may not perform as well as the L/480 floor, but that's their call to make. The contractor can tell me he wants the code minimum and it's totally ok. It's not a code requirement, it's not a life safety requirement. For example, I could argue it's best practice to design a floor for L/480 live load deflection to keep them from being bouncy, but the contractor may not care. In those events, when I am working for the contractor it's his or her call. With that said, I only do this with what I deem to be serviceability issues. I would tell the owner that they paid for it and I recommend it, but if you want to ease up on the contractor and aren't worried about it, that's fine. If I was working for the owner, I would inform the owner and let the owner make an educated decision.

Most of the time it's been in design build, where I work for the contractor. RE: Non-Load Bearing Partition Wall Top Connection Guastavino (Structural) 31 Aug 15 great question. If I challenge you on something, know that I'm doing so because I respect your opinion enough to either change it or adopt it. I like to debate structural engineering theory - a lot. Just with these written disclaimer emails, are these situations where the contractor is also your client? I would hate to find myself having to explain to an owner/architect client why I gave the contractor the liberty of choosing a construction method that led to shabby building performance. Gap your non-bearing walls and a lot of that redundancy goes away in my opinion. As structural engineers, we love do drone on about how wood structures are redundant in all kinds of miraculous ways that, thus far, remain unaccounted for. With floor trusses, your panel points may only be 14' apart so it becomes quite impractical to try to dodge them. Walk through a building in progress and you'll see all kinds of situations where non-bearing walls fall within a foot or so of truss bottom chord panel points. I'm skeptical of the argument that says that bearing walls won't end up at points of truss stiffness. I worked for the wood truss council of america for a while and the only reported problem that would crop up was roof trusses actually lifting connected walls up into the air. I now work in a market where the slip connections are common place. In the past, I worked in a market in the US where the slip connections where unheard of.

Shop drawing slotted slip track wall