Posted on 07/13/2016 11:56:44 PM PDT by Don W
FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS, states have quickly adopted most building safety features blessed by the Washington-based nonprofit that recommends minimum codes for the nation. But that’s not what happened after the International Code Council decided in 2008 that every new American home should have fire sprinklers. Fire Fight Far outside DC, there’s a campaign finance fight taking place over fire safety. And it’s putting families at risk.
Instead, a review by ProPublica shows, U.S. homebuilders and realtors unleashed an unprecedented campaign to fend off the change, which they argued would not improve safety enough to justify the added cost. Housing industry trade groups poured money into lobbying and political contributions. Their well-to-do members strong-armed local officials or dazzled them with hometown projects.
(Excerpt) Read more at propublica.org ...
Where I live, if you have a registered sprinkler system, you must have it inspected and re-certified EVERY year, at your expense.
No matter that you installed it for YOUR safety, nanny MUST know everything.
This sprinkler thing sounds like it would cost a fortune for installation, maintenance, and inspection, not to mention enormous cost to repair accidental discharges, if necessary. Add to that the headaches inherent to inspection and certification....
Forget it.
Doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.
Is it the law now, or becoming the law?
Yet more government overreach.
Good in theory, good for emotions, but, bad in actual practice.
Certain realtors and their pet insurance companies want this to become the law.
“Where I live, if you have a registered sprinkler system, you must have it inspected and re-certified EVERY year, at your expense. “
A better idea is to change the materials that houses are made of. Here, because wood is imported but also because Earth quakes, and typhoons the houses are made of concrete. Concrete walls & ceiling and ceramic floors mean that there isn’t much to burn.
So if you have an old farmhouse, and the building code is amended to require sprinklers, and then you decide to redo the kitchen, you end up retrofitting sprinklers into the entire house. Needless to say that is extremely expensive.
The real net effect is less work done with permits, and the inability to rehab or update older buildings. So they decay and end up being demolished in favor of new construction.
Can you imagine the cost of taking care of all that extra plumbing?
Nanny State PING!
Living in the Portland, Oregon area, and surrounded by Weyerhauser, with constant views of cuttings, logging trucks, saw mills, train loads of lumber, I'm a little baffled by "importing".
There is a port on the Columbia, a few miles away, that specializes in loading cut lumber for the Far East. Is that the importing you are suggesting?
Only people who have NO idea of how a sprinkler system actually works, or the cynical system OEMs who are bribing pet legislators to swindle the consumers, would dream of putting these systems in residential housing.
I do not believe that engineering-by-legislation supporters should be tortured to death, for criminal stupidity, but it's at least worthy of consideration.
It’s not “a couple a thousand”. The lowest quote I got for my 2600 square foot house twenty years ago was $17,000.
Any changes to the house afterwards requires all kinds of permits and inspections. All that for a 10% discount on my insurance premium.
Accidental discharges would be a problem. When our daughter was single and living with us it seems the smoke alarm went off every time she cooked. I can imagine the damage if the sprinklers went off.
Home owners insurance will NOT cover water damage. Let that sink in.
Well, sprinklers in every new home didn't go down very well. Even our local code enforcement knew how much work it would be for THEM to learn the codes, and battle everyone to enforce them.
That's how I came to find out how sprinklers got into the residential codes. Seems a couple of sprinkler companies saw a vast uninterested market, so they colluded (really???) to pay hundreds of union firefighters to go to the national codes meeting that year. Free weekend, all-expenses paid in some city, I'm thinking it was Chicago, and all you had to do for it was sign in for the conference/meeting, whatever they called it, and show up in the meeting room when directed to vote yes on requiring residential sprinklers. I understand a great time was had by all, the vote to add sprinklers was strongly supported by firefighters, anxious to save lives, and it was a huge vote for safety. Every firefighter had a great holiday weekend, all-expenses paid, and residential sprinklers were added to the national codes. Easy to get in, extremely difficult to get out...
After a lot of pushback within the state, (like people wanting to see some cost-benefit analysis themselves, rather than taking the boards word for it that it was supported), it's apparently still on delay here. My brother is building a house outside the public water service area, and he isn't being required to put them in. Seems a search is on for something that costs less than 10k to install, and will reliably NOT go off till needed. They raise you homeowners insurance when you get them, because when it's wrong your stuff gets ruined.
Have a sprinklered four unit 1 and 1/2 story building. A large expense, a large PIA and frankly better smoke and heath detectors that are tamper proof would be IMHO lifesavers, instead of the system I maintain and that originally costs about 100K, not by me though.
These laws are IMHO guaranteed after retirement jobs for retired firemen. Baksheesh.
It is so nice to see someone talking about it. I have an off the grid system too and oh my!
In a single-family home, a sprinkler system isn’t likely to save any more lives than you’d save by having smoke alarms. A system like this would be intended primarily to save the building structure, not the people inside it. With that in mind, the insurance industry would be the better advocate for this type of protection system ... and they could promote them by offering incentives in their insurance premiums rather than lobbying governments to mandate them.
An accidental sprinkler discharge is rare. Most sprinkler systems don’t activate through a detection process like a smoke alarm. Instead, they have a small glass filament inside it that melts and breaks when the temperature exceeds a certain (very high) threshold. In other words, the sprinkler only activates in a real fire — not just in a smoke condition.
I have a 1500 SF house with a full basement with a garage door (single). They’re often called “boat doors” but I keep my lawn mowers, etc. there.
The basement is unfinished and it has two red bulb chrome fire sprinkler heads in that area (155 degrees F). Direct copper pipe to the main line just after the main shutoff valve (tapped before the pressure reducer).
I guess I’m lucky. No weeping, seeping or leaking. There is a final end of line tap off from them that goes to the outside hose bibb outside the boat door.. so I can always know how good the water pressure is and measure it there at the bibb if I need to. The pressure is street pressure and that outside bibb always has a 100’ roll of hose on it (I call it my fire hose). House is 15 years old and no problems yet, thankfully.
They also operate when you bang into them and break the filament. This happens rarely in warehouse and manufacturing buildings and it only opens one sprinkler at a time.
But those buildings have high ceilings and it generally takes a forklift to trigger the sprinkler. The klutz potential in a home is much greater.
Yeah...and often the inlet pipe has to be increased in size.....big expense to replace the entire pipe line.
Teachable moment. Regulators regulate! When one realizes that, they have determined the basic threat to our freedom. While some reasonable level of guidelines, in this case a building code, is acceptable, the creeping incrementalism never stops. When you have paid regulators they want to stay busy regulating. Pretty soon the regulations have past the point of diminishing returns - but the regulators continue to tighten the noose to justify their paycheck. We have too many unelected ‘regulators’. A reduction in force is long, long overdue! Defund the regulatory bodies, reduce the number of regulators and you’ve started to confront the problem that now only gets worse every day.
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