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.
“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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wouldn’t it be a much more cost effective feature to have an exit plan and have well maintained smoke detectors in each room?
This is one of the few cases where Crony Capitalism gets it right.
The key thing is that everything is a TRADE OFF.
The houses that go up in flames and kill people are amost always OLD HOUSES. The net effect of requiring sprinklers is to make replacing/upgrading/modifying them MORE EXPENSIVE, and thereby causing people to either leave them alone, or have the work done under-the-table (and thus subject to no inspections at all).
Which then leaves people in rotting homes with 50 year old wiring with insulation flaking off. Not very safe...but that is the net effect of driving up the cost of new and modified housing. They can’t have it both ways - unless the cities and states were willing to finance the cost themselves, which they wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) do.
A friend who lives in military housing with a sprinkler is kind of afraid of it. If you accidentally hit one of the sprinklers, with a ball, or something long that brushes the ceiling as you’re moving it, you just destroyed everything in your house.
It’s not about safety at all! It’s about growing government and “creating” new before unwanted jobs, businesses, and control of your personal life.
Government expands due to the fact that there must be more regulation and that means more employees which in turn, means more jobs that are totally unnecessary.
The fire suppression business (that pays bribes to elected officials to generate more need for their products and services) enjoy a “mandated” new source of income from the sale of devices, service contracts, inspections and a whole host of future goodies that will come to ensure SAFETY in your own home. Soon there will be entirely new businesses that will come into their own to repair (of course by licensed fire system inspectors)you own system.
My tagline has always “pinned the tail on the donkey” and has never failed. The “rot” has taken years to completely destroy our freedoms and liberties and continues unabated.
We have lost our manufacturing base and now “invent” jobs and businesses that unneeded and useless functions. It’s like a circle now: Joe works for a company that manufactures can openers. He is paid by his company. The government requires Joe to only use a certain type of can opener on each day of the week and only used a single time. Joe has to purchase 7 different can openers and then throw them away at the end of the week and buy 7 more for the next week. Joe has to spend the money he made at the business to by the very can openers he makes. He has no choice...it’s the law!
The government expands and the “fat cats” at the can opener manufacturing plant get fatter and the politicians enjoy their financial support.
I guess this is what you call the Federal Industrial Complex.....
It is necessary to add sufficient costs to new homes that one must be wealthy to even contemplate owning one.
Air bags were a wonderful thing, too, until they started killing people.
I’m going for whole-house halon. Fights fire and global cooling at the same time.
A couple of smoke detectors and a manual fire extinguisher or two might be a sensible compromise...