Codes on average get updated every two years, and they keep driving up costs. The cost of a fully loaded electrical panel went from about $300 to about $2500 when Arc Fault Breakers became made mandatory. Fire sprinkling residential housing is a big cost, and a huge risk. When’s the last time you even heard of a house fire, let alone a fatal one? For me, I’m not a firefighter, and the last is in the 1970’s when someone smoked in bed and caught the bed and curtains on fire. That sounds really 1970s.
What I do hear about all the time is massive flooding caused by malfunctioning fire sprinklers. I stayed at a Residence Inn where half the hotel was under renovation for 2 years because of a fire sprinkler system malfunction on the fifth floor. Can you say millions in insurance costs?
I wonder how much of the tripling in insurance rates is due not to the increase in hail storms and natural disasters, but to manmade disasters living right there in your city inspector’s code book? And those disasters will get worse every code update. Global warming might still be up for discussion, but this is very clear: Manmade failures required by new codes are costing our economy literally billions!
Here’s my latest one: Boilers in the City of Denver must have a backflow prevention valve. Apparently, maybe a malfunctioning boiler could push boiler water back into the drinking water system. Yet, the backflow prevention device costs $360 for the part, it will leak per the installation instruction and trouble shooting manual, it needs a line filter to keep debris out that will make the backflow prevention device leak sooner, and it needs a second device to prevent normal fluctuations in water pressure from making the backflow prevention device leak. Luckily, the max leakage per the enclosed pamphlet is 40 gallons per minute. That’s like 18 showers running at the same time. Go City Code! This way we sell more water! And my boiler installer choked when I told him. All newer boilers, including mine, already come with a built in backflow device. Duplicating costly equipment is a disservice not only to landlords, but to my low income tenants who I have to pass along the 1200 dollars in install costs to, along with any emergency costs.
Yes, there is a famous backflow incident that sparked all this regulation. Someone bright in Chicago had a poisonous solution in their utility sink. That sink had a mop bucket hose attached to the faucet, one of those cut off hoses that allows you to fill a mop bucket sitting on the floor. That hose was now in the sink, which was filled with some kind of toxic dye or cleaning agent or whatever it was. The faucet on, water was coming out of the hose until there was a fire nearby. The fire department hooked up their hoses and pumps, and the pressure caused backflow. Fire department pumps sucked all the available water out of several blocks away of city piping, including the toxic solution in that one sink with that mop fill hose. Drinking that water might have been very bad for someone. Now, instead of banning mop hoses, we are creating billions of dollars in install costs, installing flood causing devices (in duplicate), and dramatically ratcheting up insurance costs.
Life is about tradeoffs. Yet, I know legislators love sound bites and will pass crazy laws any chance they get to get a little TV exposure. We’ve seen ones just like this: A child broke their front teeth riding a tricycle and then falling onto a curb. Senator Dumas Legrand will now introduce a bill to protect young children and forever ban the manufacture, sale and use of tricycles. Childhood obesity be damned, tricycles are a health hazard and must be banned, immediately. Anyone that votes against this bill hates children and is a tool in the pocket of tricycle industry lobbyists.
Yet tradeoffs that dramatically upend costs and hurt our economy as a whole because of one fluke accident are ill conceived. It’s amazing some of us survived without seatbelts, headrests, infant car seats, with leaded gasoline, leaded paint, asbestos in just about everything, riding our tricycles and bicycles without helmets, lawnmowers that didn’t stop when you let go of the handlebars, and so many more hazards.
How many billions can we spend making life idiot proof, except for the fact that the problems we’re solving don’t really fit the norm, and could be solved more cheaply. Don’t use mop hoses! Make smoking in bed illegal (even if you just had a great time in bed and need that “after a great time” cigarette). Let’s all vote for sanity. And, stop the unnecessary code book updates. Those code update guys sitting on their hands for a few years would keep our economy in better shape.