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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30112 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Culture war in building codes?

In most of the United States, the building codes are based on codes issued by the ICC (International Code Council), including the IECC (International Energy Conservation Code). Apparently, the committee in charge of updating the IECC for 2024 attempted to insert a bunch of mandatory provisions that were not directly related to energy conservation. The NAHB (National Association of Homebuilders) summarizes the objectionable provisions as follows:

  • Electric-vehicle charging infrastructure in both residential and commercial buildings

  • Solar-readiness provisions in residential buildings

  • Electric-readiness provisions for electric cooking, clothes drying, and water heating

  • Penalty for using natural gas for space or water heating in commercial buildings

  • Electrical energy storage system readiness in commercial buildings

These insertions were appealed to the ICC's board of directors, which (by votes of at least 10 to 7) ordered that they be moved to nonmandatory appendices of the code.

Build it and they will come. If we want electric vehicle - and they are superior to ICE cars in every way but the charging speed and range - which I think will be solved in a decade or so - talking in principle - why current. Removing friction for buyers is good strategy. Putting solar panels on every roof in sunny area is also a good idea. In my corner in europe - we cook and dry and very often heat water with electricity. So once again - a good idea.

Natural gas is incredibly efficient when used for heating building - the real thermal energy we capture from the potential is 90% or so. So this is not a good policy if gas is readily available.

Energy storage for buildings will arrive 12 months after room temperature superconducters and 6 months after nuclear fusion. Whatever solution we come up with for grid storage and balancing will have one thing in common - will be incredibly bulky. Putting it on prime and expensive land makes no sense for a commodity that travels at the speed of light

I don't think it was culture war - probably just well meaning people with tentative grasp of current tech and the normal bureaucratic tendency to expand your authority.

which I think will be solved in a decade or so

Yeah I said the same thing in 1995.

If we want electric vehicle - and they are superior to ICE cars in every way but the charging speed and range

Also robustness vs. power grid destruction. Remember that a hot nuclear war almost certainly means the power grid is gone because of E3 EMP burning out all the transformers, and you can't use local solar either because E1 will destroy photovoltaics. Another Carrington event is another potential issue, although there's no E1 from that and we can probably get most of the transformers unplugged in time to save them.

Trucks are more important than cars in this scenario, but if you live rurally I can see a car still being pretty personally important.

I think that the pipelines are more vulnerable than the grid. The liquid fuel distribution system is quite fragile. And modern cars are terrible maintenance wise - the last real engines were the turbodiesels from the 80s - everything afterwards have too many electrical parts, black boxes and what not to also require a quite fragile distribution chain.

Trucks are more important than cars in this scenario, but if you live rurally I can see a car still being pretty personally important.

Trucks are probably the last vehicles to be electrified, though.

I don't think it was culture war - probably just well meaning people with tentative grasp of current tech and the normal bureaucratic tendency to expand your authority.

This does seem to match much of normal culture war behavior, though, just without the step of demonizing the people who oppose one's naive overreach.

and they are superior to ICE cars in every way except for the ways that actually matter

If the charging speed and range problems are solved (i.e. electric cars charge as fast as normal cars do, on the same schedule normal cars require it) at-home charging becomes a moot point for the same reasons people don't recharge their normal cars in the garage right now. So that requirement is just added expense for zero benefit.

FWIW, Gas stations suck. The ability to home charge an EV daily driver is literally the only reason I would consider getting a near term EV.

(i.e. electric cars charge as fast as normal cars do, on the same schedule normal cars require it)

It isn't possible.

Consider that the biggest battery you can get on a Tesla Model 3 has a capacity of 100 kWh. They claim it'll do 362 miles on a full charge. Which is indeed nearly as far as small European hatchbacks will generally make it on their 9-gallon tanks, except of course that in the case of the hatchbacks that's the real-world figure and in Tesla's case it's the marketing figure.

If you wanted to charge that battery in six minutes (for easy math), you would need to supply a megawatt of power continuously for those six minutes (in reality even more than that, accounting for losses). Even assuming you could find battery tech that could withstand that, where are you going to get that power? A big, modern, new American house will generally have a 44kW connection (200A at 220v). Charging the one Tesla in 6 minutes works out to the equivalent of the maximum allowed power draw of about 23 houses.

An electric charging station with 10 chargers would need a 10MW grid connection, as much as 227 houses, that is to say as much as a whole neighbourhood. And again, even more, as residential power networks are generally quite a bit undersized on the (for now correct) assumption that not everyone will be drawing the maximum amount all at once.

If you wanted to charge it in three minutes (at which point it would actually approach the time it takes to fill up) you can go and double all of that again.

You've given reasons it wouldn't be possible in a residential setting. But supplying megawatts to commercial charging stations should be quite practical.

Assuming you can figure out a way to deliver megawatts to the battery without melting it or otherwise damaging the vehicle, yes.

at-home charging becomes a moot point

Only if we assume that gas station electricity per kwh will be lower than the one in the outlet at home. And the time it takes to charge is also free. Because I have a habbit to always start a journey with the tank full - those 20-sh minute detour to charge at the begging or end of trip are quite annoying - the 15 min breaks in the middle of the trips are not bad. So I could see the value. And anyway american homes consumes more and more electricity and are still stuck with feeble 110v outlets that can't deliver 2kw, using a hack (two phases ) to get something decent, so it is nigh time to update that part. I have often expressed desire to bump the power in EU homes to 7-10kw at the breaker.

for the same reasons people don't recharge their normal cars in the garage right now

I'd assume the reason people don't do that is because they don't have gasoline piped into their houses. If I did I absolutely would never visit a gas station again if I could help it.

Codes and code enforcement have always be and will always be instruments of politics. The devil is always in the details. That said:

While I probably wouldn't want it to be mandatory, in that I'd like very little to be mandatory, I've been yelling at every meeting for every project I work on that we're idiots if we don't plan for EVs. If you put in a parking lot today without running conduit under it for future chargers, you're a fool who will later be ripping up a parking lot. The cost of planning for the future should be minimal, requiring that commercial and residential buildings leave breaker space and place conduit before the building is closed up is smart. It avoids costly and often messy retrofitting later. Requiring them to actually put in the wiring and devices I would oppose.

If you put in a parking lot today without running conduit under it for future chargers, you're a fool who will later be ripping up a parking lot.

No you won't. The electrician will route the conduit through decorative barriers around the edge of the parking lot, or over covered parking etc.

Greenfielding new commercial construction? Absolutely, put it in now. Back in the 80s, a family member's residential construction business put in a fiber network for the power company in a front range city, and the one-time installation cost has paid for itself about a thousand times over, even allowing for updated runs and municipal gigabit fiber to the home in that neighborhood. Smart infrastructure investment is usually a good deal, even if it's pricey up front.

Just don't make me re-wire my entire panel box for solar/battery/EV deployment, when I have none of those things, just to finish my damn basement.

I’ll agree to a point, but I think for a lot of people looking to build for business this could easily end up making it cheaper and faster to find places that don’t mandate those future ready things. That’s cost disease in a nutshell. I don’t have the money to lay that cable under my parking lot to maybe possibly use it five years later. And if the barriers are high, I might well end up either just not building at all and taking my business elsewhere. Which ultimately reduces jobs in the area, tax receipts, and just general quality of life for residents who have to either pay the premium to shop locally in places that bent the knee and need to recoup the costs of charging stations for cars that nobody owns, or drive their gas powered cars an extra twenty miles to the next town where they can save cash on goods they need.

Like I said, the devil is in the details. What constitutes "readiness?" I'm all for conduit and panel space, very much against ripping out existing anything.

Tons of the ticky tacky national builders give their customers panels that are already completely maxed out, such that in order to add an outlet without breaking code requirements you have to redo the entire box. It's smart to avoid that. Running heavy conduit up to the roof and out to the garage before you close the walls is trivial, after it's major surgery. That's smart policy. Putting thousands of dollars in wiring in is a mistake.

Even for conduit, the software concept of You Ain't Gonna Need It probably applies at scale -- depends on your assumptions as to adoption of course, but I'll be that the total cost of putting this everywhere is around the same OOM as the extra cost that would have been incurred by (say) spec-home buyers who end up using it.

Sort of a form of income transfer from low-end homebuyers who really want a low-end home to midrange folks who do end up upgrading things later.

You Ain't Gonna Need It

This has always been a far too broad reactionary argument to tamper a tendency that goes too far. The wise engineer knows that there is a very small target of just enough helping yourself in the future without hindering yourself in the present. And I've only seen people develop a good sense of it through experience.

At some point it gets complicated and we can split hairs. Are unit prices elastic to cost or primarily to demand? For the most part low end home buyers aren't actually checking things like electrical wiring, they're paying for ft^2 and location.

But the cost of putting conduit in a wall or under a parking lot is negligible. In any house I've renovated, I always run conduit between the major parts of the house, so as to at least be able to run a wire most of the way without cutting open any walls. Panel to the garage, panel to the attic, panel to the basement.

For the most part low end home buyers aren't actually checking things like electrical wiring, they're paying for ft^2 and location.

And the vast majority of them will never need that conduit -- so instead of just paying for sq. ft. and location, now they are paying also for the conduit that guys like you and @IGI-111 (and probably me, TBF) want. The builder doesn't put that stuff there for free.

Penalty for using natural gas for space or water heating in commercial buildings

This is especially dumb and culture-wars because natural gas at point of use is almost inherently more efficient than burning natural gas to generate electricity and then converting it back to heat.

It depends on the heating system I think. Heat pumps rival gas furnaces in overall efficiency because they move the heat rather than create it.

This is true for water heating (and natural gas cooking surely), but for space heating you can do better with a gas electrical plant (45% average efficiency, 60% in the most efficient) powering a new heat pump (300%+), because with the heat pump you're not just getting the electricity converted back to heat you're also stealing more heat from outside.

The catch is that your heat pump has to be overdesigned for your climate most of the time if you don't want it to be underdesigned some of the time. My old house had two modes, one "normal" mode that worked at heat pump efficiency for most of the mild winters here, versus one "emergency heat" mode that was necessary if the daily high got abnormally low for long. I presume "emergency heat" was just resistance "convert it back to heat" heating, 100% "efficient" instead of 250% or whatever, but the effect on our electric bill made "just freeze until the cold snap passes" seem like a reasonable alternative. Fortunately I'd moved to a new gas-heated house before we had a week-long cold snap...

This is true for water heating (and natural gas cooking surely), but for space heating you can do better with a gas electrical plant (45% average efficiency, 60% in the most efficient) powering a new heat pump (300%+), because with the heat pump you're not just getting the electricity converted back to heat you're also stealing more heat from outside.

Induction might actually be more efficient than a gas stove because there's no heat loss to the surrounding area, but it's true.

Of course in practice heat pumps usually don't have enough horsepower to keep up with commercial demand(I'm technically an HVAC tech- heat pumps are simply too weak to keep up with commercial needs, even on high tonnage systems). It's more or less a binary choice between emergency heat and gas. Particularly commercial buildings use a lot of hot water and heat pump water heaters are simply incapable of performing well enough for commercial use.

I presume "emergency heat" was just resistance "convert it back to heat" heating,

Emergency heat is straight electric, yep.

It's like the natural gas stove stuff. Ostensibly, it's for health and safety reasons related to insufficient ventilation; in practice, it's obviously motivated by decarbonization that expects the electric versions to be powered by clean renewable energy, which they'll never implement in sufficient scale or scope.

At a county level, non-mandatory code compliance can once again become mandatory. My father runs (well, ran) a business remodeling homes in and around a city where such adjacency to reality is the default disposition, and the cost and time difference between projects in this county and projects in the neighboring farmland county would make your head spin. Pulling permits for just about anything is a nightmare, since the city takes this as an opportunity to force homeowners to update their properties for modern code compliance. We've had deck jobs where the city-mandated updates to insulation, electrical, etc ended up costing more than the damn deck.

The city council loves bragging about how they have some of the strictest and most complex building codes in the nation, because in their minds, it means they're doing the most in the fight against climate dragons. It somehow goes unmentioned that a lot of these initiatives are counterproductive or dangerous (mandated over-building electrical infrastructure for any job that touches an electrical installation encourages people to get creative with their own wiring jobs). A lot of the other mandates are clearly back-scratching graft for a captured industry - the insulation requirements are so ridiculously overprovisioned that in many cases the only way to meet the county requirements is with special sealant foam along every wall joist, which costs like $3/ft and is sold by one company in the state. Note that this can also be an add-on requirement by the county for anything that opens an exterior wall for any reason (including maintenance and repair). This all has exactly the expected effect on willingness to perform maintenance by local landlords, and large swaths of the city have properties full of dozens of trivial issues that get swept under the rug to avoid incurring massive update costs unrelated to basic maintenance. And of course, the dilapidated ghetto-houses in this city are worth double or triple the value of the neighboring county's much-nicer modern homes, contributing another unironic brag by the city council.

During the pandemic, out of an "abundance of caution" the city council decided to shut down the building and planning department - offices closed, phones off, no one responded to emails - and moved all the permitting forms online. The online form was totally broken, of course, and auto-rejected all applications. For 18 months, you simply could not pull a permit in the county. Homeowners were understandably upset with this state of affairs, and eventually ignored the permits and moved ahead with their projects. As long as we follow code, and get engineering approval for anything that needs it, the only thing missing is the formality of a city stamp on your piece of paper, and they're not supposed to arbitrarily reject you if you're doing everything right, so... Of course, the instant the city comes back from their 18-month paid sabbatical, they immediately start suing every homeowner who did unpermitted work, starting, of course, with the people who live in viewing distance of the city council members! The city council got a reality check at the state court level, but not before wasting millions of dollars attempting to punish their own citizens for a problem they created.

Most of the city council secured re-election.

My dad has since left the state.

Newer is generally better form an efficiency perspective compared to older. So any standard that retards people from moving from older to newer is asinine. Thus, you shouldn’t require a person to update everything to code when trying to modernize X. That just makes incremental improvements more expensive.

We see this in other areas. Mandating the best while grandfathering the old leads to suboptimal outcomes.

The fiber I mentioned has been replaced with newer, higher-bandwidth stuff a couple times in the last 40 years. The key value proposition wasn't the fiber itself - it was laying a channel with enough access ports that anyone could run whatever they want through the run for the next hundred years. In this case, the power company paid for the fiber itself, then businesses paid for updates and replacements decades later, and it cost a fraction of what it would have to tear up all the streets and put in new channels everywhere. Like @FiveHourMarathon mentioned in the sibling post, leaving room for expansion and future updates is smart.

And how much capacity is there to enforce code requirements? The Gestapo isn't keeping track of all this, so you end up with people doing things without permits if doing them with permits costs too much money.

This is how you get anarcho-tyranny. People just end up ignoring the permits and regulations out of necessity, and then the government only goes after easy targets to fine and/or after people they dislike for some other reason.

It is a special kind of Madness. I do almost all updates myself as you are allowed to do almost all your own work in my state and my town is also kind of wild about building codes. In my town it is residential sprinkler systems, even though we haven't had a deadly fire in 100 years. The fire chief's car even has 'residential sprinklers save lives' on the side of it, guess what the other half of his family does, you guessed it residential sprinkler systems. I would like to add another unit to my property but guess what that means, residential sprinkler system would have to be installed and inspected every single year from then on out and serviced every three. They are one more point of failure and horrific water damage, all for no real net increase in safety. The fire department is 99% ems calls .09% brush fires .009% parades and .001% structure fires already.

It NEVER stops, nothing ever comes off the books or gets easier to build. They just let everyone in town build an ADU if they want, no one has done it as it basically needs to be as expensive as your main residence due to code compliance. Same people that are "worried" about affordable housing are the ones driving up housing prices and creating cost disease. Rather have someone burn to death using a propane heater in a tent than not have r50 insulation in the roof of a new home.

In my town it is residential sprinkler systems, even though we haven't had a deadly fire in 100 years. The fire chief's car even has "residential sprinklers save lives" on the side of it. Guess what the other half of his family does? You guessed it: residential sprinkler systems.

To be fair, residential sprinkler systems have been mandatory in the IRC since year 2011, so your jurisdiction is not necessarily being corrupt here.

They are one more point of failure and horrific water damage, all for no real net increase in safety.

The NAHB also opposes this code provision, considering it a waste of money when three-quarters of house-fire deaths occur in houses that don't even have working smoke alarms.

In my town they didn't implement it until 2018 and it is not a state wide requirement. Most states don't require them and about half leave it up to the towns. Thanks for the link, it allowed me to find the list of states https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/advocacy/docs/top-priorities/codes/fire-sprinklers/fire-sprinkler-state-adoption-2019.pdf?rev=fb2e43a2c10249c79234ac4ef2405470&hash=93C19612CC1E730D343D25624862D0A8

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