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