kcantor
Senior Member
are you in town or teasing?
Strathcona Hotel Restoration | ?m | 3s | Beljan Development | Hodgson Schilf Evans
- Thread starter Daveography
- Start date
archited
Senior Member
Aaron_Lloyd
Active Member
From yesterday evening.
Airboy
Senior Member
There is a code requirement for sprinklers.
Indeed, but code isn't normally applied retroactively, so was curious if they existed before given the recent fire history.
Airboy
Senior Member
They gutted the building, code required a full sprinklered building. But I seem to recall that there was a sprinkler system in there before.
kcantor
Senior Member
current codes will always be applied to current work. there are some thresholds that provide some nominal exemptions to complete upgrading but those actually get triggered quite quickly and are cumulative so you can't avoid them by breaking the work up into small pieces. as we're talking about fire and life safety we probably don't really want that anyway.
existing buildings are typically "grandfathered" in their current condition only (as long as their isn't an imminent structural or life safety or health concern) and for their current use only (i.e. a change of use will typically trigger a full upgrade to current codes).
Airboy
Senior Member
Rule of thumb here is if you touch the system you upgrade.
Had a school that half had sprinklers, the older section had none. Local authority said we didn't need to add to the system but we updated anyway.
Had a school that half had sprinklers, the older section had none. Local authority said we didn't need to add to the system but we updated anyway.
Thanks. I could have just asked if it was there before in retrospect.
That said, coding requirements and how they apply presently and to past buildings is still good information to get out there.
