Wes Stewart wrote:
On Wed, 02 Jul 2003 22:04:26 -0400, "Thomas D. Horne"
wrote:

[snip]


|It has to be required by law. The inspector cannot make up rules based
|on personal judgment. Some states, such as Virginia, forbid the local
|AHJ from enforcing anything that is different from the state wide code.
| The city must adopt a code and make that code available if their
|state allows it. The inspector say's so is not enough.

Oh, I dunno about that.

I added a 160 sq ft laundry/sewing room and a large garage on my
house. The laundry was between the existing structure and the new
garage.

Although I plumbed in HVAC from the existing system, the duct was a
long way from the plenum and since it's a masonary house with a flat
roof and no crawl space I couldn't add a return duct.

Since the garage is also the workshop and it gets hot in Arizona, I
added a cooling system to the garage. I also planned to supply
additional cool air from this system to the laundry to augment that
system.

I designed the addition but had a professional do the drafting and run
the plans through the county plans examiners. After approval, I began
construction. One of my inspections was for rough framing and
mechanical. The inspector blessed the duct that ran from the garage
into the laundry.

During the plumbing and electrical inspection, a different inspector
looked at the duct and said, "You can't have that duct run from a
garage into a living space."

I said, "Huh? This was blessed by the plans examiners and the last
inspector."

He said, "I don't give a damn, you either tear it out completely or
replace it with a thicker gauge sheet metal and install a heat
operated damper, or your project stops here."

I went to the county plans examiners and told them what happened and
they were besides themselves. I appealed to the chief inspector and
his reply was, "I never overrule the inspector in the field."

I tore it out.

Please explain how that constitutes "make up rules based on personal
judgment." A fire wall between a residence and an attached garage is
required by all of the model building codes. A duct that pierces a
firewall must meet tougher standards than one that does not. That is to
protect you from a fire in your garage spreading so quickly that it cuts
off your means of egress before your smoke detector sounds. All plans
approvals are subject to verification of their effect by field
inspection. The fact that the inspector who actually had to sign off on
the job was stricter in his inspection practice than the folks who
signed off on the plans is often true. If you had the plans reviewed by
a licensed design professional they might have caught that problem
before you built the duct.
--
Tom