Whacko Government Control of our Homes.

I'm in process of building a house for myself, or at least I'm in process of jumping through government hoops so I can get legal permission to build a house for myself. So far I've spent around $3,000 on fees and permit taxes to various government agencies and have not turned the first shovel of dirt. If my blog entries have been a little slow in coming lately, that's the reason.

I used to build houses for a living back in the 70s. Life was more simple then. The environmental whackos hadn't taken over the building industry. The energy saving environmental whackos have just gone totally nuts since then, and they control building codes so everyone is required to do as we are told or the government will not allow us to live in our homes.

I'm all for energy savings, don't get me wrong, but there are limits and there is insanity. The new International Residential Code requires that all exterior walls be caulked, sealed, gasketed, closed, tightened, and otherwise carefully closed to outside air. Those old style aluminum frame windows (with the nice looking dark anodize) are no longer allowed here. We have to buy much more expensive wood or vinyl (white) windows that have a "U" factor (heat admittance) of 0.35 or less. Well and good you might say considering that winters get cold here sometimes. But that's not the end of it. Houses with all the exterior sealed up get air pollution inside. When all the fresh air is sealed out people end up living in their own concentrated air pollution. So the newly required significantly more expensive windows are required to have a manufactured opening in the window sill to let in fresh air. Alternatively you can install fresh air vents in your wall next to your windows. Is that nuts, or just insane? My wife said, "If you want fresh air, why can't you just open a window? Isn't that one of the main reasons to install windows?" Of course it is, but the environmental whackos running the building codes think we are all too stupid to open our very expensive tightly sealed windows, so we are required to pay for open air vents to allow in the fresh air that we had to pay to seal out.

Then there are the bathroom fans. Thirty years ago you were allowed to open a window if you had one in your bathroom for ventilation. Not any more. The new code requires you to purchase an exhaust fan at extra expense, even if you have an outside window that you could open. "Well, okay," you might think, "I don't have to use it with the window open." Not so. The law requires you to install a timer which turns your bathroom fan on twice a day and run it for a while whether you want it on or not. They also require you to buy a more expensive "low noise" fan in hopes that you won't get so aggravated that you rip the noisy intrusion out by the roots as soon as their back is turned. So to sum up, you have to install a fan even if you would rather just open the window. You have to have it wired to a timer because most sane people wouldn't turn the noisy annoyance on if given a choice. And you have to do it because your house has become so sealed up by buying all that expensive insulation and sealed doors and windows which they require, that without mechanically driven forced air replacement you will have an unhealthy level of polluted air in your home.

Some other wrinkles I've been discovering.

Gas furnaces, boilers, and water heaters now have to be much more expensive "sealed" combustion models because your new home is too well sealed up for the industry standard model which takes combustion air out of the home and exhausts it by convection out a stove pipe through the roof. An alternative is to build an insulated mechanical room which is effectively an unheated outside room open to the outside but not to the inside. All the heat lost by the water heater and furnace thus is lost outside the home instead of generally adding to your indoor comfort as was the case before the environmental whackos took over.

You have to install a "radon abatement system" to prevent naturally occurring radon gas from coming out of the ground and collecting in your sealed home. The radon abatement system defeats much of the expensive insulation you were required to install under your floors. Once more you pay for "energy savings" and then pay to defeat it. That's the law.

You and I are told what we can and can not do, what kind of homes we can and can not live in, even down to how often we have to turn on our ventilation fans. The control of and environmental whacko government into our lives is tyranny and oppression. We don't need them, we don't want them, and we would all be far better off without them.

Bob