Friday, November 14, 2008

Byzantium by the Bay

We have been pleased with the tankless water heater that we installed last month, but we still had to get final sign-off on the permit. We had cautioned the installer that the Foster City regulatory process was one of the most Byzantine in the Bay Area, but he assured us that, after dealing with the inspectors in Marin County and San Francisco, a Peninsula city should be easy as pie. He had forgotten that pie is a dish often served with humility.

The crusty inspector pointed out the first problem: the installer had run the gas and water feed along the exterior of the house. About 20 feet of piping had to be rendered invisible from the street, so the plumbers spent another day drilling holes in the walls to reroute the lines to the garage interior.

Next, the water heater had to be lowered from our neighbor’s view so that he would not be disturbed by the unsightly box peeking over the six foot fence. (Although it seems to me that only those who have the most extreme esthetic sensitivity would be offended by the sight of a stainless steel box, one does not argue with building inspectors. By the way, our neighbor’s a nice guy and has never complained, but his successor might.)

The ¾ -inch wrapping around the pipes was insufficiently thick for reasons not entirely clear, especially since other cities deemed that width to be adequate. The local Home Depot didn’t carry one-inch insulation, but our installer located a plumbing supply specialist who did. “Foster City?” the storeowner asked rhetorically.

The final requirement was that the black insulation had to be painted white, again for esthetic reasons. You never know when my neighbor might look at our pipes from his upstairs bedroom and be horrified by the sight of stark black against white. I took pity on our installer, who was operating under a fixed price contract, and said that I myself would slap a double coat of paint on the foam.

The inspector signed off this week. While I have to admit that some of the changes improve the look of the system, I do wonder about the cost of compliance.


© 2008 Stephen Yuen

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