Transcript:

Christoph Lohr:
And welcome back to The Authority Podcast: Plumbing and Mechanical. I’m your host, Christoph Lohr. And on this week’s episode, we’re going to be talking about how Seattle improved water savings and reduced new construction costs through accurate pipe sizing. Seattle recently mandated the use of the IAPMO Water Demand Calculator® for multifamily residences, also known as R2 occupancies. The inclusion of Appendix M in the city’s plumbing codes puts Seattle on the cutting edge of sustainability and resiliency by creating a pathway for significant reductions in potable water use, improving energy, as well as significant reductions in new construction costs. Joining me for this episode is, first, Steven Hart, chief of the Plumbing and Gas Piping Program in Public Health for Seattle & King County.

Steve, thanks for joining us.
 
Steven Hart:
Thank you, Christoph. Glad to be here.
 
Christoph Lohr:
And also joining us on this doubleheader is Duane Jonlin, FAIA, Energy Code and Energy Conservation advisor for the City of Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections. And he was directly involved with the requirement to use Appendix M for multifamily in Seattle. Duane, really glad to have you on the show.
 
Duane Jonlin:
Thanks for having me.
 
Christoph Lohr:
Well, for our listeners, let's dive right in.

So when, this is a new requirement, to our knowledge this is the first time anywhere in the U.S. that there's a mandate to utilize the Water Demand Calculator. And I think, Duane, I’ll drive this first question at you. What drove the decision to update the way Seattle plumbing professionals size their pipes?
 
Duane Jonlin:
Well, this calculator is all around apartment buildings, multifamily buildings that use low-flow fixtures; they don't need as much water. So the fact that our state has requirements in that are stringent for low-flow fixtures for multifamily buildings already means that we’re already there for that requirement, and the energy savings were terrific. And the fact that we’re getting energy savings and construction cost savings in the same bundle is a pretty special deal. So that was pretty much a no-brainer.
 
Christoph Lohr:
Why mandate it? Why not just promote the availability of an updated sizing calculation?
 
Duane Jonlin:
Yeah, I’m always poking fun at mechanical engineers for being so habit bound. I think nobody’s phone ever rang on the weekend because somebody’s heating capacity was oversized, right? So there’s always a tendency to want to err on the side of caution, and in this case, this rule change prods the whole industry, engineers and builders, into moving up to a higher level of performance, maybe out of their comfort zone at first.
 
Christoph Lohr:
… is similar concept? There’s always that inclination to add a safety factor on top of a safety factor. And the oversizing, we know from the California Energy Commission that Hunter’s curve is, and like a multifamily building can be like as much as 25x — that's not 25%, but 25x — so 25 times oversize.

Steven Hart:
There’s kind of a trickle-down mechanism here that’s happening, and when there are codes that change and have significant impact, the outside entities that have to introduce these into their design, meaning those that are the design professionals, want to know exactly what a government organization like ours here in Seattle is going to look for.
 
What would we want to have you provide to us so that we can be comfortable that you have met all the criterion within the requirements of Appendix M using a Water Demand Calculator. So for that to happen, everybody has to get educated, and we try to do that simultaneously. So here coming up in a couple months, we’ve actually tried to introduce not only the inspection part of our program as well as the professional part of the industry to collaborate in a shared arena and environment, to have one collective training.
 
And we hope to do this more than once for those that couldn’t make it the first time. But it is a shared environment, so it’s a back and forth and it would make somebody apprehensive as to know how far to stretch this thing out and how much effort should they put into creating design documents for a government-reviewing organization like ours who will also be doing the inspecting.
 
Christoph Lohr:
Definitely. And I think that that date, Steve, I think we had set on was February 17th. Is that correct?
 
Steven Hart:
That is. We’re going to have a training on February 17th at Green River College in Auburn, Washington, and it’s going to be about a four-, five-hour event; it depends on how lengthy we get into discussions. But again, I think what I’ve noticed when we’ve had discussions regarding Appendix M is there’s this continual kind of apprehensiveness to when you say to somebody, ‘Well, you now have a 6-inch water supply that can be reduced down to a 4-inch water supply; same structure, same fixtures,” and there’s a lot of apprehension about I’m going to use empirical data and say 6-inch works, but I don't have anything for 4-inch. But in fact that’s kind of not really true because there is a very large, lengthy study of multiple structures over a significant amount of years to identify the actual use of Appendix M.
 
Christoph Lohr:
Excellent. Excellent. So one question before we move on in terms of a little bit more on that retraining of Seattle plumbing professionals.
 
Let me ask this question: In terms of, we talked about why mandate it. But one more follow-up question I wanted to ask on that is why mandate it for multifamily and specifically target like apartments, condos, that kind of building? I’m assuming it’s because the larger pipe sizes, you would have a much more disparate impact than if it was just on a single-family home.
 
Duane Jonlin:
This is specifically for multifamily that uses low-flow fixtures. It’s what Appendix M works for.
 
Christoph Lohr:
Gotcha. So it would also work for a single-family home. Appendix M can work for single-family, but the mandate is only for multifamily, and I’m assuming it’s because of the larger water systems in play in multifamily. That was why that was targeted as part of the mandate and not single family.
 
Duane Jonlin:
Seattle, in Washington state, the local jurisdictions are not allowed to make changes to the single-family residential part of the energy code or to the residential building code, so anything like that we have to do at the state level.
 
Christoph Lohr:
Understood. Understood. OK, that is helpful context to know. All right, switching gears back to the plumbing training side. Steve, you mentioned a little bit about some of those opportunities, but it sounds like, is there anything else you want to mention about retraining or any other anticipated needs in retraining Seattle plumbing professionals to be more comfortable with using the Water Demand Calculator?
 
Steven Hart:
I think any time that you look at something that’s new, at first you have to understand it and then get the historical context of why it’s been introduced and why we’re going to transition from what we currently use to what we’re going to eventually use as a continuance of water supply systems going forward.
 
And to do that, it takes multiple trainings. Not only, like I say again, on the design side and on the building department side where there’s going to be inspections of that category of those water supply systems and the review of those water supply systems. It takes a lot of training, and that training has to take time to sink in.
 
And not everybody’s going to grasp this the first time. So there’s going to be more than one training, there’s going to be a lot of dialogue and crosstalk and communication regarding about questions that need to be either answered through our process in and on our website, like a frequently asked questions venue just tailored for Appendix M, so that way we have somebody who is maybe familiar, but not entirely with Appendix M, that we can deflect some of those questions through an FAQ process and give a little bit more comfort and a little bit more reassurance, and where maybe they’re lacking a little bit of knowledge or training that it’s at their availability.
 
Christoph Lohr:
Definitely. Well, and I know IAPMO, we are definitely committed to helping you all make it a success. As mentioned, we’re going to be helping do that training on February 17th, that Saturday. And then there’s plenty of other opportunities in terms of past classes and recordings and IAPMO Learn for folks to access too, but whether it’s live or recorded or otherwise training, definitely excited to make sure this is successful for you all in Seattle-King County.
 
Duane Jonlin:
I’m not worried about the kind of people that show up at IAPMO events or other things that Steve organizes for plumbing professionals like that. It’s those smaller outfits that are not part of any of these societies that are just working on their own, that are going to be the ones with unhappy faces up at permit desk when they get turned away for doing what they’ve always been doing, and I don’t know the best way to get out and reach those people. It might be through the vendors of gear that, since everybody has to deal with them that we can somehow get the notice out that life is changing.
 
Christoph Lohr:
That’s a great point, Duane, and I was going to ask you and my sense is, too, it’s going to be difficult to get out to everybody, to get that message out to everyone, especially if they’re not paying attention. The education might be on the back end, unfortunately, and that’s just one of those costs of doing business in a certain way that that you might not be on the up and up when changes like this happen.
 
But I was going to say I imagine you guys have a pretty good communications department, so hopefully at least they’re paying attention to building code changes as they come out.
 
Let’s wrap this up with just a couple more questions here. And I guess this first one I want to point at, maybe, Steve, if you want to start and then Duane you want to chime in on, is, what would you say to other jurisdictions facing water shortages?
 
They’re trying to reduce their energy consumption, they have housing affordability issues. What advice or guidance or, what would you say to them if they’re thinking about those kind of things?
 
Steven Hart:
I think communication is the beginning step. You were just talking about how is the industry going to know that we’ve made this transition? Our program does a newsletter. We do it often and we incorporate our government partners as well as our local partners like MCA and PHCC and ASPE and ASHRAE and the local IAPMO chapters, so we have a very solid connection with industry partners as well as government partners to share the word and the knowledge that you know exactly what is happening and what’s going to happen in the near future. But aside all of that communication, when you’re talking about somebody who’s thinking about doing something like this, one of the first approaches is to first identify, is this a benefit to my community and how can my community benefit from a different style or type of water supply system?
 
If you're a community that is struggling financially in a city or town and you need to find some mechanism to reduce the cost of, let’s just say, affordable housing, you may want to look into this opportunity because cutting across the board, it has all these trailers to it that, as Duane mentioned earlier from smaller pipe size to smaller corehole drills to smaller plumbing chases to smaller insulation size, and then all of that translates into the economic factor of it — less costly in an installation format, as well as in the overall maintenance of such a system.
 
So what you're talking about, should my community approach this, there are some qualifying questions that you should ask yourself in your community. Is this a benefit to our community and then approach it from that going forward.
 
Duane Jonlin:
And I’d add that first off, if you’re not in a state that requires low-flow fixtures, you’d need to ensure that the apartment builders were using those, which is getting to be pretty normal now across the board as those fixtures have gotten to be better.
 
But then this is one of those really rare opportunities that in one jump you can reduce water use and energy use, carbon emissions and construction costs all in one go. I think anybody that’s not jumping at this chance is going to look pretty foolish a few years down the road.
 
Christoph Lohr:
And when you're saying this chance, Duane, you’re talking about specifically adoption of Appendix M, right-sizing Water Demand Calculator. Excellent. Well, that is, I think, a great way to close out the main questions. Just one last question before we go. And that is, I would say first off, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation here.
 
I’ve learned a lot from you, Steve, and you as well, Duane, and really appreciate you sharing your time. Would love to have you guys on the podcast again sometime in the future. Let’s say it’s a year from now. What do you think we’re talking about in one year from now? And I’ll start with maybe Steve and then I’ll go to you, Duane, or vice versa. Either way, whichever one of you guys wants to jump first on that.
 
Steven Hart:
Well, I think in a year from now we’re going to be talking about the reduction of the size of drain waste and vent systems, because the correlation of the factor of a reduced water supply system may not change the probability of the use of that water supply system in the discharges, but if the loading was comparable to a larger-size system, then if you reduce that water supply system, I think what you’re going to discover is that the drain waste and vent system was oversized to begin with.
 
Christoph Lohr:
On the residential. I think that makes sense, Steve That’s actually in Appendix C of the UPC. That’s one that I've been exploring quite a bit, the drainage there. And it’s been interesting, the opportunity there too.
 
Duane, what about you?
 
Duane Jonlin:
Well, we have also in this area mandates going into effect that your water heating is going to be done by heat pump in Seattle and in Washington state. And as that gets more real — the project’s progressed to the point where they’re starting to install these systems — we’ll be looking at what the professionals out there have figured out as the most economical and sensible way to install these systems and any words to the wise that they might have for us.
 
Christoph Lohr:
Excellent, Excellent. Well, on behalf of IAPMO and The Authority Podcast: Plumbing and Mechanical, I just want to say thank you, Steve, thank you, Duane. Really appreciate the time today and look forward to having you on in the future.

Duane and Steve, thank you.
 
Christoph Lohr:
Thanks for joining us on this week’s episode of The Authority Podcast: Plumbing and Mechanical. Love this episode of the podcast? Head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate and leave a review. Please follow us on Twitter @AuthorityPM; on Instagram at The Authority Podcast or email us at iapmo@iapmo.org. Join us next time for another episode of The Authority Podcast: Plumbing and Mechanical. In the meantime, let's work together to make our buildings more resilient and shape us for the better.