Tonight, building officials from the City of Cranbrook and the Regional District of East Kootenay will be providing information on the new BC Building Code regulations at a forum.
Tracy McGuire, City of Cranbrook Building Inspector, said the forum is aimed at providing information to contractors within the East Kootenays. She said the changes are on a wide parameter and came into effect Dec. 19, 2014.
“It affects most of the disciplines in the construction trade: framing; insulators; electricians; wood stove installers — everybody,” McGuire said.
She added that the meeting is more for contractors than the general public, with the exemption of people who are building a house.
“It’s only for new builds,” she said.
McGuire said the forum is about making the changes more straightforward for those involves in building construction.
“The province changed the way the regions are divided in British Columbia, so there’s been a change in our energy requirements in our zone, which is a newly created climatic zone,” she said.
The changes to the energy requirements deal mostly with ventilation and insulation.
“The changes will be affective on any building permit that was received after Dec. 19, 2014,” she said. “That’s fortunate because we don’t really have any new single family dwellings in yet — it’s our real slow season for that now.”
She said there is a big list of things they will talk about.
“It’s all regarding energy efficiency requirements in new builds. There will be changes to the insulation requirements, changes to ventilation, and changes to the building envelope airtightness requirements.
There are also changes to the existing Radon mitigation requirements.
“We already employ that within the building code, but there are just modifications to that now,” she said.
She said the presentation about all of the changes will likely take about 40 minutes. That will be followed by a question and answer period for the contractors to ask anything specific as it pertains to them.
McGuire confirmed the event is free and added that there will be donuts.
She said one of the reason they are putting on the forum is that, while there were some seminars put on by the Building Officials Association in December, they cost hundreds of dollars to attend.
“The changes affect so many disciplines of the trades, so we decided we would do this just to get information out there,” she said.
Handouts will also be available for people to pick up.
The forum will take place in Cranbrook on tonight, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2015 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Manual Training School, located at 1212 2nd Street North next to the Cranbrook Public Library.
