Code of conduct: Helping contractors stay compliant may be your most important role
By Oliver Post
Among the many challenges distributor personnel face, staying abreast of changes remains constant. Each year, there are scores of changes in products, techniques and practices, and you can play an important role in deciphering this information for your customers, who often have less time and less on-the-job access to information.
Think about it: whereas you can easily pull up something like the Electrical Safety Authority’s (ESA’s) website—the group responsible for electrical safety in Ontario—your contractor customer will have a hard time of it while he’s engrossed in wiring up a building (not that the Internet is typically available on the jobsite, anyway).
This
puts some onus on you at the outset—doing what you can to stay
informed—to understand the implications of a job a customer may be
taking on. That requires training, and easily the most important area
in which you should stay informed is building codes, and how the
products you sell fit in with them.
While
some clinics may seem at times to be tedious, possibly offering little
in the way of new information, it is critical you take them seriously,
especially when they relate to building codes.
The
seeming proliferation of residential and commercial fires this winter
got me thinking about the origin of building codes, and the sad fact
that they have frequently been a reaction to some dreadful incident or
another—as far back as pre-biblical times.
Records
of building codes date back to before 1700 B.C. The “The Code of
Hammurabi” was named after the Babylonian king who wrote its tenets
somewhere between 1795 B.C. and 1750 B.C. This book of laws, which
prescribed such punishments as cutting off the hand of a thief, also
dictated that a builder would be put to death were he to build a house
that fell down and killed the homeowner. Were the falling house to kill
the homeowner’s son, then the builder’s son would be put to death. Were
the house to fall onto, and kill, the homeowner’s slave, or destroy
other property, then... well, you get the idea.
But
building codes are living, dynamic things. About a year ago, a tragic
fire in New York City spurred action on its building codes. In March, a
fire ripped through a two-family home in The Bronx, killing 10
people—nine of which were children. In this house fire incident,
investigators cited a number of factors that contributed to the
horrific event, including smoke detectors that had no batteries. Still,
the house complied with the city’s building code. Lessons were learned.
Of course, you don’t have to go across the border to find incidents
worthy of mention.
In
downtown Toronto, when a century-old building started to burn in late
February, so did the one next to it, and so on. Nearly a whole block of
businesses—and the apartments above—burned right to the ground.
Thankfully, nobody lost their lives, just their stuff; which is bad
enough, considering it was in a low-rent district and most losses were
uninsured. An electrical failure is suspected, but with precious little
left of those structures, we may never know the full answer.
While
buildings as old as those will always be challenging to maintain, it’s
also a sure bet that each had been subject to repairs/renovations over
the years that were not to code. When people are poor—or don’t know any
better—they often do things they shouldn’t. And that includes doing a
repair (improperly) to save a little money; then the right
circumstances come together to cause that unprofessional repair to fail
and start a blaze.
Playing
into the hands of that cost-above-all market is the influx of
counterfeit products. These products look just like the legitimately
tested and certified ones on your shelf (or nearly like them, anyway),
but don’t meet the performance standards that their labelling would
indicate. For distributors, it can be tough to distinguish the real
from the fake—from the outside anyway.
Counterfeits
are an insidious fact of the global economy and, when it comes to
critical safety items, they are an abomination... like circuit
breakers, for example, that are expected to have a 10,000A rating and
trip at 3500A (that’s if their contacts don’t weld first).
There
are more than a few cases—some accessible through the aforementioned
ESA website—where products have been recalled by a distributor or UL.
Many of these do not perform properly and are dangerous. Oh, and
they’re cheap.
A
handful of years ago, authorities raided a distributor in New York
State and seized thousands of counterfeit GFCIs falsely bearing the UL
mark. The units looked good and, at one-third the price, were a
tempting buy. But the parts possessed no GFCI circuitry whatsoever.
Were they installed, they might have passed undetected for years, lying
in wait for conditions requiring a GFCI to save someone’s life.
The
best way to avoid such products is to be extra careful when dealing
with unfamiliar suppliers who have special deals on surplus, overstock
or auction items that may not be what they seem.
Considering
the severity of the consequences, you should pass on the deal if you
have any doubts. When you have a question, check with the brand’s
manufacturer. When you come across counterfeit products on your shelf,
contact the authorities.
Thankfully,
these are still pretty rare occurrences among distributors. On a daily
basis, you’ll be more likely called upon to provide the right products
for a job.
Building
codes that dictate how products are to be constructed and how they are
to be used in concert with each other are the result of real world
experience, not some isolated engineering exercise in a lab somewhere.
(GFCIs were only mandated in the 1970s after one too many lives was
lost.)
Even
legitimate, quality products can cause problems when used improperly or
placed in an environment for which they weren’t designed. (You only
have to take a quick glance at the Electrical House of Horrors at
EBMag.com to be reminded of how bad it can get. And, while you can
laugh at some of those, thinking about all the substandard repairs we
don’t know about should make you a little nervous.)
Building
codes, and the products that meet them, exist to help keep people safe.
Keep this in mind when you’re undergoing a building code refresher, or
when you’re faced with a contractor who you suspect might be making an
error: sometimes saving a customer from himself is the best customer
service of all.
Oliver Post can be reached at
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