Selecting the right plumbing products for any commercial job is a balancing act that would make circus clowns proud — budget, function, conservation, maintenance, who’s going to use the fixtures and how.
Have you opened the latest edition of NFPA 13, Standard for the Installation of Sprinkler Systems, to check on a specific requirement and wondered if you opened the right book?
Did you know there is a specification for water leak detection products that protects your customers’ home or business from damage caused by leaking pipes?
The U.S. is seeing about 10,000 baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) retire per day. That means every day we lose knowledge from our industry due to retirements. The fact that so much of the construction industry is experience- or knowledge-based work makes this fact especially sobering, but the challenges don’t end there.
Recently, I had the opportunity to go on a fishing trip. It was a “deep-sea” excursion from the northern tip of Plum Island in New England. The recommended method of trickery was to put some pieces of squid on a hook, weight the line with a 16-ounce hunk of lead and let it sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Unintended consequences, that close cousin of mislaid plans, can claim some responsibility for a current conundrum: low-flow fixtures paired with existing oversized piping helped create the growing crisis of legionella bacteria.
Charlotte Pipe & Foundry recently discovered a Shanghai, China-based company called Yitai Plastics had registered the Charlotte Pipe name, brand and logo in the country in 2010.
Most plumbing engineers involved in healthcare design who I’ve talked to have said their foremost design concern is waterborne bacterial control in general, and legionella in particular.