Is meeting City Of Vancouver regulations worth it?

[Dave295]

The city make it sound simple but if you read between the lines it certainly isn't.

You will have to put in hard wired smoke alarms throughout your house and get an inspection, and in 5 years from now you'll have to install a sprinkler system that costs a small fortune. 

If your basement suite is unaothorized as most are in Vancouver (and very well known to the city that most are unauthorized) , then the inspector may bring that up and make you do all kinds of upgrades that will likely cost you many thousands of dollars. 

Many basement suites can never meet the city requirements and you run the risk of having it shut down permanently. 

Anyone got any thoughts on this? 

[Pete28]

Hard wired alarms are a good idea - they all go off together which avoids you not hearing the lower level one etc, but would be extremely hard to do after construction 😞

I have also found they also tend to all malfunction together...

I was unaware of any residential requirement for sprinklers anywhere. That's a while other level of chaos. I guess it can be done but $$

[Dave295]

Hi Pete, the smoke alarms are a good idea and I put them in my house, also I made sure all the windows met code for fire egress. When they go off they warn you in French and English which is always amusing as most the people in my house speak Japanese or Korean. 

I did most the work on the hardwired alarms myself as I'm a carpenter and was mostly cutting holes and pulling cable, then had my electricain do final hook up. 

[Pete28]

Apparently they now do wireless ones 🙂 I have wired ones in a rental and they keep going off randomly. 

[Mj8]

They can be wireless but all need to be interconnected.