Shopping now vs. Shopping later

Look, it’s money AND time! And none of it now. Hilarious, considering the previous post, at least to me.

Anyway, I’ve been having some difficulty in the evenings, where I’m not quite ready to go to bed, and I’m also not interested in taking on anything that requires significant effort or has to be done to some particular quality standard. For a while there, I was shopping online, but honestly, I’ve bought plenty of stuff recently, a lot of it Ahsoka Tano themed for the next trip to WDW. I’m about done with all that, and I have all the accessories for the tablet I’m playing with. So instead, I figure I’ll do some Future Shopping, aka, house planning.

Today in house planning: I saw on the Control Estimate that the bathrooms have tile. No tile! Ugh. I hate tile. It is hard. It is cold. I do NOT want radiant heating under tile because when it breaks, you can’t really fix it. So you wind up putting mats and rugs down and those are a whole other awful. Ugh. Also, no vinyl, that shit stinks and takes forever to finish off-gassing. I’ve actually had two bathrooms renovated, so you would think I would have an answer to this question and over dinner, R. and I discussed those answers, which were: bamboo and marmoleum.

I had already done the kitchen in marmoleum (sheet, battleship grey, unwaxed), because it’s easy to stand on, and as long as you don’t do the kind of mopping that involves a layer of water on it (I almost never mop, no way in hell am I ever going to do that kind of mopping), and you don’t let things stab into it, it’s pretty eternal. Did I mention it was easy to stand on? I _think_ that one of the bathrooms has the exact same flooring, but I’m asking the person who lives there now to find out if that’s correct and what condition it is in, now that 20 years have gone by. The other bathroom — more like 18 years ago on this one — has bamboo flooring. I’m waiting to find out about condition on that one as well. Forbo / Marmoleum has a tile and/or plank product now that purports to be substantially more waterproof than in the past. They continue to be a low-VOC product, which was also part of the appeal Back in the Day.

What I’m a little uncertain about is whether that thing will survive a zero entry shower context, and I have no idea how one would handle the transition from the tile that would be within and some distance outside the shower, to the rest of the bathroom. Hmmm.

Thursday: 220.70 FTW

We’ve been really struggling to get our electrical provider to … provide for the new house we are building. Here’s a little timeline on the backstory.

September: preliminary load sheet goes out
October: official load sheet goes out.
December: person who received previous load sheets decides to move one or both of them along as part of Oh I’m About to Leave Town for the Holidays
January: what, you want some power? Did you tell us? Oh, you mean —- brings up September load sheet — this one.

It’s now February, and our electrician is, as of two days ago, suggesting I should talk to DPU about the electrical providers failure to provide. (I haven’t, and that is on hold for a moment as a result of the most recent developments.)

I reached out to the HVAC provider, because last week we did a meeting about the Control Estimate and there is a building management system in there that is … well, let’s just say, it has a line item in the control estimate that is meaningfully more than I paid for my condo Back In the Day. I look at what-all can be in a Building Management System and I go, aha! Maybe we can get a reduction in load here. I bring this up with the HVAC guy, and he brings the engineer and electrician back into the conversation. I don’t really want to talk to them, because they keep (NOT LITERALLY) patting me on the head and telling me the tech is in front of the code and sure, but we can’t do that. Also, the HVAC guy finds a bunch of stuff that the engineer spec’ed that we don’t need and that will meaningfully reduce the load calculation. That’s encouraging, so we send the engineer off the remove those items, redo the load calculation and get back to us. (That’s why the electrician backed off on me calling DPU. Yes, I was going to involve the lawyer in that conversation.)

Also, apologies to all my usual readers who have somehow fallen into Construction World with Me. I’ll start tagging these and putting warnings in the subject line because this will be going on for a couple years, and while I will try to make it comprehensible and entertaining, I will fail more than I succeed.

Where was I?

Oh, right. At this point in the story, I said to myself, Self, you’ve read the code. You can do it again. If there is a Walkitout Brand, it is, “There is Nothing More Fun Than Reading a Rule Book and Then Exploiting It”, with a side helping of, “I Exist to Look at Complicated Plans Experts Have Developed, Point to the/a Thing That Will Wreak Havoc 1-5 Years In the Future, Point at It and Propose a Simple But Potentially Time Consuming Solution That If Implemented Now Will Save Everyone’s Future Asses”.

Which is to say, I am the change that I want right now.

So, off to find out what the current code is and where I can read it for free without getting out of wherever my ass is currently.

By now, I had some search terms, like, “load management system”, which is good because I didn’t want to read the whole damn thing. “Load management system” found me “Energy Management System” and I wound up writing this about an hour later:

-=-=-=-=-

When I was a kid, I used to read the code, because my dad kept up on it when he was an electrician, and when he was studying for his electrical inspector license he just got even more invested in it. In retrospect, he’s at least as autistic as I am, and this was a topic you could actually get him to talk about, which was probably part of my motivation.

I hadn’t looked at it for a while, however, newly armed with the phrase “load management system”, I went googling. It appears to be the case that energy management systems entered the code around 2014 when building managers wanted to manage their total lighting load. When EVs came along a bit later, and fleet managers wanted chargers but didn’t want them all adding up to a really big number, EVSEs got added. More recently, the relevant sections (625 and 750) have been somewhat harmonized and generalized (so they are no longer treated as these super reactive regulations, but are trying to create a flexible regulation that can apply to more things as they develop). Provisions such as EMS not overriding fire pumps or other emergency/critical equipment or disconnecting power to an elevator or emergency lighting make a great deal of sense in this context. Finally, 750.30(C)(2) says, “The EMS shall use monitoring and controls to automatically cease current flow upon malfunction of the EMS.”

At first, I was like, welp. There’s the _real_ reason I don’t want a load management system. Please don’t turn my entire house off if something goes wrong with the control system!

But then I thought, didn’t we come up with a list of what we want to power in the event of an outage, vs what we _don’t_ need to power? Could we put some/all the “_don’t_ need to power in an outage” under the control of an EMS designed to cap that load in a way that fits into the 800 service? That moves the hypothetical system back into a direction expected by the regulation (not exactly like a DRED system, but kinda).

Thoughts? I’m not asking for anyone to commit themselves; I’m wondering if this approach might at least fit within the universe of the code better than ones I had earlier been talking about.

-=-=-=-

I sent that on Tuesday and did not get an immediate response. R. got a chuckle out of the whole thing, because a non-response to something like this means someone had to go off and do some reading. He came back with this response:

“To your point, and a little clarification on the load shedding portion. So historically the load management systems have been used for just that, the management of specialty systems and generator and emergency system load shedding for either reducing the size of a generator or reducing peak flow of the main service for billing purposes. With the new demand on the grid and new battery and PV system technology this is an ever evolving technology. This is where it gets tricky, while it all exists and in theory and application will indeed work it is not addressed in article 220 which is where the sizing of your main service is derived. With that said since the tech exists and has been proven this is where the AHJ (local inspector) may provide an exception if necessary. I do believe this is just a lag in the NEC and eventually this will be added to article 220 as it is going to be necessary with the push for electric system usage over fossil fuels.”

I looked at that and said, oh, 220, you say? I had gotten bogged down in 220, but I knew I had at the time been looking at an old version of 220, so I was like, Self, ya gotta go look at the most current 220. And sure enough, there’s a change in the latest NEC (which YES, I checked, it has been adopted by Massachusetts, so all this, you’re so cute there’s a delay in adopting code revisions thing you can just stop with right now. In fact, it was adopted in January of _last_ year):

“Thank you for the feedback on my question re: the code. Also, 220.70, tho. I get that it is crucial NOT to put anything super essential into whatever is within a 220.70 EMS and resulting load calculation, which is why I asked the question the way I did. Also, it may be the case that whatever savings we could hypothetically get from this would be wiped out by having to treat the EMS setpoint as a continuous load. Obviously, if doing the load calculations without such an EMS gets us into the envelope we need to be, that’s way better! I’m just paranoid and trying to imagine an alternate path forward if we need one. “

Almost no delay in an answer this time:

“This is very good as 220.70 is a new one in 2023! I will forward along to [redacted] as I see no reason this couldn't be used if necessary, We'll see how the load shakes out with the current study, I am also interested in finding out the cost of the EMS system versus the larger gear as there's really no reason [redacted] should be forcing the shortage on you other than being lazy and not wanting to redo the job the proper way which they should have in the first place. “

This directly resulted in me running in circles around my kitchen waving my hands in the air and yelling gleefully, “I win! I win! I win!” And then I vaguebooked that I won a code war by playing 220.70.

If you made it this far, and you are wondering, _yes_ this directly connects to what I posted about schedules and budget. Once I realized that scheduling and budgeting without details means, “I don’t wanna”, and then people kept saying, “but the code”, I understood that “I don’t wanna” means what it _always_ means with electricians and engineers. Every time you do a New Thing, you have to fucking learn a lot of arbitrary bullshit like the current contents of the code, in the case of an electrical system. If you can avoid doing it until it’s absolutely normal and commodity and comes in a box (and is thus the HVAC guy’s problem), life is much sweeter.

On the other hand, I can “smooth the path” by finding the elements of the current code that make it okay to do this thing. And now, the “budget” is no longer, “oh, too expensive”. It’s now, “I’ll find how what it costs”. Because it was never about money or time. It was about the code, and the annoyance of having to dig around in it.

But I love reading rule systems and exploiting them, so, I Win!

ETA: R. was up on the third floor playing bridge and heard me. I went up just now to update him and his comment was, I was trying to catch up on email to figure out what that was all about. It didn’t sound like it was about money so I figured it had to be the house. Heh.

Gratitude

When I’m engaged with a Big Thing, I often do a lot of complaining / whining / venting, but it truly is part of my process. I’ll ask for sympathy and support and then just plow right back into it (more or less whether I get the sympathy and support or not, but I really appreciate the sympathy and support thank you very much!).

I also love routine. I like it when things are calm and I know what’s coming next. I like rereading favorite books, and the next episode of a favorite show and another book by a favorite author and episodes of my favorite podcasts. And hanging out with my kids. I like date night with my husband.

I wouldn’t want all one or all the other. I learn a lot from both. The routine teaches me to see ever more carefully, to experience ever more consciously. And the Big Thing teaches me random crap I had no idea I didn’t know.

It’s all great, and I am very grateful to get to have both of these in my life.