Thinking of renovating, remodeling or adding on to your home? If you live in California, keep in mind that there will be some changes taking effect on January 1, 2014, which may require that you also change out all the plumbing fixtures in your house if they are not compliant with water conservation standards.
I was watching the recording of the Millbrae City Council Meeting on November 12th, (note: if you don’t know this already, you can watch all the meetings via the MCTV website, and one of the topics on the agenda was the adoption of new building codes taking place in California and in Millbrae. There are several changes, but one of the bigger ones applies to water conservation, as the State of California is working to reduce water usage by 20% by the year 2020. If your house was built before 1994 and if you are applying for a permit for an alteration, improvement or addition, the building department may also require you to change out plumbing fixtures that don’t meet a certain standard. For example, even if you are just remodeling your kitchen, you may need to change out the plumbing fixtures in your bathrooms as well.
This does not apply to permits for repairs, such as reroofing, replacement of water heaters and furnaces, sewer lateral repairs, etc. And this will not be a “point-of-sale” requirement until 2017 – “point-of-sale” meaning requirements that must be fulfilled whenever a property is sold.
Find out what's happening in Millbraefor free with the latest updates from Patch.
So if you’re thinking to do some work on your home built before 1994, and if you don’t want to take a chance that you’ll have to replace all the plumbing fixtures in your house, you may want to consider submitting your permit application before January 1st. Of course, it’s a great idea to “go green” anyway, since it’ll be better for the environment and for your water bill.
For a copy of the 2013 Calgreen Residential Mandatory Measures, read the 2013 Green Residential Documents.