It says
in part, . . . a water . . . pipe shall not be installed . .
. in exterior walls . . . unless adequate provision is made to protect it
from freezing . . . . This section modified the 2003 International
Residential Code in 2005, so it applied to Syncon's construction of our
house.
It's important because it directly
addresses our problem. Obviously, an "adequate provision"
has not been made to the bathroom water pipe, which is in an outside wall,
since it freezes. The building code has been violated by Syncon
Homes, which is completely, utterly, and without question, unacceptable.
It's notable that, when Syncon was
unsuccessfully searching for the missing recirculation line, they found an
exterior bathroom water pipe that was right at the outside of the
foundation. The house is built on a slab foundation, so the pipes
are embedded in concrete and then rise out of it when they come to the
facilities. In the case of the bathroom pipe, it rose from the
concrete right at the outside edge of the foundation. Effectively it
was only covered from the elements by a miniscule fraction of an inch of
stucco.
What did Syncon do? They had
the plumber chip away at the foundation and push the pipe in a little
bit. That doesn't really solve the problem since the pipe is still
rising in the wrong place. They only pushed in the top part of the
pipe less than an inch. That was their solution, which remains
unsatisfactory because the water pipe in that bathroom still freezes.
So, we not only still have a pipe
freezing issue, but we also have a code violation. It exists due to
a lack of workmanship and can only be solved by re-routing the plumbing
within the solid concrete, which is not an easy thing to do if it can be
done at all. It's especially problematic when it's realized that the
foundation is a "post tension slab," where cutting is not
allowed, due to the embedded steel bars that are stretched under tension.
So, the story goes on.
