Best Intentions—Unintended Consequences

It has been a busy month of travel for the CONTRACTOR team. First off to Birmingham, Alabama for PHCC Connect, then to Columbus, Ohio for the biannual ASPE Convention.

Now normally, when I’m attending industry events, I try to find a theme—something that helps me tie everything together. It helps when I’m working up articles or editorials (like this one). If I had to pick a single theme from this month of travel, it would probably be “unintended consequences.”

Many people are working very hard to achieve important policy outcomes, such as upgraded water infrastructure, improved water conservation, better energy efficiency, and reduced carbon emissions (all good and worthy aims).

But the Devil—as always—is in the details.

I was in a bar attached to a chophouse in Birmingham where I had a drink with Dale Arndt of Arndt & Son Plumbing. Dale, if you don’t know him, is a fixture in the industry. He and his company in Brooklyn, WI, have been performing some of the highest quality, most forward-thinking plumbing and heating applications you will ever hope to see. And that night Dale was upset about a geothermal heat pump application.

And why? Because it ran on electricity in an area where electric rates were high. If it costs three cents a kilowatt hour in Missouri, it makes sense, Dale said, but if it costs 47 cents a kilowatt hour in California it just doesn’t. Better to put the money into replacing old boilers with newer, higher-efficiency boilers, even if they’re gas-fired. More money savings, more energy savings, more long-term carbon reduction. He was downright angry over the wrongheadedness of it all.

Later, on the expo floor at ASPE in Columbus, Gary Klein stopped by the CONTRACTOR booth. Gary is President of Gary Klein and Associates, a consulting firm specializing in energy efficiency and pathogen mitigation. And Gary was upset about heat pumps, too. Heat pumps, he said, can cause condensation which can in turn promote the growth of mold. As heat pump adoption sweeps the country it’s a potentially gigantic public health problem, and no one was talking about it. No one seemed to want to talk about it.

Somewhere between the two I had an interview with Kerry Stackpole, CEO and Executive Director for Plumbing Manufacturers International. PMI has started a new chapter of its “Rethink Water” initiative aimed at educating policymakers who think of low-flow fixtures are the solution to all their water conservation problems.

Yes, Kerry explained, water conserving fixtures can be fantastic, but standards and codes need to be closely adhered to or serious problems can happen, such as inadequate drain carry of solid waste, blockages in sewer pipes, and backflow into potable drinking water. You can even get the opposite of the outcome you were hoping for—people flushing a poor-performing toilet twice, or taking twice as long to get clean under a low-flow showerhead.

The problem is one our management columnist, Al Schwartz, has long been sounding the alarm about. As plumbing technology and systems become ever-more complex, the people designing and installing those systems become more and more specialized, leaving a dwindling number of experts who understand how all the systems of a building work and interact together.

Now, in the wake of the Chevron decision (check out the cover story from our September issue), more and more plumbing regulation will fall, not on plumbing experts at the regulatory agencies, but on legislators who know a lot about legislating, but not very much about plumbing.

Unless we pay close attention to the warning signs, all these good intentions might pave us a road to someplace very bad…