[timun]

Originally Posted by photon

All I know is I've been told the same thing as PaperBagger'14 said by multiple electricians over the years.

I don't doubt it, photon. This nonsense about having to get a permit for a light bulb replacement is exactly the kind of old wives' tale that gets spread around by electricians, hence why I presumed that PaperBagger is an electrician. I still do presume he's an electrician, because of the dogmatic insistence that the Canadian Electrical Code is gospel and you have to follow it to the tee.

Again, going back to one of my earlier posts, PaperBagger painted himself in a corner pretty much right from the hop when he said this:

Originally Posted by PaperBagger'14

There is no reference to any appendices which allow for the inspection department to overrule this. [...]

This would never be enforced but it is code, and it's ridiculous.

I would have hoped PaperBagger would have seen the flaw in his logic here: if the local inspection department cannot override the rule in the CEC that says you have to get a permit, how come you, I or anyone else can replace our own light bulbs? If inspectors must enforce it, how come they don't?

Because first of all the code doesn't say that light bulb replacements require a permit, and PaperBagger wildly misinterpreted Rule 2-004. The gist of the rule applies to light fixtures, not to the bulbs, in precisely the same way that you need a permit to add a receptacle but you don't need one to plug in an appliance. Wormius, to his credit, picked up on the logical inconsistency right away.

And then secondly, the idea that the code cannot be superseded is patently untrue. PaperBagger was hoisted by his own petard when he doubled down on his insistence that the electrical code is national law that local jurisdictions don't have the power to vary from. For everyone's info our building codes are not law, they're just reference standards adopted by our provincial governments by regulation. They have no force and effect until they are adopted by regulation. Every province has the power to adopt it as they see fit. I quoted a STANDATA last night, and most of you have probably never heard of the term, so let me explain: STANDATA are relatively small explanatory publications from the Alberta Ministry of Municipal Affairs and the Safety Codes Council. There are three categories of them: bulletins, interpretations, and variances. Bulletins are general info about how the safety codes apply, interpretations are just that; explanations of how particular code rules and clauses are to be interpreted in Alberta; and variances are where a code rule is allowed to be broken ("varied") in Alberta. The very existence of variances negates PaperBagger's insistence that code cannot be overruled.