IBC for Plumbing Fixture Count / NFPA 101 for Egress Occupant Loads

[redbird11]

Hello,
I am working on a project in an area that has adopted NFPA 101 for Life Safety/Egress but for Plumbing the code is the 2018 IPC, which says to follow IBC for occupant loads.

Normally, I would find my IBC occupant load and use it for both. Now it seems I have to go through this effort twice. Once for egress, because the NFPA uses different occupant loads than IBC, then again for the Plumbing Fixture Count.

Have you seen this before? Am I confusing any matters?

 

[Tim Mailloux]

Hello,
I am working on a project in an area that has adopted NFPA 101 for Life Safety/Egress but for Plumbing the code is the 2018 IPC, which says to follow IBC for occupant loads.

Normally, I would find my IBC occupant load and use it for both. Now it seems I have to go through this effort twice. Once for egress, because the NFPA uses different occupant loads than IBC, then again for the Plumbing Fixture Count.

Have you seen this before? Am I confusing any matters?

I would assume thats an oversight, and you should be basing your IPC plumbing fixture calculations off the NFPA 101 egress occupant load calculations. I would reach out to the AHJ or State Building Official for clarification.

 

[RLGA]

In my opinion, anything IBC-based should stay within that family of codes and the same applies to the NFPA codes.

Typically, it is the fire marshal that requires the NFPA 101 and the building department requires the IBC. Thus, they are enforced separately and not integrated. In that situation, my above statement applies. The fire marshal does not care about plumbing fixture counts--they are only concerned about egress based on NFPA 101. The building department, on the other hand, probably could not care less about how the fire marshal enforces egress requirements--to the building department, everything must comply with the IBC and its referenced codes.

However, if the jurisdiction replaced IBC Chapter 10 with NFPA 101, then, as Tim stated, they probably did not do a very good job of correlating the two codes and created some significant discrepancies or conflicts.

 

[Tim Mailloux]

However, if the jurisdiction replaced IBC Chapter 10 with NFPA 101, then, as Tim stated, they probably did not do a very good job of correlating the two codes and created some significant discrepancies or conflicts.

I was assuming they replaced IBC chapter 10 with some equivalent chapter from NFPA 101.