Electrical safety must be kept front and centre in our farm buildings

Saturday, October 3, 2015

With rural municipalities being absorbed into urban ones, building inspectors may not be knowledgeable enough about farm building technology or the Canadian Farm Building Code. The code must be updated and not dropped, as it has been in other provinces

by RALPH WINFIELD

There is no doubt that safety codes must be in place to ensure that some guidelines are enforced, but unfortunately they can often overrule common sense.

During my tenure with Ontario Hydro, I sat on and participated in many Code Committees. When I became Chairperson of the Farm Section of the Canadian Electrical Association (CEA), I was also conscripted onto the early Canadian Farm Building Code (CFBC) committee as the electrical advisor.

But, more directly, my immediate supervisor at Ontario Hydro, the farm sales manager, had a very positive outlook. He believed that, if any code changes were necessary for the benefit and safety of Ontario farm customers, you did not leave a stone unturned. As a result, many very positive changes were made to the Ontario Hydro Rural Service Manual (RSM) and the Ontario Electrical Code (OEC), which was an updated version of the Canadian Electrical Code (CEC).

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I worked for Ontario Hydro as an agricultural applications engineer, electrical inspection was also carried out by Ontario Hydro staff. That arrangement gave me direct access to the Manager of Electrical Inspection. No changes were ever proposed that did not keep electrical safety front and centre. However, some of you older readers will remember the days when a single breaker was next to the Hydro meter on a yard pole or on the corner of the house if the house was closer to the road and main lines.

As those early services were upgraded to meet the higher power demands on farms with silo unloaders, gutter cleaners and the like, the amperage capacity of that old system became outdated very quickly.

We promoted and achieved the concept of a centralized metering (CM) system where the total farm power did not have to be controlled by that one breaker. Individual breakers could be located at each building served from that CM system. This approach worked extremely well and permitted electrical upgrades at reasonable cost as power needs increased on individual farms. The only shortcoming initially was that standby power had to be provided at individual service locations.

The next innovation was the pole-top switch at the CM pole so that one generator could provide power to all the buildings, which was essential for water supply, milking, feeding and lighting. The pole-top switch again provided one-switch isolation for the total farm power system in the event of a farm building fire.

Barn fires. These were always a problem when early barn wiring was not upgraded as load increased and newer wiring materials and installation practices became available.

Whenever a barn fire occurred, the first suspect was electrical. But that was certainly not always the cause. In my youth, I remember attending many barn fires. Most of them were caused by spontaneous combustion of too-wet hay. How many of you remember when farmers starting using forage harvesters to chop hay and blow it into the upper storey of the older two-storey barns? If that chopped hay went in a little tough, a barn fire was assured.

By that I am not suggesting that electrical systems did not cause barn fires. They did. The old "Romex" wiring used just after the knob-and-tube systems of the 1920s was not suitable for the moist environmental conditions of many farm buildings housing livestock.

I recall my father-in-law asking me to deactivate a number of electrical circuits in the old two-storey barn, which had been wired in 1930. (We presently live at that farmstead.) A few newer non-metallic wet (NMW) circuits are still in use but the moist livestock environment is long gone.

Newer electrical wiring. The NMW series of wiring has been used in livestock barns for many years. The W means wet and the wiring contains no paper wrapping, which is present in the NMW wiring – think Dry – which is used in residences.

But there can be problems with the NMW product as well. During my Ontario Hydro tenure, we became aware of many barn fires in milk houses attached to older two-storey dairy barns. Some field research established that the wiring insulation was of the ideal consistency for sizing rodent teeth. If that wiring was hidden in walls or ceilings, mice would strip the wires bare! I have seen a full set of bare wires in the attic of an insulated milk house attached to an older two-storey barn. The solution was simple. Surface-mount the wiring in a PVC conduit.

But we must not forget that most electrically-caused fires are started by one of two things. Either an overloaded circuit causes the wiring to overheat or an arcing fault is caused by a bad electrical connection. Electrical inspectors should pick up on the first cause but you, the building owner or operator, must pick up on the second one. An arcing fault can be at any electrical connection between a device and the electrical transformer that provides the power.

The arcing wire connection pictured on page 39 occurred at our farm some years ago. An electrician and I spent many hours checking in-house wiring connections before we determined that the bad connection causing some of the lights to flicker was indeed at the service transformer.

Farm buildings are unique. While electrical safety in farm buildings has always been of concern, structural integrity is also a matter that needs the attention of owners, builders and inspectors.

Some of us are old enough and lived close enough to remember the collapse of the arena in Listowel one Saturday morning in February, 1959, due to snow load, resulting in the loss of many lives. Numerous existing arenas were inspected and upgraded as a result.

But farm buildings are indeed unique. They have low human occupancy and usually a warm internal environment, which will encourage snow-melt on roofs. In addition, they almost exclusively have metal roofs, which also tend to encourage snow slides to reduce the risk of collapse from snow load.

The Canadian Farm Building Code (CFBC). The first edition of the CFBC appeared in 1964. By 1975, the Associate Committee on the National Building Code appointed the Standing Committee on Farm Buildings. This committee was made up of appointees, primarily agricultural engineers, from across Canada.

The primary role of that committee was to provide expertise and guidelines specifically for all types of low human occupancy farm buildings, not including human living quarters. The CFBC provided basic standards that dealt with the design and construction of new farm buildings and the alterations of existing ones. "The detailed provisions refer primarily to structural sufficiency, fire prevention, health and sanitation, and are recommended minimum necessary not only for the protection of people, but also the minimum loss of livestock poultry and stored produce," states CFBC literature.

In 1988, Agriculture Canada produced the "Canadian Farm Buildings Handbook," a 155-page collection of all the information needed to design a very wide variety of farm buildings.

Unfortunately, the network of agricultural engineers effectively led by the Research Branch of Agriculture Canada has dwindled to being effectively non-existent. While the Canadian Farm Building Code still exists, lack of support from many provinces is putting its effectiveness in jeopardy. If the CFBC does cease to exist or is not recognized by individual provinces or municipalities, the cost of low human occupancy farm buildings will increase significantly – probably by 20 to 50 per cent – if farm buildings are classed as industrial buildings.

We just cannot afford to lose the Farm Classification of Farm Buildings in Ontario. Design loads for wind and snow will increase well above the presently allowable low human occupancy standards.

While we have seen a temporary increase in barn fires in recent years in Ontario, the real problem is still one of lack of water. When the fire department arrives, the fire in a farm building will be well established. With trucked-in water, the best they can hope to do is protect other buildings, including the farmhouse.

In my opinion, insurance companies should and will likely take on a greater responsibility in assessing the risk, especially with older farm buildings. I cannot forget the heads-up I obtained from a fire insurance inspector about the problem of mice stripping electrical wiring in the situations mentioned earlier.

Unfortunately, many rural municipalities are being absorbed into residential/industrial municipalities. The newly acquired building authorities often have no knowledge of rural building technology or the Canadian Farm Building Code. Those building inspectors will attempt to apply the industrial building code at the farm owner’s expense.

The time has come for major farm organizations, such as the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, the Christian Farmers Federation, the National Farmers Union and the Canadian Farm Builder’s Association, to band together to ensure that the Canadian Farm Building Code is updated and is not dropped, as it has been in some other provinces. BF

Agricultural engineer Ralph Winfield farms at Belmont in Elgin County.