New rules for barn heaters delayed

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

by BETTER FARMING STAFF

Ontario’s poultry and livestock industry has received a reprieve from new rules governing the use of unvented gas heaters in barns.

On December 16, the province’s Technical Standards and Safety Authority announced the suspension of a January 1, 2016 deadline for enforcing new barn-specific installation standards for heaters installed before Oct. 1, 2014.

It is also calling for proposals by March 1, 2016 for code requirements regarding unvented heaters in poultry and livestock barns.

In an advisory posted on its website, the authority said a shortage of “license holders who can design ventilation systems” is the reason for the suspension. The shortage “has made it difficult for owners of existing unvented heaters in livestock and poultry facilities” to meet the deadline.

The advisory noted distributors and suppliers could continue delivery of fuel for the heaters.

Lynn Ramsay, authority spokesperson, confirmed in a Wednesday email the decision to suspend the deadline was motivated by the “difficulties owners were having in finding license holders able to design barn ventilation systems” by the January deadline. One of the new requirements is having the installation inspected by a qualified engineer.

She noted the request for comments in the advisory “was not the first, nor will it be TSSA’s last. Between industry risk reduction groups and advisory councils, our call for comments is ongoing.”

Ramsay did not know what the new enforcement deadline would be.

Sam Bradshaw, Ontario Pork environmental specialist, said in an October interview that the authority has been concerned for a while about the way the heaters are installed in barns.

“What happened was there was an issue with a barn some years ago where an inspector found some irregularities in the gas equipment being used and started to look into this,” he explained. The inspector discovered there were no special regulations governing the use of the appliances in barns.

Moreover, the standard regulations required heaters in an enclosed space either to be vented to the outside or to meet certain requirements such as having an interlock system that would shut off the heater if the continuous running fan stops.

“This (type of heater) isn’t available for barns and we can’t purchase one of these,” Bradshaw said.

So commodity groups joined forces and together with a consultant recommended a change to the authority’s proposed regulations: that in barns the appliances be required to have 300 cubic feet per minute of air flow for every 100,000 BTUs (British thermal units) of a heater’s input or ensure the barn space is “large enough so that there’s 20 BTUs per cubic foot of space in which the heater is working,” Bradshaw said.

The authority accepted the recommendation, amending the Gaseous Fuels Code Document in 2014 to include the barn-specific standard.

Bradshaw said hog barns meet the requirement.

However, the authority also required a barn installation to be inspected by January 1, 2016 by a qualified engineer.

“Producers are busy,” said Bradshaw in October, by which time few farmers had obtained the inspection. He anticipated the flood of last minute demand would end up bottlenecked by too few engineers qualified to do the work.

In the December advisory, the authority warned that the suspension does not exempt owners and operators of the heaters or fuel distributors “from compliance with any other provision of the Gaseous Fuels regulation, the Code Adoption document or any adopted code, including provisions relating to the discovery of an appliance or work in an unacceptable condition.”

Bradshaw said that the industry has been trying to persuade the authority to allow technicians and gas fitters — those who install the heaters — to be trained to do the inspections. “We’re still working on that,” he said. BF