ECN Forum Forums Code Related Discussion NEC & other Code issues IEC?

Was looking up the local codes before doing a job at a buddy's house, and the AHJ referred to the "International ICC Electrical Code". Never heard of this one before. Is it online somewhere, or is it another $125 tome I need to expense somehow?

It is printed by the International Code Council, Inc.:

http://www.iccsafe.org/e/prodshow.html?prodid=3980S03&stateInfo=qhkjKkincfhnjdEc7996|4

It is only $10 (plus shipping). There is actually only a couple of pages of electrical stuff, the rest is admin.

Thanks Dean. I don't know why they didn't just ref. the NEC, but hey, it's their town.

Be glad the ICC was convinced not to try and write a new electrical code, they were trying, but realized the NEC has too solid of a following to try and compete.

They of course wrote a primarily administrative code because at the time the ICC was created the NEC did not have the admin section yet. Plus it is coordinated with the rest of the ICC building codes which has pretty much taken over as the standard code across the country. (That of course was the intent of BOCA, ICBO, and SBCCI to merge and have a code that everyone could follow where ever they were in the country. and to sell more books.)

I don't know how the 'international' part has been accepted though.

Of course don't forget that if the town has the Int'l Residential Code adopted, that it has a complete electrical code embedded in it. The embedded code is NEC verbage but with a different formatting. This worries me as you need to be sure they didn't change a word or two that could change the meaning of the sentence or paragraph.

Just something to keep in mind.

The ICC was adopted here only for administrative purposes. The NEC is still the "code".

I would not worry too much about the verbage of the electrical chapters of the IRC. They were authored by the same guys that authored the NEC Handbook (all NFPA employees), then sold to ICC.

IRC references NEC and states that the codes were reprinted. It goes on to provide a table in the back cross-linking each IRC paragraph with the NEC paragraph.

All the text and tables are 100% verbatim, but the IRC leaves out a lot of stuff. I actually prefer to use the IRC version as a reference for residential, as there is a lot less fluff to wade through.