You may remember these names: Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, Colombo, and then of course, Clouseau and Gadget. They were fictional characters, all famous inspectors able to inspect and solve, formulate their findings, either through observations and experience or through bumbling pratfalls. Their findings were taken as gospel, irrefutable and highly regarded as fact even when delivered through the absurd and comic. Today, the EIFS industry is being independently regulated by a person of knowledge, a specialist of sorts, known as a special inspector.
EIFS was accepted into the International Building Code in 2008 for adoption into the 2009 code book. For the industry, it was a well-deserved win of a hard-fought battle. Coming out of a “dragging-through-the-mud war,” industry associations, professionals and manufacturers all rallied to rightly have EIFS acknowledged as a code-approved, high performance exterior cladding. The icing to the EIFS cake was the recent code mandate for continuous insulation to achieve a more rigorous insulating value, thus reducing energy usage and ultimately, carbon emissions. But they didn’t get here unscathed or without giving up something, that something being the code mandated watchful eye(s) of the special inspector.