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Part F2 Sanitary and other facilities
Performance Requirements
FP2.1 Personal hygiene facilities
Suitable sanitary facilities for personal hygiene must be provided in a convenient location within or associated with a building, to the degree necessary, appropriate to—
(a)
the function or use of the building; and
(b)
the number and gender of the occupants; and
(c)
the disability or other particular needs of the occupants.
The Objective of this Part is to—
(a)
safeguard occupants from illness caused by infection; and
(b)
safeguard occupants from loss of amenity arising from the absence of adequate personal hygiene facilities; and
(c)
enable occupants to carry out laundering; and
(d)
provide for facilities to enable food preparation; and
(e)
enable unconscious occupants of sanitary compartments to be removed from the compartment.
Examples
Examples
- The BCA requires sanitary facilities to be installed at a rate based on the number of people in a building. If insufficient, unacceptable queuing may result.
- Loss of amenity can occur if users are not provided with sufficient privacy.
Adequate laundry and cooking facilities should be available to health-care buildings and early-childhood centres, as well as residents of Class 2 buildings and Class 4 parts of a building.
A building is to be provided with—
(a)
suitable sanitary facilities and space and facilities for personal hygiene; and
(b)
adequate means for the prevention of contaminants to hot water, warm water and cooling water systems.
A building is to be provided with—
(a)
space or facilities for laundering; and
(b)
suitable means for the sanitary disposal of waste water.
Application:
Application:
FF2.2 only applies to—
- a Class 2 building or Class 4 part of a building; and
- a Class 9a health-care building; and
- a Class 9b early childhood centre; and
- a Class 9c building.
A building is to be provided with—
(a)
space and facilities for the preparation and cooking of food; and
(b)
suitable means for the sanitary disposal of associated waste water.
Application:
Application:
FF2.3 only applies to—
- a Class 2 building or Class 4 part of a building; and
- a Class 9a health-care building; and
- a Class 9b early childhood centre; and
- a Class 9c building.
Health-care buildings, early-childhood centres, Class 2 and 9c buildings and Class 4 parts of a building must be provided with cooking facilities. Under the FF2.3 Application provision, FF2.3 does not apply to any other buildings.
As for laundry facilities, Class 2 and 9c buildings and Class 4 parts of a building are required to have cooking facilities because their occupation is generally of a permanent nature. Cooking facilities are also required in health-care buildings and early-childhood centres because the occupants of these places may require specific types of food not easily available from outside (eg special dietary needs).
Cooking facilities are not required in other buildings. For example, a hotel, motel or boarding school may have its own cooking facilities, have an arrangement with a commercial caterer, or choose to have no cooking facilities at all. It is assumed that the same people do not occupy sole-occupancy units in Class 3 buildings for extended periods of time, so they are not required to be provided with cooking facilities.
A sanitary compartment is to have sufficient space or other means to permit an unconscious occupant to be removed from the compartment.
FP2.1 recognises that the number, type and location of sanitary facilities are dependent on:
- what the building is used for; and
- the number, gender and particular needs of the occupants.
FP2.2 Laundry facilities
Laundering facilities or space for laundering facilities and the means for the sanitary disposal of waste water must be provided in a convenient location within or associated with a building appropriate to the function or use of the building.
Application:
Application:
FP2.2 only applies to—
- a Class 2 building or Class 4 part of a building; and
- a Class 9a health-care building; and
- a Class 9b early childhood centre; and
- a Class 9c building.
Health-care buildings, early-childhood centres, Class 2 and 9c buildings and Class 4 parts of a building must be provided with means to dispose of waste water and either:
- laundry facilities; or
- space for laundry facilities.
A building's function or use will determine the appropriate number and location of the laundry facilities or space, and the means to dispose of waste water.
For the purpose of FP2.2, waste water includes water that is soiled as a result of clothes washing, mopping floors, and other domestic cleaning processes.
FP2.3 Kitchen facilities
A facility must be provided which includes—
(a)
a means for food rinsing, utensil washing and the sanitary disposal of associated waste water; and
(b)
a means for cooking food; and
(c)
a space for food preparation.
Application:
Application:
FP2.3 only applies to—
- a Class 2 building or Class 4 part of a building; and
- a Class 9a health-care building; and
- a Class 9b early childhood centre; and
- a Class 9c building.
Health-care buildings, early-childhood centres, Class 2 and 9c buildings and Class 4 parts of a building must be provided with adequate cooking facilities. This means:
- washing facilities for both food and utensils used for the preparation and consumption of food, in conjunction with adequate waste water disposal;
- a means of cooking food, which may be either fixed in place (such as a wall-mounted oven) or a removable appliance (such as a microwave unit); and
- space to allow food to be prepared.
FP2.4 Disposal of contaminated water from containers
Suitable means must be provided in a building containing wards or bedrooms to facilitate the emptying of sewage or dirty water from containers.
Application:
Application:
FP2.4 only applies to a Class 9a or 9c building.
Class 9a and 9c buildings with wards or bedrooms must have facilities for emptying bedpans and the like, such as a slop hopper.
FP2.5 Construction of sanitary compartments to allow removal of unconscious people
A sanitary compartment must be constructed with sufficient space or other means to permit an unconscious occupant to be removed from the compartment.
Sanitary compartments are to be large enough or have another suitable means that enables the removal of an unconscious occupant.
FP2.6 Microbial control for water systems
Hot water, warm water and cooling water systems installed in a building must control the accumulation of harmful levels of micro-organisms.
Limitation:
Limitation:
FP2.6 does not apply to a system serving only a single sole-occupancy unit in a Class 2 or 3 building or Class 4 part of a building.
Buildings must have hot water, warm water and cooling water installations that minimise the risk of major disease outbreak caused by the harmful levels of micro-organisms.
This Performance Requirement does not apply to a system serving only a single sole-occupancy unit in a Class 2 or 3 building or Class 4 part of a building.
Verification Methods
FV2.1 Sanitary facilities
(a)
Compliance with FP2.1, for the number of sanitary facilities, is verified when queuing modelling predicts that occupant waiting time for sanitary facilities is at least equivalent to the waiting time predicted using the respective Deemed-to-Satisfy Provisions.
(b)
For calculations performed under (a), the occupant waiting time is determined as the 90th percentile wait time at maximum population.
(c)
Queuing modelling in (a) must reflect the following:
(i)
Function or use of the building.
(ii)
Number and gender of occupants.
(iii)
The disability or other particular needs of the occupants.
(iv)
Occupant usage patterns.
FV2.1 enables the use of queuing modelling to demonstrate that the occupant waiting time for sanitary facilities is at least equivalent to the waiting time predicted using the respective Deemed-to-Satisfy Provisions.
Overview of the modelling process
Sanitary facilities and their users are an example of a queuing system. In the usual terminology, a queuing system is made up of one or more servers and a number of customers to be served. In the case of sanitary facilities the servers are the fixtures (closet pans, urinals, wash basins) and the customers are the users of each type of fixture. Any one building may have a number (up to five) more or less separate and independent queuing systems:
- For males—closet pans, urinals, wash basins
- For females—closet pans, wash basins.
A queuing system is defined by—
- the number of servers (= fixtures) and the statistical distribution of service time (= occupancy time);
- the statistical distribution of arrival times of customers (= users); and
- a queue protocol (assumed to be first in first out denoted by FIFO).
It is assumed that the population of customers is effectively infinite, except for cases where there is a pronounced interval effect, as in the case of theatre intermission, and that there is no physical limit on queue size (which may arise due to space limitations for example), but there may be some avoidance behaviour on the part of users if queue length (and expected waiting time) become excessive.
The analysis of queuing systems can be complex. Under certain assumptions, closed form expressions can be derived for the key parameters that describe the performance of a queuing system. The particular type of queuing system which is most straightforward to analyse is based on the assumption that the arrival times can be described by a Poisson distribution. A Poisson distribution is fully defined by a single parameter, denoted by the Greek letter λ, which turns out to be the arrival rate (number of arrivals per unit time).
The Poisson distribution has two properties that render its use attractive. Firstly it is memoryless i.e. the probability of an arrival at anytime is independent of the past history of the system (for example, whether there has been another recent arrival). The second property is that the inter-arrival times follow the geometric distribution with a mean arrival time of 1/λ. The Poisson distribution is the only process that has these properties.
Occupancy times in a simple queuing system are also assumed to have the geometric distribution with mean value denoted by1/μ. Thus the servers (times when users finish with a fixture) is also a Poisson process with parameter μ. Once again, this has the memoryless property (the probability of a user finishing with a fixture is independent of the occupation time up to that point).
The queuing system described above is often referred to as a M/M/c system where c denotes the number of fixtures of a certain kind and for each sex (the use of M signifies memoryless).
Where the queuing system has been allowed to settle into a steady state a full analysis is possible and the following parameters can be determined:
- The traffic density (= the ratio of mean occupancy time (1/μ) divided by the number of fixtures (c) to mean inter-arrival time (1/λ): this ratio must be less than one or the queue grows without bound, λ/(cμ)<1).
- The probability that nobody is in the system (no one of the specified sex is using the specified type of fixture).
- The probability that a user will need to wait.
- The mean waiting time.
- The waiting time cumulative distribution function: this provides an estimate of the proportion of occurrences when a user arriving at a facility will need to wait more than a specified time (or the probability that a user will have to wait more than a specified time).
