Reports
High-wind Design of New Woodframe Houses has an Average Benefit-cost Ratio of 6:1 in Canada Public Deposited
- Abstract
We can design new woodframe houses to resist high winds, but what are the costs and benefits?
This work considers key vertical load path enhancements to resist wind uplift prescribed in Canadian
standard CSA S520:22 that exceed requirements of the 2020 National Building Code. This work
presents a probabilistic, performance-based wind engineering analytical method that treats wind
speed and component fragility as uncertain, and geometry, mass, and repair cost as deterministic.
I applied the method to a single test case: a two-storey, 2,180-square-foot house with gable and
hip roofs. The enhancements add about 1% to construction costs ($1.70/ft2 or $3,600).
Considering straight-line and tornado wind hazard and averaged over the Canadian population,
the features avoid $22,000 ($10.10/ft2) in future losses per house. The enhancements produce a
weighted-average benefit-cost ratio of 6:1 and a net reduction of lifecycle cost of $18,000
($8.40/ft 2). The site-specific benefit-cost ratio varies between 0.1:1 and over 100:1, depending on
location. The enhancements reduce the weighted-average frequency of significant high-wind damage
from about 0.02 per year to near zero, and severity from $17,000 to $6,000 for this sample house.
Insurance claims frequency and severity data generally agree.
- Creator
- Date Issued
- 2024
- Academic Affiliation
- Last Modified
- 2024-04-22
- Resource Type
- Rights Statement
- DOI
- Language
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ICLR_-_Study_-_High-Wind_Design_has_a_Benefit-Cost_Ratio_of_6_to_1_in_Canada__Part_A__-_Dec_2023.pdf | 2024-04-21 | Public | Download |