What it won’t do
The refusals are the product.
A tool that answers everything is a tool that cannot be trusted on anything. These are the things Plumbline declines, and in each case declining is the correct behaviour rather than a gap waiting to be filled.
Three things it will never tell you
01
It will not tell you whether a requirement applies to your job.
02
It will not tell you whether what you built complies.
03
It will not recommend a method, a product, or a course of action.
Those are judgements about your situation, and a search engine is not entitled to make them. The provision is the authority; reading it is the work. For a judgement, go to the regulator for your jurisdiction, or to a qualified safety professional or lawyer who can look at your actual site.
Why a question comes back empty
An empty result always names its reason, because “nothing found” and “no such rule” are very different statements and only one of them is ever true here.
This sits outside what we index
Plumbline indexes Acts, Regulations and Codes that carry the force of law. Guidance notes, codes of practice, interpretation bulletins and the fire, building or electrical codes a safety regulation points at are not in here.
The detail lives in a standard we cannot reproduce
The regulation requires compliance with a technical standard — CSA, ANSI, ASTM, ASME or NFPA. Those are separately published and copyrighted. We index the requirement to comply and tell you which standard it names; the standard’s own contents you have to get from the standards body.
This is set by policy, not by the regulation
Some requirements come from a safety authority’s own policies rather than from the Act or Regulation. Because we index binding law, an answer here may reach only the general statutory duty and stop short of the detail you were after.
This jurisdiction is not indexed yet
We would rather decline than answer from a neighbouring jurisdiction’s rules or from a model’s general knowledge. Both would look like an answer and neither would be one.
Nothing matched closely enough to cite
Retrieval found no provision it can stand behind for this wording. Try naming the equipment or the hazard rather than the situation, and ask one thing at a time.
Limits built into how it works
One question at a time
Retrieval grounds most strongly on the single provision that best matches. A question bundling several requirements — the trigger height and the guardrail dimension and the plank grade — may be answered well for whichever part matched most closely while another part is answered in passing or not at all. Those questions have their confidence capped below High automatically, because one section’s match cannot certify a multi-part answer. Ask each requirement separately.
Acts, Regulations and Codes only
Not guidance documents, approved codes of practice, policy bulletins or interpretation guides — which is often exactly where the practical detail a regulation leaves out actually lives. If an answer feels thinner than the question deserved, the regulator’s own guidance is usually the reason.
Incorporated standards stay outside
When a regulation requires compliance with a CSA, ANSI, ASTM, ASME or NFPA standard, the requirement is quoted and the standard is named — but its contents are separately published and copyrighted, so they are not here. Answers that depend on one say so and have their confidence reduced.
A periodically rebuilt index, not a live feed
There is always some lag between a jurisdiction publishing an amendment and it appearing here. Every document shows what it is current to and when the source was last checked, so the lag is visible rather than assumed away.
Semantic search can still miss
Meaning-based matching occasionally surfaces a related-but-wrong provision, or misses the best-worded one. Every result carries its source link precisely so you can catch that — the tool is built to be checkable, not to be right every time.
Not an official product
No government department, regulator or workers’ compensation board has reviewed or endorsed this, and none of them is responsible for what it returns.