Steven L. Smith, Bellingham, WA Home Inspector (King of the House)

One thing you cannot take for granted in a home is that it will have sufficient heat sources. In older houses the situation could be as basic as a space heater that is being used to heat too many rooms. I have inspected newer houses where, for one reason or another, one room had no heat duct. And with brand new homes, at least 30% of the time, I find heat ducts that DO NOT WORK. You might ask why. Well, almost always, the flex heat duct is not connected into the system or it has come loose or someone has crushed it so it is flat as a pancake and no heat can pass through. A device that is really handy for checking all the ducts, when the furnace is running, is a laser thermometer. I use one at almost every inspection and it saves bending down to feel for heat. You can walk through a room and point it several feet and still get a reading that lets you know if anything is happening. It makes for a good photo too, that shows the true situation. For example, if I have the photo below showing one duct at 125F and another duct pictured beside it putting out 58F, both when the furnace is running, the point is made! Personally, I like the red dot that shows up too. It makes it clear what you are measuring.

Thanks for looking.

www.kingofthehouse.com

bellingham home inspector

Steven L. Smith

If you are logged on to AR tonight, you know that I am snooping through some of my photos from my recent trip. Enough time has gone by, a month, that I am actually finding them interesting. In the city of Verona, the city of Romeo and Juliet, my wife and I went for a walking adventure one day. We walked to the other side of the river, that surrounds the town, and walked up a hill. Basically we got lost but stumbled on this old Roman theater and, on the hill behind it, we walked past an upscale restaurant that was open for lunch. We said, to heck with it, and decided to get out the wallet and go in and check it out. The view of Verona was incredible. The waiter bragged, and I believe him, that it had the best location of any restaurant in the city. You could look down at the river or up at the hill. The waiter thought the hill view was the best (top picture) personally I went with the river view, which is the bottom photo. See what you think. They were both pretty fabulous. Verona is much like Venice, and near Venice, and has some of the feel of Venice but, personally, I like it better. It too is on my short list of places to go back to.

In the past, when I have posted photos from my recent trip to Italy, people have said that they enjoyed the photos. I was going through some of my pictures today and thought I would write about, and post these. We have visited Italy four times now and we are starting to determine places we would really like to go back to for another visit. These photos do a pretty good job of capturing Lake Como. It is a short train ride from Milan and was a great two days and I wish it had been longer. The lake is huge and there is fairly service, from before daylight until after dark, that takes you all around the lake from one small village or city to another. This was late September and the weather was still warm and wonderful. I hope you find them intersting and, if you are looking to go to Italy, this is one scenic and relaxing stop, at least it is the time of year I went. I think it would be crazy in the summer.

In the past, I have written articles or blogs here at Active Rain about the benefits of chimney caps on chimneys. In my wet climate, they are pretty much essential for keeping the rain out. On my trip a couple months back, to Italy, I could not resist but to take photos of some of the chimney caps they have over there. They are pasted in above so take a look. I think they are interesting and, when compared to what we have over here at least, unique. These are old tile roofs and a number of the caps, that do the job of keeping the water out below, are pretty neat ore ven classy looking. They do a good job of matching the overall look or aesthetics of the old tile roofs.

Thanks for taking a look.

www.kingofthehouse.com

Bellingham WA Home Inspector

Steven L. Smith

Actually, this title is a bit like the old question: "Who is buried in Grant's tomb?" The way you detect a multi-layer roof is by looking. That can, however, be harder than you would expect. The photo below is the simple way, just tweak the shingles a bit and you see another color below. The best place to look is at the eaves or at the gable ends. Sometimes there will be a metal drip edge flashing put over an old roof and that can make it harder to be sure what is below. On the other hand, I did an inspection this morning and the roof was covered with ice and the material so frozen and non-pliable that I was afraid that gently pulling on it would tear a shingle. While most home inspectors like to see only a single layer of composition shingles on a roof, many roofers will put on two layers which usually leaves a number of old metal flashings, sometimes rusted, below the new roof. If there are already two layers, that pretty well guarantees that the next roof will first require a tear-off. If you think about it a concern with multi-layer roofs is weight. If you have ever carried a bundle of comp shingles up a ladder to the roof, you know this is no issue to take lightly -- pun intended. This is a heavy topic.

Thanks for looking.

Steven L. Smith

Bellingham WA home inspector

www.kingofthehouse.com

As a home inspector, there have been times where it was important, as a service to my client, to guesstimate the quantity of water that was collected in a given location. In one case, in a garage, I found an old pit for working under a car. This under the slab pit was about 8 feet long, 4 feet across and 5 feet deep. The problem here, unfortunately, was that the pit was full of water and lots of old oil. It was considered to be hazardous waste so state regulations applied and the estimate of cleanup costs was based on quantity. How many gallons were in there? To find out, we use our nifty little online calculator that was designed for storage tanks but works for all cubic measurements. We enter 8 x 4 x 5 ft.

With the dimensions above, that is 160 cubic feet of water. That is not a number one can readily visualize or gets too excited about. However, click the calculator again, to calculate gallons, and you find that we are talking about hauling away 1195 gallons of contaminated liquid. Now, that puts things in better perspective.

I had another handy use for it recently. I was inspecting a home that had significant standing water in the crawl space (even down under the vapor barrier) in two locations. Estimate that the first wet location was an area of about 15' x 15' and the water was fairly consistent in depth and an average of 3" deep. (I err to the side of underestimating here, so I am not blowing anything out of proportion). We put in our calculator  15 ', 15' and .25 (for the 3" in depth). When we convert it, that is 56 cubic feet of water or 420 gallons of water.

In another area, there was a patch of water about 10' x 10' and 2" deep average. We find that area has 16 cubic feet of water or 123 gallons. Add those two areas together and that means there are 543 gallons of water in the crawl space. That number is something we can all relate to, just think of 543 gallons of gas or 543 gallons of milk.

In a case where the client is trying to determine if water is a problem, being able to better quantify the amount of water is very helpful to the client. "543 gallons" brings the issue into much better focus than saying: There are two areas with standing water in the crawl space. The first one is about 15x15 ft and the other is 10x10 ft. At these locations the depth of the water averages 2 to 3". Obviously, when possible, giving a reasonable evaluation of the amount of water involved is preferable to just stating there is water in the crawl space.

I know that many of the real estate professionals here at active rain, along with members of the public who find us through search engines,  are very interested in obtaining information about homes, problems found at homes. I am aware of this because dozens of people have, for nearly a year now, subscribed to and commented on my home inspection blogs. Those of you in that category know that I try to make salient points and provide an easy to understand but informative approach with detailed photos.

I peruse through AR too and, in the past month or so, there is a new inspector on here who is really taking off and doing some wonderful blogs. He is putting lots of effort into it, to let AR readers better understand the inspection process. A link to his blogs is here. The inspector is Harold Miller from Camano Island. I am glad to say he is another Washington inspector. If you are in the group that likes the detailed blogs I have done, then you will want to subscribe to his work too. He is posting lots of detailed and accurate information, in clear concise writing, and Harold is a welcome and great addition to the active rain community. If you have not read his material, please check it out!

 In the blog just before this one, I wrote about why re-inspecting a home to make sure all repairs were done by qualified parties, in a workmanlike manner, can be high in liability. I was browsing some photos and thought this would be a good example. These were live 120V wires in a crawl space. They were cobbled together. Obvious problems, no junction box, but clearly a sloppy job especially when down in the crawl space where it is wet and you really do not want to make contact with any bare live wires. Now, if an electrician comes in he is going to, like the inspector, know that this wiring really needs some scrutiny and using that specialized knowledge check the panel, the grounding/bonding, etc. On the other hand, you get the handyman in, who knows way less about wiring than the inspector, and he will try to jam these wires inside a junction box someway somehow. When he is done, those wires might be in a junction box but the system is likely to have numerous other problems that were beyond the scope of a home inspector but would have been caught by the electrician. that is an example of why you want the licensed and qualified person doing the repairs, not someone who can work but does not understand ramifications or the big picture.

Thanks for looking.

Steven L. Smith

www.kingofthehouse.com

 Frequently a home inspector is asked to go back and re-inspect repairs at a house where that inspector had previously done an inspection. This is typically done at a fraction of the cost of the original inspection.

On the surface, this sounds simple enough. But, for the record, most of those companies that insure home inspectors try to discourage us from doing re-inspects at all, in any fashion. The force of the marketplace is such that, realistically, most of us cannot refuse to do these inspections. But I think that here at Active Rain would be a good place to explain the reasons for this reluctance on the part of the insurers. There is strong logic to it.

As inspectors, at the initial inspection, we go in and find visible defects. Then we will, pretty much without fail, recommend that the repair work be done, and that the system be evaluated for upgrades, by a qualified party -- a licensed electrician, a licensed plumber, a licensed contractor, a licensed roofer, a licensed HVAC professional. So far, it seems simple enough. But then reality gets involved more often than not: The seller or a friend, or someone free, cheap or casual labor, will end up doing all the work at a fraction of the cost one would pay a professional. In my view, if that is the case with the simple and easy to repair things: Gutters need cleaned, downspout extensions installed, vegetation cut back from the house, dirt taken out of the crawl space vents, then great!

The big problem comes in, and this happens a lot,  when this same party works on complicated systems. For example, the inspector initially finds melting insulation on solid-strand aluminum wiring in the main panel. He or she comes back next time and somebody has snipped off the burned connections and put the same wires back in the same panel. Or, even if some better than average amateur repair is done at the melted wires, chances are that the wires are also be corroded and melted in the wall at the terminals on the outlet the circuit is routed to in a bedroom. A non-electrician, who did the work, has no clue of this related matter and putters with the obvious problem but misses the big picture -- which is equally or more dangerous. Similar situations occur in plumbing, or roofing where the amateur repairs the roof by smearing tar all over. I called for repair of an incorrectly installed TPR drain once and, when I went back, they had changed it so it was routed okay but the pipe went from being copper to PVC -- Wrong!

Roofing, flashing issues, wiring, plumbing, HVAC are all systems and components that I have seen amateurs work on and try to pass off as repaired when they were not. In those cases I was able to ascertain that was the case, but how about the systems that run through walls, behind or under insulation, etc. They are plain not visible. It is, for that very reason, that an inspector wants to see that work was done by someone "smarter" or more knowledgeable in that field than the inspector. As inspectors, we are generalists. We know lots about many things, and everybody has certain areas they know more about than others, but few of us are licensed plumbers, electricians, or HVAC service technicians. Therefore, it only makes sense that when we see a problem we refer it to one of these experts. That way the component or system called out as faulty, and anything more complicated in that system that the inspector did not identify, will be recognized by the expert and that leads to that being resolved too. Contrast that to the person doing a repair who does not know much about what he is doing but does know how to hide things.

Home inspection insurance companies warn that trying to discern if work is done correctly is much harder than finding the initial problem, especially if anyone is being sneaky. That is the reason an inspector wants to see the specialized work done by qualified and licensed parties. It indemnifies us to some degree and is our insurance policy. If it ends up that an electrician did a lousy job, in a concealed area, he is responsible and the client can go after his license and take him to court. The inspector might be in line, but he will be behind that electrician in a lawsuit. It is the same with a plumber or any licensed contractor. On the other hand, if some fly by night worker with no license or authorization to do a specialized job, half does the work, then that can get an inspector who says it looks okay in real hot water. Take for instance, a worker who replaces visible galvanized supply pipe but none of the pipe that runs inside the walls. Six months later, as it begins to gush through the rusted pipes, the buyer is mad at the inspector for not knowing the handyman didn't replace all the bad pipe. If a professional plumber had been in that equation, and did such poor work, the buyer would be able to effectively go after that plumber. But, since it was an unlicensed party, who might have vanished, the easiest party to get mad at is the inspector who is still around, insured but certainly could not see inside the walls.

Obviously, in a re-inspect, a wise inspector uses defining and exclusionary language. Also, a number of inspectors just flat will NEVER sign off on any electrical, plumbing, roofing or structural work unless invoices are shown proving that all of the work was done by a qualified and licensed party. That applies regardless of how good the work might look on the surface. This is always frustrating to the sellers or the realtors involved. Agree or disagree with this policy, now you understand why the simple re-inspect is anything but simple and routine for the inspector. Personally, I know more inspectors who have stepped into hot water on the low-price re-inspect than on the real, full priced, inspection.

I was told about this video and it really is worth seeing. I had dropped by the Bellingham Technical College today, where we are running a college level inspection training program, and Charlie Buell, a friend and instructor, told me to check out this posting at youtube. I cannot tell you, in my experience, how many times I have had someone argue with me about my citing the lack of a TPR (temperature pressure relief) valve, or the fact it is routed to drain up instead of down which can easily keep it from working at all. I had not heard of the program here, mythbusters, but I do not watch TV. This pair built a small shed, to California building standards, and then put the water heater in it. The tank did not have a TPR valve and they must have had the thermostat locked on (which can and does happen in real life as these are not such sophisticated devices). Anyway, if you work with people who are buying houses, take a look at this video and you will see first hand just how important it is to have a properly operating and installed TPR valve and drain. Watch the water heater rocket here.

Thanks for dropping by.

Steven L. Smith

www.kingofthehouse.com

Bellingham WA Home Inspection