This post is primarily directed to newer members of AR. As people become serious about building a standing at AR, they have a few ways to do this: Invite points, localism, but most of us rely on blogging and comments as the mainstay of our quest. A person trying to get to the next level will do ten blogs in the week and try to get in ten comments per day.
This has been said before, but I want to reiterate it here. If you are taking the time to read blogs and then comment, make sure you write enough words in the comment that it will count for points. For example, if you take 30 minutes and write ten comments, similar to the title of this post, and check your points you will find that you earned zero comment points. As I recall, the magic number to trip the system is twelve words, which is not that challenging. By the way, if you make really short comments, these also do not help the person who wrote the blog. Case in point: We often have people posting here (I was one of them a few months back) asking why they have a number of comments after a blog, but so few actual comment points. That is because a number of the comments are short and do not meet the AR minimum guidelines. If the writer does not get a comment point, then neither does the blogger who wrote the post being commented on -- at least that seems to be the case from my personal experience dissecting my blogs and comments.
Realize, the comments do not have to be that arduous a task, but they need to be more than a couple words. The following would earn comment points and is not so hard: "Steve, I appreciated the information on comment points. I had wondered why some of mine were not showing up."
Cheers, I look forward to your comments.
Well, it took me more than a week to mull it over but, as of this weekend, I did 
This is a topic that impacts all of us including realtors, home inspectors and home buyers. In new construction it seems to almost always be done correctly, at least in my area. But in older homes and mobile homes, plumbing vent stacks can be really messed up or missing completely. Venting the drain and sewer system seems like a straight forward enough concept. The vent pipes go up and outside, through the roof usually. If they terminate under eaves, are cut off in the attic, terminate in front of a window that opens, that is yet another installation problem. My topic here will discuss homes with too few or no vents at all. The roof you see below, was a home that had NO sewer vents at all. There was no main, nothing in the kitchen, bath, etc. As a result, drains were gurgling and slow. Often in older homes, especially mobile and manufactured homes, they try to help the situation of missing or too few vents by putting in mechanical vents. These devices can help alleviate a slow drain, but they are sure not as good as a real vent. They must be installed at the correct height above the flood level of the basin. Also, as they are mechanical, they will fail at some point and, at that point, they will allow sewer gas out into the home. If you think about it, the need for vents, and how they work, is pretty basic and intuitive. Think of the big juice can. You make a large hole in one edge and when you pour it goes glug, glug, glug. Yet, put the teeny, tiniest hole at the other edge, and it comes out smooth like gangbusters. A home inspector should always take a look at the venting. A stack missing at a small sink is one thing, but when the main stack is no where to be seen that indicates pretty hay wire plumbing.
This is one of those things that is frustrating to the home inspector. What you see here is a flex drain. It has ridges in it, like a vacuum cleaner hose. We usually find these under bathroom sinks. If you have ever cleaned a bathroom sink drain and trap, even one with smooth pipe and a proper P-trap, you probably know that the hair and gunk is icky. Well, add the flex drain, with the ridges, and imagine how often it is blocked and needs to be cleaned. Why is this device used at all? In all cases, far as I can tell, it was done by a 
Those of us who are home inspectors get used to our own lingo. And the realtors who have been in the business for some time understand most of it. Today, I had a reminder, in speaking to a realtor, that all the technical words we inspectors think are common might not be to others. This word, that brought this tedious blog to mind, is an acronym. 
Recently I posted on OSB, or oriented strand board, which is so often found as siding on manufactured homes. In fact, it is found on lots of different homes, however the vertical panel style (not lap) is what I am concerned about in this post and that tends to be on manufactured homes.
It might vary in different areas, but around here, most of the siding one finds on manufactured homes is oriented strand board. It is commonly called OSB. By the way, the famous siding that had so many problems -- L-P siding, was oriented strand board. Even though they have done some work on the composition of it, anytime OSB is seen, it needs to be carefully gone over. Very seldom, especially on manufactured homes, do I find OSB that does not have at least some decay. This material, when it gets wet not only decays but it almost reverts to a form of cardboard. It is soft and you can put a probe right through it with the greatest of ease. With this product, good eaves help protect the siding. It also needs to be carefully maintained and paint and caulking kept in good shape. Downspouts dumping on the siding, dirt on the siding -- while bad with any wood siding -- are about 5x worse with this product. It should not be surface nailed and holes for hooks or planters on the side are invitations for trouble. If one had such a home in a very dry climate, with little rain or moisture in the air, some of these warnings might be less critical concerns. This information is passed along as a number of realtors have posted information on mobile and manufactured homes. A photo of OSB on a manufactured home is below. It looks much like T1-11 siding (a veneer (in sheets or layers) like plywood) to the untrained eye -- but they are different products. OSB is ground-up flakes of wood all glued back together. I will be writing a blog on that issue shortly.
Here is something that not everyone knows. As a realtor, ever look in a condo and find the "main" electric shut-off inside the panel in the house. Or maybe you saw that at a mobile home. Fact is, at least in my area, most of the time that panel is not the main. It is a distribution or sub-panel, which might have a shut-off but it is not really the main!
As a home inspector, I see lots of do it yourself work. Some better than others. Universally, the worst and most dangerous work I see is do it yourself electrical. Most people just flat do not know what they are doing -- despite what the box store might tell them they are capable of. I see main panels with the neutral and ground buses not bonded, I see distribution (sub) panels that are bonded neutral to ground -- both wrong. I see no earth grounds, I see the water-pipes as the earth ground. I see reversed wires and no grounds. How about the one do it yourselfer who had an outside outlet and had reversed the ground and the hot. The hot was on the metal junction box hooked to a wooden pole. Think about grabbing onto that metal cover, standing there in a mud puddle. It might be the last thing you ever think about. And there are the GFCI outlets wired wrong so they do not function. Or check out the wire-nuts applied so loosely that the connections are warm from the resistance of a bad connection. Then there is the one that really frosts a home inspector's fanny -- and it takes a lot to do that. It starts with splices not in junction boxes and goes from there: The person who disconnects wires and leaves them unterminated and unprotected and hot. I was in a dark attic once, by accident I saw two wires over my head: Live 240V from an old water heater. I will repeat LIVE. How about crawl spaces. They leave live wires in crawl spaces, sometimes with wire-nuts other times not. When there are bare live wires it is really scary, but when the wire nuts are about to fall off, that is not so good either. So the unsuspecting inspector, or the kid running his new stereo wires under the house, might run across these -- while laying on his belly in an often damp space. Enough of a tirade, but I ran into this three times this week. You can putz around with your steps, louse up the drains, rot out the wall -- but please, take enough time and caution that you do not kill someone with your sloppy and unsafe wiring.
Actually, I do not need to be vindicated by the photo, as my concern in this post is based on standard plumbing practices. But this posting of the two photos makes a great point! I can tell you that, time and time again, an inspector will go under a home and find that the temperature pressure relief valve drain line goes straight down into the crawl space. Now, granted, this is better than no pressure relief valve or drain, but sure not good in the category of fending off wood destroying organisms. Even though most plumbing codes specify the TPR drain should be in a visible location, I have had licensed plumbers tell me that they see this as "no big deal." As a Washington home inspector, we have to call that out as a conducive condition and I finally got a great example of why. The top photo is the TPR drain: Straight down into the crawl. The lower photo is the vapor barrier underneath. The problem is, water was coming out of the TPR valve and that results in the water below. If you think that is of no consequence, let me go on to state that the crawl space was afflicted with an anobiid beetle problem. This pest gives no breaks when it comes to excess moisture. Hence, this extra water was bad news for this crawl space. The funny thing is, generally it is so easy to take a few extra minutes and route the drain line properly outside. Heck, it can even be done with CPVC plastic pipe which is easy to cut and glue. 
