mthomas1

Multiple defects problem. Thanks for that link. I wonder how many people here, had they encountered that in the wild, would - like me - have taken all appropriate steps to alert everyone involved to the danger, but at the same would have been thinking to themselves : "real-world, there's little chance that that degree of potential cross-connection at the exterior could admit enough CO to produce a significant concentration...".

Some interesting comments here

Those Chinese, always good for a laugh... a few years back I had a sump pump failure because the "stainless steel" band clamp I purchased at Home Depot turned out to be mild steel, and rusted out in about 6 mos - no doubt someone in China made $.002 extra each on about 15 million of them, and retired rich by Chinese standards.

Visual guide to the 2000 IECC with Georgia Supplements and Amendments, many good pics: http://www.jacksonemc.com/Right-Choice-Standards.388.0.html

I did. A search of the library for "stairs" returns the City of Chicago Deck Guide and two chapters of the rehab manual, but nether of the documents to which I posted links.

Always a great resource for these kinds of questions: http://www.stairways.org/pdf/2003%20Sta ... SCREEN.pdf http://www.stairways.org/pdf/2006%20Sta ... SCREEN.pdf

Psychologists talk about this more generally in terms of the difference between cognition (knowing something) and metacognition (being aware of whether you know something or not). For an example a inspector with better than average cognition may be more adept at recognizing a defect when they encounter it in slightly different form than previously because they can see the similarity, while an inspector with better than average metacognition may be more adept at realizing that a difference from a previously encountered defect is great enough so that what they are looking is some kind of different defect they have never seen before.

Well... "There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent. On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well... One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence..." Someone with a lot more inspection experience than my own recently described me as being "humble" about my inspection skills, which I took as both a compliment and and encouraging sign - the people in this business (and just about any walk of life) who really scare me are incompetent people who are highly competent at projecting the illusion of competence.

THIS will get ya' close:

I read that as an effort by someone to obtain experience by providing free inspections: "Have your apartment, house, or commercial space inspected FOR FREE from a newly certified Home Inspector ... contact ANDY HAAS 052-673-3704 Character references available." Nothing wrong with that, unless the "client" is depending on the inspection to make a significant personal or financial decision and does not fully understand the possible limitations of the inspectors ability. But then again, the way the industry works, that's pretty much the position of most of our clients were in when we were just starting out. Just made me think about the concept of "value" for our services, - as perceived from both sides - was all. Or, maybe I read it completely wrong... [:-dunce]

Speaking of getting paid what you are worth: "Professional Home Inspection - FREE!" http://www.janglo.net/content/view/40895/

In such jobs one of the problems is how to KEEP thinking, day after day, when you are doing pretty much the same thing, day after day. ------------ For example, consider a few of the many different kinds of "intelligence" that make for a decent rehab crew member: The ability to anticipate: "If I do step A now, will it make it difficult/impossible to do step D later?" Good spatial imiganation: "What is on the other side of this place where I'm about to drill this hole?" Attention to detail in repetitive work: The ability to drive 500 nails when hanging siding without over-driving the 501st Creativity: The first time you are asked to move the claw foot tub out the 24" door and down the stairs to the dumpster, do you reach for the hand truck or the sledge? You need a certain level of "native intelligence" to do such work. but how good you will be, and what you will be best and worst at, depends a *lot* on the proportions in which fate has ladled out these "talents", IMO at birth or before.

In my experience if you think that a crew composed of recent Mexican immigrants and recent Easter European immigrants have the same set of cultural assumptions and interpersonal skills and attitudes, or the same set of assumptions about and strategies for dealing with supervision, and you attempt to motivate for for quality or job safety, you are going to fail with one group or the other and you are fooling no one other than yourself if you think otherwise. My observations about culture backgrounds and behavior of many Polish and Russian semi-skilled construction workers in Chicago area is not uniformed bigotry, it's appreciation of reality informed by observation and experience. Watch one of these guys shoot a nail through another's hand into a stud, and discover that both participants and the rest of the crew think it's *funny* and a chance to prove how tough they are, and you begin to understand that they are on a very different page from the Mexican worker who does not report an injury because he fears for his job and wants to avoid any potential confrontation with authority. And if you are going to stand there with Tyvek instructions in Spanish and Polish and then get them to do the job right once you leave the site, you had better be aware that on the average you are going to have to work through two largely different sets of assumptions about a lot of things, starting with "authority" and "authorities" . And if you want to understand WHY it's that way, you need talk to them about their experience back home, for example under Communism. I didn't make this stuff about Poland out of whole cloth, I LEARNED it from conversations with such workers. Life under communism imbued many people with a very fatalistic and cynical set of convictions about how the world - including the guy trying to get them to do the job right - works. (And FWIW, that's not a matter of my political preferences, I think the lot of blue collar workers as envisioned by the some on the right in this country at the moment does the same). Rural poverty in Mexico creates a different set of assumptions. Life in an economically declining blue collar community in Northern Indiana still another. And if we want to talk about why we see so much apparently thoughtless and end occasionally perversely bad workmanship, we need to be able to talk realistically about assumptions, motivations and attitudes of the workmen - which encompasses a lot more than their attitude toward their paycheck. And this reality, for better or worse, cannot get erased by erasing someone's words like an "unperson" in those 50s Soviet photographs. ----------- Another news bulletin from my planet for the PC police here: whoever erased that post is WAY behind the times. PC in corporate American - the heart of PC these days - *means* understanding these sorts of differences and managing around them. Classes, books, workshops, Power-points.. yadda, yadda, yadda, it's as PC as PC can get.

Whoa Nellie! It appears that part of my post above has "disappeared", is that the norm around here?

One thing I’d add as someone who has hired three different “fully insuredâ€

Hausdok, Interesting you should mention that... Joe-Bob, Esmeralda, Jose & Ivan's Drywall and Construction is the major builder in my area, too! Phillip, The "after" picture for that bathroom exhaust fan: Image Insert: 92.76 KB

Just curious how many here pull such fuse blocks to determine the size of installed fuses.

My experience and preferences are exactly the same as Scott's. I would add, though, that the corded pin set that comes with the Surveymaster comes in *really* handy when taking pin readings at rafter tails, when you want to take the reading around a corner or on top of a beam, or have to reach far overhead or reach around the side of a ladder - it's the meter I take into attics and crawl space. Also, it's pocketable, whch the Tramex is not.

Chris, IMO, a lot of these distinctions are actually arguments as to what code requires. For example I don't report a feeder re-identified with electrical tape if there are a couple of good tight turns around the jacket and it is not unraveling. Some other inspectors whose judgment I generally respect would. Or, they are instances where the existence of a "defect" is a "judgment call", for example I don't ding a box that's slightly loose in the wall unless I have reason to suppose it's going to get worse. As for your actual "benign" defect... yes, on reflection, suppose I do recognize this case. An example would be exposed NM, in a location where it is unlikely to be subject to mechanical damage, that is not supported exactly per code but still appears to me to be adequately secured, and in this instance would not be reported. However for me as a practical day-to-day reporting decision, the major distinction is between items which I report in detail (for example as to individual location), and those I don't. For example I generally don't report the exact location of individual junction boxes without covers, just that one or more such defects are present in a general area, such as a basement or attic. However, I would specifically report the same defect in an exterior box at a deck. Similarly, in an attic I might report the presence of improperly secured/protected wiring as a general item, but a piece of NM looped up off the rafters at the entry so as to create a trip/damage hazard might rate specific mention ("at various locations in the attic, for example to the north of the attic entry"). Or, if I felt it was especially hazardous, perhaps even a picture illustrating the problem.

Homegauge lets you install their software to multiple PCs, I have mine on two at at the office and the laptop at home. If you have high speed access consider working out an arrangement with a friend or business associate who has the same to mirror all your data out to off-site PC(s) using the free Foldershare software; using FS you can can mirror gigabytes of data off-site at no additional hardware cost. In addition to local backup to each PC using Ghost and to local USB drives I mirror via Foldershare to two machines at work, the laptop at home, and the PC of a business associate in another city - he in turn mirrors all his data on the two PCs in my office. One advantage of this arrangement is that I always have the current version of my HG templates and recent reports on all three PCs, automatically synced whenever there is an internet connection. I recently spent a few hours a day on vacation in New Mexico cleaning up the templates, connecting to the net once a day to check my e-mail using my Verizon Treo 700p as a data modem. Everything synced and backup up automatically; I came back, sat down at the office, and wrote a report on the office PC using the updated template.

Jim, "I don't understand your uncertainty. Push the GFCI test button, check to see that the outlet in question is dead = certainty." As noted above, some GFCI outlets will trip with the internal test button, but not with the ST. If this is true, is it also true for outlets downstream from these outlets?

Did a mirror in that hole show you what sort of wiring was entering the box (if any) behind the plate?

To get back to Suretests and GFCIs for a moment: One thing that vexes me is when you have (for example) counter outlets on one side of the kitchen that test (with the ST) as GFCI protected from an upstream GFCI outlet (the ST test trips the upstream outlet), but on the other side of the kitchen, the ST GFCI test trips nothing (the counter outlets appear to be unprotected). In such cases its often clear that likely all the electrical work was done by the same person the same time, and I find myself wondering "Huh? They bothered to do it right on that side but not on this one?", and in my mind the tester's results become somewhat suspect. In this case I report how I tested and the result, and as I'm not getting call-backs from pissed off electricians who discover such outlets are protected, perhaps the ST is highly accurate in such cases. But I do wish my confidence level was higher, and that I had a "foolproof" way to test for GFCI protection.

BTW, AFAIK that Rheem "General Safety Precautions" Tech Bulletin is no longer on their site. There is a copy at: http://www.rheem.com/Documents/Resource ... 0/1400.pdf

http://www.ci.phoenix.az.us/FIRE/firescld.html http://www.tap-water-burn.com/