hausdok

Hi, Ditto in Washington State. The inspector must first take and pass a 120 hour course of instruction. The courses are vetted. They have written tests and report writing requirements in the courses. If one can't pass the course, one can't go onto the next step which is to do forty hours of inspections with a licensed inspector and complete five written reports that comply fully with the standard of practice. Then there is the third step which is the National Home Inspector Exam. The exam is written and if the inspector can't read, or his/her reading comprehension is poor, the inspector isn't likely to pass the test. Since an inspector can't even apply for a license until those first three steps are completed, I think the reedin' an' ritin' part is cuver'd. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I spoke with Wade yesterday and recommended he check out Bellingham Tech's course. It provides the 120 hours of classwork needed plus the 40 hours of mentoring for about the same cost as the others. Most of the comments I've heard about the course have been positive. Can't say that for any of the others. Marc, I don't have a school. I teach one course for North Seattle Community College called Introduction to Home Inspections. The class doesn't teach people to be inspectors; it's meant to give the student an understanding of what inspections are, what the scope and limitations are, an understanding of the ethical challenges and moral dilemmas inspectors are sometimes faced with and insight into some of the machinations and dirty tricks of manipulative agents. It's attended by those who are taking the real estate license and appraiser courses there. The students are typically realtors, lenders, insurance agents, appraiser students, property managers and investors and sometimes one or two wannabe inspectors. So far, as soon as the wannabe's have figured out that getting into this gig is a slog through a minefield they've either dropped out or have opted to do something else by the end of the course. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike Mike

Repeat that test in the home you live in. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Wesco used to be made in Seattle. They've gone out of business. If it's a heat pump any HVAC guy with half a brain can repair it using off-the-shelf parts.

Around here the landfill allows you to discard up to a specific amount - I can't remember how much - of asbestos a week. They supply you with the yellow plastic bags with the red lettering on them. You remove the shingles from your house, stack them in the shed and then every week package up a batch up to the weight limit in the yellow bags and they'll pick it up and dump it in the landfill. No complicated contractor arrangements. OT - OF!!! M.

It depends on how heavy the metal is and how long it's been left to rust. If the steel is still tenable, it can be sand blasted and then coated with POR15 followed by an epoxy primer and the rust will stop. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Take the 40 gal back and get a Rheem XR90. It's 29 gallons, and is shorter and narrower than the big box cheap tanks and it performs like a 50 gallon while using the energy of a 40 gallon. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Without apologizing, 'cuz I don't think I said anything that I need to apologize for, The simple answer is just run B-vent all the way from the collar to the outside. It will retain the heat you need to maintain buoyancy it will allow you to reduce the clearance around it to combustibles. A water heater venting into a big chimney is condensing water all over the place whether you realize it or not. Why is a straw you use to drink out of very small in diameter? Why not two inches in diameter? Answer-try sucking liquid up through that two-inch wide straw and see how hard it is compared to sucking it through a narrow straw. Now imagine the air passing over that chimney causing, if the stack is properly positioned, low pressure above the vent that helps the water heater to draft. It pulls a whole lot better when it's passing over a 3 - 4 - 5 inch B vent than it does when it passes over the gaping maw of a masonry chimney flue. Most of that water heater exhaust probably cools to dew point about a foot or two from where the B vent ends and it enters the flue; and then it just clings to the sides of the flue, eats it up and eventually turns it to masonry mush. If the chimney passes up through the center of the house where it's not as cold as a stack exposed on the outside wall of the house, it might not be as bad as it would be on the outside wall of the house 'if' the flue isn't way oversized. For the typical 40,000 Btu water heater - just about every masonry flue is oversized. As far as I can tell from what you've posted, YOU have not entered the realm of lame-brainededness. I was saying that sticking a single-walled vent into the middle of a vent system after a B-vent is installed is lame brained. I was urging you not to become one in my own inimitable fashion. It might surprise you to learn that just about every furnace I see from the 70's and 80's and well into the 90's and up to about 2006 is installed wrong because around here most are in unheated garages and the code had said for many years that "connectors" in "cold" areas were supposed to be double-walled material. The HVAC industry has rigging the books for years by ignoring that little rule around here because they made sure they'd increase the frequency of their repeat repair business. The number of condensate-damaged furnaces, connectors and vents I've seen is mind-boggling. Then some numb nuts decided to eliminate that rule altogether and the number of Cat 1 furnaces installed with single-walled connectors increased around here - and so did the number of damaged appliances. If you have the skills do the work yourself; but use the correct components. If you're smart, you'll extend that vent through and up that chimney and cap the old flue around the liner in order to turn that masonry flue into warmed space that will keep the flue liner warm instead of it being a condenser. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

The single-walled portion of the vent is called a "connector" and is only allowed from the appliance to the B-vent. From there to terminus the B-vent needs to be used because it not only provides reduced heat radiation It keeps the exhaust gases hot enough to retain their buoyancy, without which those acidic exhaust gases stall, cool to dew point, condense inside the vent and then eat through the vent or damage that masonry chimney you're venting into (Which is also a pretty bad idea). I've seen homeowners try to readapt to single-walled pipe from B-vent material many times. Aside from the fact that the results look jackleg and the vents leaked, the result was loss of gas buoyancy and damage to the vent system. It's a lame-brained thing to do - DON'T DO IT! Do it right or don't do it at all. Stop complaining about the cost of a product designed to make that system safe and purchase the right components. If it's technically too much for you, loosen the purse strings and hire a tech to do it for you. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I see things done a lot the same way Jim describes. I've been here nearly 17-1/2 years and from day one I've never ceased to be amazed by the stupidity of what seems to be the overwhelming majority of so-called "professional roofers" around here. It's become a challenge just trying to find a roof cover that I don't have to criticize. I know,....it pays the bills; but sometimes it's pretty frustrating. Finally, the 2013 code will require drip edge flashings. That means that by about 2020 every municipality around here should have stopped using the 2009 IRC and we might see drip edge flashings installed on more than just the occasional 1 in 1000 roofs. Then it will be another ten years of writing them up for improper installation before they figure out how to install them correctly - if they bother to install them at all. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Yeah, Well, they would say that. They are in the business of selling the product after all; but they aren't engineers. About fifteen years ago the engineers of the truss council (called something else today) published a paper that said basically, "Asphalt roofs are heavy, too heavy. Installing more than one layer works for a static load but when you factor in a heavy snow load the roof trusses are being stressed way beyond their design limits. Don't do it!" Made sense then and it makes sense now. When folks want to know what I think of a roof-over versus stripping off and installing a single layer I use language just about as colorful as Kurt's. By the way, if a roofer doesn't tear that first layer off, how is he/she going to be able to see whether that roof deck has started to rot or delam on the side that can't be seen from inside the attic? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Oh yeah, Especially black cats. OT - OF!!! M.

Don't know how that looks to others but from here that place is dark as the inside of a cat's ass and it's hard to make out what I'm seeing. For the benefit of you other old farts with browsers that make that all dark and dreary, I've tried to lighten the photo so one can see some detail. Click to Enlarge 46.1 KB OT - OF!!! M.

Lots of foundations have a little negative slope immediately next to the foundation. It's where the backfill was tossed back into the foundation hole without being compacted and after the soil settled nobody ever bothered to add some more soil. If you don't currently have any issues caused by negative drainage next to the foundation, and it's just nagging at you because the inspector said to fix it, Just remove the sod from the surface next to the foundation and add soil to build up the grade next to the house so that it slopes continuously away. You don't need to try and put in curtain drains, or French drains or anything else. As long as the ground slopes away for that first six feet or so, everything will be hunky dory. Psst: If there weren't any issues caused by that negative slope, the inspector probably didn't tell you that commenting about twelve inches of soil draining toward the foundation was just him covering his tush. He probably didn't realistically expect anything to happen if you left things the way they are. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Yeah, Pre-1984 split bus. See 'em on virtually every pre-1984 house I see that's built between the 60's and 80's. OT - OF!!! M.

If there isn't a severe moss/algae problem or a lot of tree debris remaining on the roof that gets wet and secretes tannic acid, I'd say it's a defect. I supposed it could be the IKO thing - they've got a manufacturing plant down near Olympia someplace and lots of local builders use their product, but I've seen plenty of IKO shingles here and they don't seem to have any issues . OT - OF!!! M.

Sure, why not? It's not my story anyway. I bet it occurs every day all around the country. OT - OF!!! M.

They didn't let a carpet of moss develop and remain on that cover for a loooonnggg time did the? OT - OF!!! M.

Hi, All good advice but the most important reason that you should call an arborist is that if those trees do come down and you haven't called an arborist to evaluate them there's a good chance your insurance company will not pay you a dime because you didn't exercise "due diligence." That happened to a client of mine about 7 - 8 years ago. She had me inspect the house in October. There were tall trees on the property - about half a dozen. I told her to get them looked at by an arborist and do whatever the arborist said to do by way of pruning, removing etc. She closed in November. In mid-November we had a series of wind storms that took down trees and power lines all over the county and left many of us without power for more than ten days. Not long after that period started, I got a call from my client. She wanted to know if I knew of a tree removal service in the area. I told her of a company I knew and asked what was up. She responded that one of those trees had come down......on top of a neighbor's house. She'd called her insurance company. They asked her if she'd had the trees evaluated by an arborist when she took possession. She had not. She'd leased the house back to the seller for two months and hadn't moved in yet so she hadn't gotten around to getting the trees evaluated. Her insurance company tsk, tsk'd and then told her that there was nothing they could do because as the homeowner she was expected to exercise due diligence and she should have had those trees evaluated. The rest of the story is that she was sued by her neighbor's insurance company to recoup the cost of repairing her neighbor's house and she ended up going bankrupt and her home was foreclosed. Get them looked at. Then do whatever it takes to follow through with the arborist's recommendations as soon as you can. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

When you finish it you'll need to ensure those panels are all kept free floating. If you end up gluing those panels to the stiles and rails with paint or varnish those panels are sure to split when that door expands. See it all the time with wood raised-panel doors that someone decided to paint and didn't want to leave those pesky joints free-floating. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

For the record, kust posted this here on my recommendation. He'd written to me via email and I'd already opined that it was a cold joint between pours. My only concern was the unknowns - the possibility of below-grade movement next to the foundation. Backfilling foundations properly with the right mix of soil and stone in New York State's winters is an art. Do it wrong and you can have a mess on your hands. That said, this is a 7-year old house. If there was anything like that going on, it almost certainly would have manifested itself by now. All that an inspector can tell from any of those photos, and probably in person, is that it's clearly a cold joint between two pours. It's not the end of the world. There will be rebar in those walls helping to keep those halves aligned. If he's worried about infiltration, there's not a whole lot there to worry about. Based on those photos I don't think I'd ever recommend anything beyond what his inspector did. If he wants a warm and fuzzy maybe patching the cold joint is the way to go; but, though I agree with Jim that patching is best done from outside I think there are ways to do it from the inside that can be pretty effective too - it's just a lot of work. He can grind out an inverted V at the joint and fill it with a urethane sealant and then apply crystalline waterproofing material to the face of the entire wall. Patching it from the inside will keep out water but there's no way that anyone looking at those walls can know what's going to happen on the outside of that foundation - patched or not - without knowing how drainage is configured and how that foundation was backfilled and with what. Kust, you want assurances; nobody here can give you those; neither can the inspector you hired nor an engineer. Inspectors can reduce your risk when you buy but they can't eliminate it completely because there will always be plenty of unknowns - such as what's going on below grade adjacent to that foundation. The engineer can't tell you much either unless he/she performs some invasive testing. In this case, I don't think the inspector's recommendation to keep an eye on it is so far out of line. I agree that telling someone to monitor something is often inspectorspeak used to cover one's ass, but there are times when you can't do anything but continue to watch something for which your inspector couldn't provide solid answers. That doesn't make the inspector incompetent; just not endowed with super powers of x-ray vision. Let's face it, if he said, "It's a cold joint between two pours and nothing bad will ever happen," and something bad does happen, you're going to be pretty unhappy. You've already shown here that despite multiple folks telling you that they don't think there is going to be an issue you're still fretting about it. Despite some of what's been said here about the value of the inspection you received, I don't see where the inspector did anything wrong. I wonder how many of us, given the limited information available, would have reported anything differently or would not have told him to keep his eye on it. Kust, if you don't feel comfortable with it, don't buy the home. It's that simple. We all have an inner voice. When we ignore our inner voice and something goes wrong later on, most of us are pretty upset with ourselves and everyone and everything related to the issue. If we listen to that inner voice and nothing bad ever happens we usually don't fret about it because we've moved on, but if something bad does happen and we learn about it we are invariably pretty pleased with ourselves for having been so astute that we avoided the bullet. If you walk away, one warning and that goes back to what I said above - nobody can guaranty you the perfect home and no inspector can assuage your fears of the unknowns associated with those things the inspector was unable to know. There is ALWAYS risk associated with purchasing a home. If you are unwilling to assume any risk, you're better off not buying and continuing to rent, because a house is one huge maintenance item that's waiting to be worked on. It's in a constant race with its owner; the house wants to return to the earth and become compost and the owner is the goalkeeper preventing the house from reaching that goal. If you can't accept that reality and don't want to be a goalkeeper, home ownership is not for you. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Those king of look like concrete railroad ties to me. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Sometimes I think people work overtime to confuse me with their weird plumbing configurations. This should be part of a weekly feature in the paper entitled how many screwed up items can you identify. Click to Enlarge 26.33 KB Click to Enlarge 29.96 KB Click to Enlarge 31.64 KB Click to Enlarge 29.88 KB

I shouldn't be in 'em. I'm beating myself up in these damned things. Every time I crawl out of one I feel like the Sounders have been bouncing balls off of me for a couple of hours. My doc told me last week that I gotta be out of my tree doing this crap at my age. He called this a "gig for younger men" and warned me that if I don't start looking for something easier to do I'm probably eventually looking at total knee replacement in both legs. Talk about caught between the rock and the hard place! ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

No, I think you're confusing terms. The Categories 1 to 4 only deal with the characteristics of exhaust temperature and positive or non-positive static exhaust gas pressure. You can have a direct vent category 1 or a non-direct vent category 4. A water heater that has an exhaust fan mounted at the end of the exhaust vent or inline with the exhaust on top of the tank is a "power-vented" water heater whether it takes it's combustion air from inside or outside. A direct-vent appliance has either a combination intake-exhaust vent or a two-pipe system - one for intake air from outside and another for exhaust air. There are direct vent water heaters that produce exhaust that's as hot as what you'd have going out the top of a conventional gravity stack and there are those that produce exhaust that's body temperature warm. You can have a condensing furnace that's a Category IV that can be configured as a direct vent or it can be configured to get it's combustion air from the interior - in which case it is no longer considered a direct vent appliance. A category 1 appliance operates with non-positive static vent pressure and temperatures that will prevent condensation in the vent. Translation - gets it's air from the area around it and the exhaust is too hot to touch. A category 2 appliance operates with non-positive static vent pressure and temperatures that will cause condensation in the vent. Translation - gets it's air from the area around it and the exhaust is not much hotter than body temperature and the exhaust system collects a lot of condensation. A category 3 appliance operates with positive static vent pressure and temperatures that will not cause condensation in the vent. Translation - it's got a high volume exhaust gas inducer and a closed burner. It can get it's air from outside or from around it but the exhaust is too hot to touch. A category 4 appliance operates with positive static vent pressure and an exhaust temperature that will cause condensation in the vent. Translation - it's getting it's air from inside or outside it has a high-volume inducer and a staged heat exchanger that extracts heat even from the condensate produced by the exhaust. The exhaust gas is barely body temp. OT - OF!!! M.