hausdok

Yes, of course they have a thermostat that activates the pump and the fan - it's no different than a hot air system that turns on the inducer fan and kicks on the burners at the same time in response to a stat. However, it is not true that the only time that one has heat with this system is when the timer is on. When the timer is on standby the heating system still functions normally in response to the thermostat. Have you ever tasted the water at an exterior sillcock after you haven't drawn water from that sillcock for a year? Bleeaach! I have a friend who owned a home with one of these systems. She had heat even when the timer was in standby mode. The timer is only really needed during summer months when the heat isn't being used. Without the timer you get, for want of a better word at this moment, stinky pipe syndrome. You aren't supposed to plumb these systems so they have constant circulation through them and the water is changed whenever someone draws from a faucet somewhere in a house. None of these should be plumbed like that. So, like a hydro-massage tub that gets bacteria buildup in the pump and recycling loop because the hydro-massage system is never used, you get bacteria buildup in the heating loop if you don't cycle clean water through these systems at least once a day. That's why an indirect water heater works best for these; you don't have to be concerned with bacteria. A couple of years after she bought her home, the timer went out on my friend's system. She didn't know exactly when, but she noticed a gradual odor and difference in the taste of her water and then got diarrhea. Her water tasted brackish and had a bad smell. She called me up to ask me what I thought it might be. I asked her to check to ensure the timer was functioning; it was not. She got it fixed, flushed the system out, the water tasted normal after that and the trots subsided. If one were to plumb one of these systems directly in line with the potable plumbing loop there'd be no more need for a circulator than you have on your normal house plumbing; however, then I suppose you'd have to deal with the issue of damage caused to the system by pipe scouring. The other way I've seen these done is with a conventional tank type water heater and a plate heat exchanger halfway between the water heater and the heating loop. The system had a plate exchanger the size of my cable modem. When a thermostat demanded heat, the pump on the heating system side of the plate exchanger circulated water through the heating loop until the temp in the room in question was satisfied. I guess that this system didn't require either a timer or a pump on the water heater side of the plate exchanger because the loop to the exchanger was very short - probably less than 8ft. I'm not a plumber or an HVAC guy; it was a plumber/HVAC guy that explained these setups to me. It made sense to me then and it makes sense to me now and, for me at least, the easiest way to make my clients understand what it's like is to tell them that it's very much like an oversized automobile heating system. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

LOL! By the looks of the framing, it appears that it's in some kind of a lean-to shed attached to the house. If we get a shaker, I wonder which will fail first - the shed or the two rinky-dink struts nailed to that brace. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Rich, You may have noticed that the Amazon store is gone from TIJ; that's because we're planning on building our own. I talked to Douglas by phone just two days ago; and, if things work out the way we hope they will, we may be selling his book, the Code Check materials and other books for inspectors on here in the not-to-far-distant future. In the meantime, as Jimmy suggested, go straight to the source. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

They probably wouldn't work real well in New Jersey's frigid winter climate but folks here who've owned them seem to like them. Those, or another manufacturer's variation on the same theme, are what I see in a lot of the high-rise condos in downtown Seattle. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Oh, I forgot to mention, sometimes you'll see them hooked up to a conventional tank-type water heater and sometimes to an indirect water heater. Both will use a circulator but only the system using the conventional tank-type water heater will have a timer on it; that's so even in the summer when the heat isn't being used it will periodically cycle clean water through it so water doesn't stagnate and develop bacteria in the coil inside the air handler. Also, either type will normally have a mixing valve plumbed into the takeoff above the water heater so one can adjust the temperature, 'cuz the temp on the water heater is usually cranked way beyond what's safe for household use. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, Yeah, I've seen about a dozen over the past decade. Think of them as an oversized car heater and the water heater as the engine block that's heating the water being circulated through them; simply an air handler with a coil plunked down in the path of the air from the blower with hot water circulating through it, a supply on one side of the air handler and supply ducts carrying air to the rooms on the other. It's very basic. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, It might be from the 25th week of 1977. I did a little googling for Columbia Boilers For Sale and then compared serial numbers shown to years that the furnace were supposed to have been purchased, when that was in the ads. All but a few seemed to ine up with year as first two and the next two numbers as the week. Some of those ads had photos; I didn't see a whole lot of difference in them from one year to the other, so it's possible that it could be 32 years old and look like one made more recently. They look like pretty solid units; I bet one that's 32 is just a spring chicken. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Kewl! Thanks Rich, I'll try and remember to add them this weekend. OT - OF!!! M.

By: Julie Slack January 30, 2009 08:09 PM - More than 500 home inspectors working across the province are now calling Mississauga home. The Ontario Association of Home Inspectors has located its new head office at 1515 Matheson Rd. E. The group celebrated its grand opening yesterday with an open house attended by Mayor Hazel McCallion. CEO Aubrey LeBlanc said it's an important day for the association because prior to having a head office, they operated out of file boxes. The head office gives people a place to make direct contact with inspectors who meet OAHI qualifications, said LeBlanc. To read the rest of the article on North Shore News at AboutCanada.com, click here

The hits keep coming quickly on this one. Here's some feedback from a BC concerned citizen to the BC Solicitor General. OT - OF!!! M.

Hmm, I notice that the only associations that they are allowing are the three that are in BC and that ASHI, NAHI, AII and the soap opera are excluded. After reading these two articles, I'm left wondering if the impetus for this was the furor a year or so ago over the BC TV news reporter that managed to get herself "certified" by the soap opera after taking that non-proctored online test. I wonder if any BC inspectors are going to want reciprocity with inspectors down here and vice versa? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, The few Columbia boilers that I saw had the year of manufacture clearly displayed there on the serial number plate. Why don't you go downtown to the Columbia manufacturing plant right there in Pottstown or pick up the phone and call them and ask them if there is a particular way that they encode serial numbers and do they ever correspond to the date? If you get an answer, get back to us; we'd love to add that information to our boiler decoding information. Are you just testing us and you work at the Columbia plant in Pottstown? Blazenut would be a good user name for a professional welder. Hmm? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

To read a follow-up article in the BC press, click here.

Hi Harold, Thanks, we need every inspector to get the word out about this. However, I guess I should have done a better job of my homework before I told you guys to write to that committee link above; because, as it turns out, Sen. Kohl-Welles is chairwoman of that committee! The others on the committee are: Democrats - Karen Keiser (vice chair), Rosa Franklin and Adam Kline; Republicans - Janea Holmquist, Jim Honeyford and Curtis King. Linda Parlette, the co-sponsor, is out of legislative District 12 which includes Wenatchee, Chelan Okanogan, etc. If you know anyone in the districts of these legislators it would be a good idea to contact them and get them to rally others in all of these districts around this issue. If they feel enough heat from constituents the bill may die in committee. If it gets out of committee, I spent about 30 minutes on the phone yesterday with Dr. Bruce Kelman (read about him in the article that I linked to in post # 3 above) and some time with other indoor air quality experts who may be ready, willing and able to weigh in on the side of reason at the public hearings or even address this issue with the committee via email. Folks need to understand that the Home Inspectors Advisory Licensing Board had absolutely nothing to do with the attempt to insert this rule into the law. Those on the board who were once members of WHILAG, the coalition that twice prevented the law from going through in 2006 and 2007, fought hard as members of that coalition to keep mold and plenty of other goofy stuff out of that law before a compromise was reached and the law was finally passed. This is just something that the Senator seems to have a pet peeve about because it's something that she's tried to do repeatedly in the past; in fact, she's been trying to enact legislation that has to do with mold in residential construction since at least 2005. Unfortunately, if the bill makes it through the hearings, the senate, legislative hearings, and the legislature and becomes law, the board will have no choice but to make up some kind of a protocol for mold inspections. When that happens, every inspector in the state will have figuratively donned an invisible dunce cap and will be walking around with an invisible sign on his butt that says, "Kick me, my senator says you can." ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

January 30, 2009 - Vancouver, B.C. B.C. will become the first province in Canada to license home inspectors to better protect buyers and ensure qualified inspections, Solicitor General and Minister responsible for consumers, John van Dongen announced today. “A home is the single biggest investment most British Columbians make but financial risk can be the result of an incorrect or misleading report from an unqualified inspector,â€

Yeah, I know but the first time a rat the length of your forearm comes through that thing you know darned well you'll be installing it. OT - OF!!! M.

Start here: Committee on Labor, Commerce and Consumer Protection ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Well, The thing to do now is for home inspectors all over the state to mobilize and call, write and email their legislators and explain to them why they think this isn't such a great idea. The more the better. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Galvanized steel mesh; it's a wonderful thing. OT - OF!!! M.

Yep, me too, and I don't want to be responsible for someone's head cold a year down the road. So, will the board be able to do anything to get rid of this nonsense? It does say "as defined by the board". Well, mold was pulled out of the last draft of the law before it was reintroduced and passed last year but the health and safety issue comment was left intact. There is no model for this - if it goes through, they'll have to make it up even though everyone on the board will be completely unqualified to do so. That's no way to do business. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

It sounds like you've been listening to the wisdom of a home inspection training guru down there in the Arizona desert country. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Rich, I'm not trying to downplay mold; I'm just concerned that they're trying to foist it onto our shoulders when even the GAO says that there's a lot more research needed before the stuff is understood. It's bad enough that we've had to deal with 10 years of these mold is gold types rushing around bilking buyers out of meager funds with questionable mold inspection/sampling methods, now we've got politicians who want all of us to jump on that bridge to nowhere. Imagine the cost to the potential homeowner if we were to report everything in, around, under a home that might be mold and had the buyer submit samples of everything to labs. Then imagine the mess when they have the home "cleaned" of all "mold" before move-in and then six months later find what they believe to be mold. You know who the recipients of all of that angst will be, don't you? Yep.....Us. Here's the full GAO study and here's a one page summary of the GAO findings. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi All, Well, it looks like this is one of the good Senator's pet peeves. This is from the rules review docket for April 1, 2005 ESB 5049 f Mold in residential units Kohl-Welles,Benton HOUS DPA8 DNP1 ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, Oi, maybe the good Senator should do her homework before she jumps into something that even the CDC and EPA haven't figured out yet. Click here for an amazing story of how bad things can happen to good people when fear mongers run amok. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Per Code Check Complete Type B Double-Wall Connectors Min clearance to combustibles per L & L (typical 1in) [2006 IRC 242710.5/2006 UMC 802.10.5] ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike