hausdok

Why not take the stack right up through the soffit and roof and flash the damned thing? We look at homes almost daily where chimneys pass up through roof overhangs. There's nothing stopping them from extending that stack except perhaps a lack of will to do so. Tear out the commercial building ceilings and put in some decent ceilings. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Nah, Great aunt Edna willed the kids her fortune but they didn't want to wait. She disappeared four weeks ago and now she's decomposing and leaking out of the attic plane onto the roof. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, Of course licensing can't guaranty that nobody will every receive a bad inspection again. Does a doctor's medical license guaranty you'll never receive shoddy medical care? Critics of licensing often like to say that licensing solves nothing. I think that boiled down to its basics a licensing program simply ensures a basic level of competency. Much the same way that your state's drivers' licensing program and driver's test ensured that you were competent enough behind the wheel to do what you claimed to be able to do - drive a car safely - a well thought out licensing program needs to ensure that those practicing this profession have sufficient training to be considered minimally competent, and it needs to test every inspector to ensure that the inspector has retained enough of what he or she has learned to be able to ensure that the inspector has the minimum level of competency needed to do what the inspector claims to be able to do - inspect homes properly. Beyond that, it's no more possible to ensure an inspector does in fact perform a proper inspection than it's possible to ensure that every person holding a driver's license that climbs behind the wheel of a car is going to drive safely. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I'm beginning to think we need to replace Chad's avatar with the Energizer Bunny. This guy has always got something going on. Nice job, Chad! ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

By Marlene Habib / Source: CBC News Canada The case of a B.C. consumer who bought a home that required $50,000 in water-leakage repairs after the seller signed a disclosure statement and the home was inspected stresses the need for national inspection standards regulated by the provinces, some industry members and educators say. To read more, plus more than 240 comments made by readers of this article, click here.

Pretty cool, Mike, To produce that video twenty years ago you'd probably have had to spend a couple of thousand dollars. I really admire you guys that can comprehend all of these new techno gadgets. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Go here. It describes the roof that was in the TOH segment I watched. I bet that you can find the contractor by emailing TOH staff. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hee, hee, Famous? Witzke must be a legend in his own mind. I'm west of the rockies and in 15 years I'd never heard of the guy. Maybe it was a freudian slip and the reporter really meant to say that "Witzke is known as the most obscure inspector west of the rockies." Famous home inspectors? Yeah, maybe if you're arrested for plotting to assissinate the Pope or something, but not for doing this gig we do. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

By Carlito Pablo, November 2, 2011/straight.com Last summer, Vancouver-based home inspector Ed Witzke drove all the way to Merritt to take a look at a house for sale. A young couple had put an offer on the property and hired him to check it out. It took Witzke about five hours to go through the house. He arrived a couple of hours earlier than scheduled, and he used that time to talk to the neighbours. To read more, click here.

A 78-year old man died in Melrose, MA in October. The deck was installed about six feet off the ground and collapsed on top of the man while he was trying to repair it. Blow up the photo in the attached link. You'll see only spikes protruding from the ledger and you'll see where the deck ledger wasn't flashed when it was attached to the house and you'll see rot where water had been getting behind the vinyl siding and then drained behind the ledger. http://jlc-media.com/portal/wts/cemcBDa ... AMaAFkAs6c ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Belt and suspenders. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

No, Watts 210 type valves have been around for a long time; it's just that we home inspectors don't talk about them a whole lot. They're typically used where it's impossible to configure a TPR properly to drain via gravity. If lazy installers would take the time to go get one and install it along with a water heater when they discover that they can't properly configure the TPR drainage, instead of ignoring the rules or coming up with some other jerry-rigged arrangement, we'd see more of them. The TPRV isn't "on" the gas line. The Watts is installed instead of the TPRV and works strictly by temperature. It has an immersion probe similar to a TPRV and at 210?F it shuts off the gas to the water heater. The white thingie in the center is the manual reset button. I agree with Jim, I've never seen any requirement for hard piping. Around here they'd probably plumb it with the bendable stuff as shown because it would be more seismic friendly. That is a pretty sloppy looking install though. To the OP, I've edited your post and rotated the picture so that we no longer have to lie on our desktops to view it. Next time, if you open that picture on your own computer first you can rotate it so that it displays upright and then save it that way before you post it. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

This was discussed in a June article in JLC that was written by Glen Mathewson. If the walking surface of the deck is 30 inches or more above grade measured horizontally from the edge of the deck, then the guard must be a minimum of 36-inches above the surface of the seat of the bench. In the article he specifically pointed out the fact that if the walking surface were only 29" inches above grade one would not be required to install a guard behind/above the bench at all; and he mentioned how that seems to disregard common sense. In the case of the planter, I think to be in strict compliance the top edge of the planter would have to count similar to the surface of a bench seat; so the top of that guardrail would need to be a total of 52-inches above the walking surface of the deck. Click here to go to the article. (If you're not a JLC Online subscriber you might not be able to view this one.) ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Yeah, You posted it and I moved it to a more appropriate topic area. Go to the home inspector qualifications and professional practices topic. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Rick, I got a chuckle out of that. Were you at any of the public hearings for the sunrise review or the public input meetings for the committees working on the bills? If so, do you remember how many bug-centric inspectors stepped up to the tables and insisted that if we were going to be licensed they felt we should remain under WSDA? I don't think there's any question that if the legislators had seen fit to do the licensing with WSDA running it that we'd have had a full-blown cluster on our hands. So far, knock wood, it still seems to be moving along pretty smoothly and none of the prophesies of the arm wavers have come true. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Bump, Bump, Bump, Another one bites the dust. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Apparently, what's pushing the boom is new fracking technology that allows them to get oil from shale and to drill horizontally. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Jeez, I just caught up on my back issues of the Seattle Times and there was an article in there about the oil boom going on in North Dakota and how they've got, literally, thousands of jobs they can't fill up there just in the local townships around the boom in work that has nothing to do with working the oil fields. I gotta tell ya, if the KK wasn't so entrenched here I'd probably be making tracks for ND right now to get a piece of some of the good paying action that's going on over there. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I'm pretty sure that I've inspected that house a few times. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi Brandon, Sorry to see you go. You'll always be a member of the TIJ family, so, please, stop by and keep us up-to-date on how you're doing. Best to you and to your family. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I was going to suggest using hardener but Kurt beat me to it. I've used the Abatron stuff and thought it was pretty good. Have never tried the Smith and Company stuff. Not sure what would be the net effect of drilling a bunch of little holes in that wood in order to infuse hardener into it. Then you'd have to fill 'em, file 'em, sand 'em, paint 'em... http://www.abatron.com ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

The only way you could have known that the convectors were corroded is by removing the covers from each unit so that you could see all of them. I don't know of anyone that's going to do that; they are often stuck in place with paint or there's so much hair and stuff behind them that if you take the covers off you'll be vacuuming all night. Remind them that you told them before the inspection that they should not expect you to have X-ray vision. (You did tell them that didn't you?). ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Not disagreeing, just sayin'. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was lawyers who crafted those couple of confusing paragraphs just to make it all that harder for someone to come back on Certainteed. The IKO shingle instructions state unequivocally that one must use a drip edge flashing. I used to write the covers up when I knew they were IKO shingles and there wasn't any drip edging. One day I'm rolling down the interstate and I got a call from an engineer at IKO; he wanted to tell me that I shouldn't have been writing up roofs with their shingles for not having a drip edge because they didn't actually require drip edging. I asked him something like, "Well, if they aren't required than why are your instructions written in the imperative and leave no doubt in the mind of the reader that a drip edge flashing must be used?" He said that he'd written that and that he could have phrased it better. I said he should re-write the instructions and he responded that their lawyers wanted them exactly the way they are. I probably should have continued to write them up as missing required components; if I had, the bitching from builders might have gotten them to re-write them. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Yeah, Kibbel would be the guy to get. Have him drive down and pay the distance surcharge if there is one. If it will take more than a day to inspect, put him up in a local motel till the job is done. Don't expect to pay Yugo rates 'cuz you'll be hiring the Lexus. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

No, it will depend on the type of setup and lots of variables like area of the room, tube spacing, exposed slab perimeter, perimeter insulation thickness, indoor design temp, maximum effective surface temperature, heating intensity, amount of banded area, horizontal insulation area, perimeter insulation length, unheated floor area, heated floor area, air changes per hour, cubic feet per minute, number of stories, types of floor coverings, etc.. I don't actually know all this stuff, I'm reading it off of one of the assumption reports used by Watts Radiant to provide estimates for one of their systems. As Marc said, it's re-heating already heated water and since the heated floor water remains warm for a long time once it's heated up there can be more efficiency than if it's simply heating cold water that comes into the tank and is drawn off. If it were being used simply to heat the domestic hot water, it wouldn't be that difficult to determine what's going to work for the given family size; however, I don't think anyone here who's never been a hydronic floor heating system designer/engineer could every determine exactly what's required of such a system. You could always assume that the water heater that's installed is the one that was designed for the system and that it's been working fine and recommend that they replace it with one of the same size and BTU rating, but I think that could be risky unless you can know for certain that the homeowner has never tampered with the original design. If a customer were to ask me that question, I'd simply tell him to contact one of the local radiant heating firms and ask for their help. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike