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Hi All, Well, I've gotta say, Fluke's Introduction to Thermography for Building Science was easily the best $36.86 I've every spent and Michael Stuart from Fluke is probably one of the best trainers I've listened to in a very long time. Unlike most of the IR stuff that I've attended thus far in my quest to learn as much as I can about IR before I finally commit to purchasing a thermal imaging device, this seminar was chock full of really useful information, stuff like how to manipulate the palette or the range and span of the device's wavelength in order to capture issues more clearly, or ways to prep a house for inspections when the weather and temperatures aren't cooperating. One of the things that I liked the most about it is that it's a very informal and hands on course and those attending actually got to use the equipment; not just look at it as it sat on a desk and then sit there staring at a powerpoint presentation all day long. Some of those attending brought their own imagers; but the boys from Fluke came loaded for bear and handed out about a dozen thermal imagers for students to share and play with. There were all of the Fluke models plus a few FLIR models as well as a Testo model. Stuart works for Fluke but he's so familiar with the imagers of Fluke's competitors that he was able to show those who using those models for the class how to get the most out of them. The seminar went from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. When one accounts for the four restroom breaks plus lunch, it was actually about 6 hours and 45 minutes long. That's OK, the breaks gave folks an opportunity to play with the equipment some more and a very hearty box lunch was included with the deal, so everyone could stay on venue and continue to pick Stuart's brain. This guy is a superlative trainer and really knows how to explain difficult technical concepts in terms that even old farts and non-techno-geeks like me can understand. Late in the afternoon, Stuart turned the class loose with the imagers and directed us to a room nearby where a number of experiments had been set up for us to discover. I was able to freely move around the room and check out the various features and performance of every imager there. By the end of the day, I'd settled on the imager that I intend to purchase and had a plan for how to go about incorporating IR into my business - all at a cost of only $4.60 an hour. At the end of the day, one long-time inspector that I know remarked to me, "I un-learned two very incorrect things that I'd thought I'd previously learned about infrared. That knowledge alone was worth every bit of the fee." The seminar was sponsored by Home Performance Washington; which is an association of Washington State businesses offering whole house energy efficiency, comfort, and indoor air quality solutions. For those of you from other states that are reading this and would like to attend one of these seminars, visit Fluke's training seminar page to see whether there are any future seminars scheduled near you; if there isn't, there's nothing stopping you from getting something started. Call 1-800-760-4523 and ask for a seminar coordinator. Click to Enlarge 44.09 KB ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Yeah, We had them in two of the houses I lived in before I was 7 years old. I used to drop my crayons and plastic soldiers through the grate, watch them melt and then get chewed out by my mother or father for stinking up the place. I only stepped on that grate once or twice before I learned to give it a wide berth when walking through a room without my shoes on. The landlord is no more negligent for having that than if he or she had equipped the home with electric baseboard heaters that got so hot someone burned themselves when touching them; or you are for using incandescent light bulbs in lamps where a kid can reach them and burn themselves on the bulb. Accidents are part of growing up and there's a reason they are called accidents and not neglidents. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, Yeah, ours does most of that but ours doesn't have any of the fence cutting, wire twisting or bottle opening features. The Chinese have a folding entrenching tool made for their paratroops which is an almost direct copy of our's but it's made out of heavier metal. Our's has been kept intentionally lighter and is made out of lighter metals to make it lighter to carry. I like some of their military innovations and don't like others. I wouldn't mind having one of these. Looks like a pretty good workhorse. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi All, I'm very pleased to announce that Scott Wood has agreed to take on the task of our new Infrared Thermography Forum moderator. Please join me in welcoming Scott to the TIJ family. Scott is President of Scott Wood Associates, LLC and is an expert in building science thermography. His firm does consulting, investigations and testing using infrared thermography as an investigative tool for commercial and residential buildings. He performs building investigations and evaluations from peer review of architectural planning designs to final building testing, evaluation and commissioning and has been the primary instructor/consultant for the Building Science Institute (BSI), developing the training curriculum and instructing the building science thermography courses BSI provides nationally since 2003. Scott also instructs level I thermography classes for FLIR, is the Technical Director for United Infrared’s Moisture FindIR module and has served as Director of building sciences for the International Association of Certified Thermographers (IACT) since its formation in 2007. Much of Scott's time is also spent on technology investigation and transfer for infrared thermography’s use in building science. Scott has performed hundreds of infrared thermography site evaluations as well as authored numerous papers, provided presentations, clinics and workshops regarding infrared thermography’s use in buildings as well as building science. As you can see, this guy isn't a poser. I'm looking forward to his helping to make TIJ'ers with infrared imagers the best informed in the business. If anyone would like to contact Scott directly regarding infrared issues, you can do so at: Scott Wood Associates, LLC www.buildingsciencethermography.com Mobile: 253-509-3742 ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi All, It never hurts to read as much as you can about a given subject. Fluke Corporation has established their own thermal imaging blog. Check it out and when your done, if you complete their survey, you can enter to win a fluke laser distance meter. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

CompUsa is having some tablet sales. http://www.compusa.com/applications/Sea ... =A685-0078

I talk to MSN engineers on an almost daily basis. The "Cloud" is not for residential applications or for guys like us with tiny little businesses; it's for larger commercial applications. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Feel lucky? Amprobe is running a sweepstakes and ten lucky folks will win one of their new Model Insp-3 digital electrical systems testers. Will you be one? For a larger view of the tester, click the image. To enter, click here.

So, you're good then; you've got the chart and figured it out? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, I would have sworn that Douglas Hansen has pointed out many times that the 'no more than one grounded conductor per terminal' rule has been around since the 1940's. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

There's a Mexican drug cartel guy looking all over for that shipment. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

That's the same info published in our chart located here. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

It's easy to explain, You drive the car into the garage and the snow, or the Seattle sunshine, falls onto the floor, evaporates and then condenses on the nearest cold surface. Around here, the condensation ruins wood overhead doors that haven't been primed or painted on all sides and edges as specified by manufacturers. When it's cold enough out, which is not very often, it freezes on the inside of the overhead doors just like it's doing there. We don't use vapor barriers here; but, occasionally some horse's ass with teeth will incorporate one into a building envelope because he hasn't done his research. In any garage where there isn't any sort of vapor barrier on the other side of the drywall, the vapor harmlessly diffuses into the attic where attic ventilation removes it. In an attic with a vapor barrier against the back of the drywall, that same vapor will go only as far as it can before it hits that plastic and the freezing cold temperature on the other side of the plastic causes the vapor to freeze. Over time, it builds up. I'm betting you have a nice tightly gasketed garage door to prevent snow blowing through and drifting into the garage, no? I agree with what others have said; if they are warming up the vehicle in the garage, even with the door open, a lot of water vapor ends up in the garage. When I was a teenager, it was my job on cold mornings in upstate New York to go out in the garage and breezeway and start up each of my parents' cars and turn on the heaters. Our "garage" was more of a carport; it was a garage in every sense of the word but Dad never installed an overhead door or a door between the garage and the breezeway, preferring instead to leave it open. It made for an interesting time getting in and out of cars after an overnight storm would dump a couple of feet of snow on the ground. When I'd warm up those cars, the steam from the exhaust would fill the garage and breezeway and condense all over everything nearby, walls, ceiling, workbench, tools, etc. I wonder if they put the vapor barrier in the walls and ceiling of the garage but left it out of the wall between the house and the unheated garage? The vapor barrier is only needed around the inhabited portion of the building envelope and should not have been installed in the garage. Imagine if you kept one room in the house in your climate that was never heated; vapor diffusion would push moisture-laden interior air from the warmer parts of the house into that unheated room, and then, as that moisture migrated into the cold exterior wall of that room, it would condense and start causing massive mold to grow behind the drywall. All that simply because you failed to keep that room at a reasonable temperature. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Is that coloring in the brick or is that a layer of frost on the face of the brick? A house that old won't have much for insulation in the walls and moisture migrating out of the house is liable to condense on the backside of that brickwork and saturate it, no? Is that the end with the prevailing winds and sunlight or is the other end? Does it have a basement or crawlspace under that end along with balloon framing? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Jeez Ezra, You messed up. He was there to deliver mail to you and you completely missed it. You probably could have been on the train to Hogwarts by now. It's a screech owl. There was one of those little guys that used to roost in the ivy covering the outside wall of the elementary school in my home town when I was a kid. Every year, I'd screw up the courage just once to climb the vine, get within about a foot and a half of the little guy, reach out and try to snatch him. Every time, just as I reached out, he'd suddenly erupt off his roost and fly off, scaring the crap out of me and damned near causing me to lose my grip on the vine and fall. After about five years and five failed attempts, I stopped trying. Its a good thing too; if I'd caught it, it probably would have taken one of my fingers off. I imagine its kids probably roost there now. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

See, I keep telling you guys that TIJ is so far out in front of everyone else and nobody except Mike Lamb believed me. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Speaking of Asus, I saw someplace the other day - I think it was ZDnet.com - that Asus has just come out with a tablet computer. You can purchase a google operating system version or a Windows version.. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

That's one of the most specious comments I've ever seen posted on this site. What other interesting "facts" have you made up for us? ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

A waiver? A waiver for what? What's the client going to do; complain that, "I didn't know that my 20 year old disposal was recalled because it wasn't on the site that O'Handley told me about," when recalls of appliances aren't even covered under SOPs anyway? If you miss a recall, so what? There is no requirement anywhere that says you have to know about every recall or inform a client about every recall; or even for anyone to look up recalled appliances; so, if you point out to a client that he or she can check those appliances to see if they've been recalled all you are doing is giving the client additional information that he or she can use. Just because it isn't directing the client to your little enterprise doesn't mean an inspector is irresponsible. by your reasoning, I'd need a waiver if I gave the client the url to the city's permits website and someone hadn't bothered to get every single permit added to the information about the house. Gosh, I wonder if I need a waiver when someone asks me where to find such-and-such and I refer him or her to google? Jeez, just when I thought it was safe to walk down the street without running into a crazy, one comes here. Get real! ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I dunno, I just googled Richmond parcel viewer and was able to find all sorts of information about addresses in Richmond, including permits that had been issued. I'm not from there and it took me all of 50 seconds to find something. If I did 20 jobs a month in the Richmond area it might take 30 minutes of my time all-told to find that info on my own for all 20 homes. To me, it hardly seems worth the fee. Maybe a buyer or seller, who doesn't deal with this stuff everyday, might find the service useful; but we look for this stuff all the time and we get to be pretty good at it. I really don't see the point. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

-also, be careful of the floor-the manufactured home industry uses a loose-lay installation and it's easy to roll/pinch the vinyl. You've also got to be careful of the floor finish. When I was a rookie at this gig back in 1996 I rolled a fridge out from the wall over a hardwood floor. When I pushed the fridge back in, the hard nylon casters had left two 1-inch wide impressions in the surface of the floor showing where I'd rolled out the fridge. The builder was justifiably upset and I rightfully ended up paying for the repair. Bend over the counter and look with your flashlight. There is no requirement for you to move large heavy objects and risk damaging the owner's floor. If you don't see it because there is a refigerator in the way, and moving the fridge would have damaged the surface, nobody is going to fault you for it except the dildo with teeth mold guy that shows up later and says, like Mike Holmes does when he gets to do an invasive inspection, "I can't believe the inspector didn't find this!" I don't know about other states, but if Jerry had not moved that fridge for fear of damaging the floor, and hadn't been able to see that with the fridge in place, our board would never consider him to be at fault. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

He's right, warmed air rises; however, heat doesn't "rise" - it radiates evenly in all directions regardless of what the air does. Warm air rises because molecules in colder air aren't as buoyant and they settle, displacing warmer-thinner air upward. If you warm the inside of a home, the heat wants to radiate outward evenly in all directions. That's one of the reasons that radiant heat in ceilings works and it's that knowledge that warm air rises that gives most folks the misbegotten idea that ceiling heat can't possibly work because it's, well, on the ceiling. Heat moves from warmer to cooler. If you don't provide some insulation to temper the differences in temperature between the crawlspace and the interior, heat is going to migrate toward the cooler crawlspace and ultimately costs more in energy dollars. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I agree, That's not what it's designed for and they are now using both the inside and outside channels of that flue for exhaust gases. They think it's the equivalent of a double-walled B vent; but a direct vent uses the outside ring for cool intake air and the exhaust flows out through the center flue. That keeps the heat down around the pipe. Now that outer ring is getting hot. I think you should take a photo. Send one copy to State, the other to Rheem and the other to the AHJ and see what kind of reaction you get. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

Hi, Apparently 240 AFCI's are out there. Page I-15 of the Eaton Cutler-Hammer catalog has a whole selection for residential use. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike

I'm thinking it's probably two AFCI's paired together with a tie bar and wired like a MWBC. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike