SonOfSwamp

I'm glad to know that there are useful successors to the BJC-80. Now, if only I can get my BJC-80 to die... WJ

FWIW, we used a Canon BJC-80 for years. It still works. It'll fit into a laptop bag, with the laptop. I never used the color ink cartridge; just B&W. (No photos in my reports.) I hooked it to the laptop via cable when I set the laptop on the kitchen table. Never a problem. I don't know if BJC-80s are still available. You might check eBay. Used ones would be cheap. Another option: Set up a useful printer in your truck; plug it into an AC Anywhere (which plugs into the cigarette lighter/power point), and you can print via bluetooth. AC Anywhere supplies 120V power; costs less than $50.00. I carried an AC Anywhere for years. Gave it to my daughter when she went to college. WJ

If anybody asked, I'd just say, "Well, when the light's lit up, that's when the switch is on. When the light's not lit up, that's when the switch is off. If the light won't light up no matter what you do with the switch, put in a new bulb." WJ

Truly. An HI, on his worst day, has got to have the confidence to say something like, "that thing's leaking. Get it fixed." Sheesh, if we can't get a commode fixed, what's the point of getting up in the morning? WJid="blue">

Exactly. Add up the cost of dismantlement, remantlement and disposament, and it's way better just to buy a new furnace. At the other end of the stick, I've got a 23-year-old Carrier air conditioner taking care of my downstairs. My HVAC guy is a little skittish about touching the condenser. "It might go 30 years," he says, "if we don't mess with it." WJ

Nothing wrong with just saying. Could be a little difference between Nashville and Lexington. Best I can recall, every time I told a customer to get a new furnace, they got a new furnace. I was fortunate enough to have few, if any, doubters. (And y'know, sometimes the RE agents adjust their fees to close a deal.) That said, my original editor at the Scene hired me to look at his octopus furnace years ago. I told him that it was 80 years old, nothing but a big can fulla fire, with no real safety equipment. He told me he'd junk it when the fire went out. WJ

I tell 'em in plain-English active voice human language. Something like: Problems include but aren't necessarily limited to: 1,2,3,4,5, etc. Sources include but aren't necessarily limited to: (Cite sources here.) Have a contractor make repairs as needed. No need to write an Oscar speech... WJ

Well, after lurking on this thread for a few days, I will freely admit: I would've just told the customers to get a new furnace. Wouldn't have gone looking for cracks, wouldn't have moved anything out of my way, wouldn't have monkeyed with it at all, other than removing the front cover and taking a (maybe) 30-second look inside. It's old. It's rusty. It's inefficient and obsolete. Just junk it. The sooner, the better. WJ

Maybe it's just me, but I lean in the direction of something like: "There's no insulation in the crawl space. If you want the benefits of insulation (energy savings, warmer floors, maybe lower noise levels), you'll need to have insulation installed." That's adequate warning. We don't have to command 'em to get insulation. We just need to tell them that they don't have any, and having some would probably be good. Depending on where a person lives -- and whether or not they have carpet on their floors -- insulation may not be worth the cost and/or hassle. Livin' in a 94-year-old house with mostly uninsulated walls and uninsulated floors, WJ PS: If you tell 'em to get floor (batt) insulation, be sure to tell 'em about the mice that'll move into it, the mouse pee that'll drip out of the insulation, and the toxic mouse poop that will accumulate in the crawl space...

Aye just crawled a round in weigh two manny 145 degree addicts. That'll make ewe dew jest about anything! (Homophones added to stay OT) When I sold my first Nashville bungalow, all I did was put an ad in the RE section of the daily paper, and wait for somebody to call. A guy came by the next day, offered me the asking price, and we closed the deal at a title company downtown. No RE agents, no commission nowhere, and nothing to it. When I sell the house I'm in, I'll probably do the very same thing. WJid="blue">

My favorite writing instructor on the topic of homophones: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucjk/20071230/c ... fH0zgE1vAI WJ

It's all about the content. Generic HI websites are painfully boring. Homemade HI websites full of bad grammar, goofball "get to know me" features, off-topic stuff, links to boring sites, and most especially those bootlicking "For Realtors" zones all work against the HI, IMHO. I advise folks to pass on any HI with a "For Realtors" zone. An HI website with interesting and original content is a wonderful thing. Such a website will create customers. The last few years of my HI run, just about all customers found my company via our website or my weekly column. Then came licensing. And I quit the HI biz. TN now has about as many sorry-ass HIs as Nashville has guitar pickers. WJ

Maybe it's just me, but I think you're going way out of your way to bless a fooked vent pipe. See Katen and Erby comments. Me, I'm not much for telling people to fix old rusty falling-down things later. On my weirdest day, I don't think I'd tell somebody to get a rusty vent pipe sanded and painted. Easier and cheaper, I think, just to fix the stuff that's wrong. The sooner the better, I say. I don't think I ever did a customer a favor by telling him to delay repairs on something that's wrong and worn out. To me, it comes down to who do I serve: the reeltor who just loves to put off repairs, or my customer, who doesn't benefit by waiting til something breaks. WJid="blue">

Jeez, a whole lotta InspectorSpeak for something so simple. Maybe plain English would work. Something like: "The vent pipe is leaning, it's rusty, and it's crudely installed. Get an HVAC technician to install a new pipe, and get a roofer to make sure that the new pipe is properly flashed (waterproofed)." How hard is that? Really? Took me less than a minute. WJ

Brother Les wrote, in part: This thread reminds me of those inspectors that get all excited about lead based paint, adequate lighting, etc - and miss the cracked flue pipe on the furnace. I say: Funny you should bring that up. Here's one reason I spend the minute-and-a-half pointing out the obvious: Some years back, I had one of those softy daddies who worried about every little thing at his house-to-be. He kept asking me about lead paint. I gave my spring-loaded comment: "Lead paint is like dog crap. If you don't eat it, it won't hurt you. Just don't let your kids eat the paint." To which he responded: "And how am I going to do that? (I am not making this up.) Now consider, at this point I had a decade-long history of being a local- and nationally-published know-it-all regarding housey stuff. It would be very hard for me to sit in a courtroom, with some lead-poisoned wobbly-headed child at the plaintiff's table, and have some lawyer ask me, "Mr. Jowers, haven't you written about the danger or lead paint since the 1980s? Didn't you specifically warn your readers about brain damage caused by lead paint?" Of course, the lawyer would already know that the answer was, "yes." Now, consider that any old HI -- not necessarly a published one -- could find himself in a similar situation. "Mr. HI, do you now, or did you ever, have any knowledge of the dangers of (fill in the blank)?" And that's where the HI would ignore the direct question and start talking about his SOP, and how he's not required to report this or that, and how all the HIs at his chapter meetings agree with him, yadda yadda. Meanwhile, the judge and jury are focused on the wobbly-headed child who could have been saved by a 20-word sentence. Like I've said before, best I can tell, judges and juries don't give a damn about SOPs and what HIs' peers think. They just want to know if somebody got screwed. If somebody did, and somebody got permanently damaged, the screwor is going to pay, big-time. WJ PS: An anecdote: Just yesterday, a nice fellow who looked to be in his 60s joined my table over at the football stadium. He asked me what I did, and I told him. Then he told me how he went to college to be an engineer, and a prof told him something like, "You'll never succeed until you master the English language. Every successful person has to master the English language." I'd never really considered that point of view, but I couldn't think of one good argument against it. Anyhow, 40 years or so later, the nice woulda-been engineer says he's thinking about going back to college and taking some English classes. If he does, I don't think they'll let him get away with pointing-and-clicking through his "comment library."

Maybe not, but we can protect ourselves and our livelihood with about 90 seconds' effort. WJid="blue">

I ran across a few of these. I just wrote into the report, something like: "There's a steep dropoff at the end of the driveway, and there's no barrier to keep cars, children or objects from falling off the end of the driveway. If this bothers you, you could have a barrier installed." I figure 30 seconds of writing, and maybe a minute of explaining, makes me look like a swell guy, and might just keep something bad from happening. That, as opposed to me looking like an ass when somebody or something falls off the driveway. (I don't care if my SOP says I don't have to talk about driveway dropoffs. I'll do the 90 seconds of extra work.) Of course, if I were using the usual HI software with just the usual canned boilerplate, I'd have nothing to say. Those swell software peddlers can't think of everything, y'know. WJ

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Where do they come from? The county courthouse. If the muni codes bubbas were actually trained and educated, and they spent adequate time onsite, and if they forced the errant builders to stop work and correct violations, then the new houses would be built to code, which is the legal baseline. Instead, we have codes bubbas who effectively have no-show jobs, and homebuyers pay what amounts to a tax on new construction. The people who buy those houses will pay out significant money to correct the problems the useless codes bubbas "blessed." Muni govt should either force the codes bubbas to do their jobs, or pull the plug on the codes department. As it is, taxpayers get nothing for the money spent on codes "enforcement." WJ

I'm thinking Ironyville. WJ

I'd say, "I think a home inspector wrote that. It has all the marks: May or may not be true, no source cited, no plausible explanation, no logical connection between what gable vents 'once were,' and their current 'proven' status of being 'ineffective.' And, there's the usual awkward staccato syntax." Could it have come from (cue Dana Carvey) home inspector school? WJ

Maybe it's just me, but this whole reporting thing is really easy. All we have to do is work at the level of a competent middle-school kid. Suggestions: 1. Ignore advice/opinions of people who are poor communicators. (That means most folks at HI meetings. You should be able to identify them when they start talking.) 3. Don't try to come up with a one-word-fits-much word. Like "satisfactory." Lawyers -- and expert witnesses -- love errant HIs who try to go Orwellian. Gives us lots to talk about over lunch. 4. Just tell people what they need to know -- in plain English and complete sentences. A person who can write and reason can't go wrong that way. We HIs get into these word messes because folks who have little if any communications skill keep trying to come up with ways to make things easier for themselves. That's what happens when states and/or HI orgs set the entry level for our "profession" at 30-year-old-high-school-diploma or barely-passed-the-NHIE level. We "graduate" people whose education comprises word-of-mouth guesses and folklore heard at an HI or RE agent gathering. Anyhow, we need to drop the goal of making reports easy for HIs easy to fill out. We need to reach for the goal of making things easy for our customers to understand. I'm amazed that I have to explain this. WJ

Well, if we're talking about Engle and Friedman, those two are first-rate. I'm talking about the shysters in the mold game, and the HIs who operate essentially off the info they get from other HIs and RE agents. WJ

IMHO, when it comes to spore whores and buckethead home inspectors, it's not so much what org they're in or the places they've been. It's the places they've deliberately avoided. Legitimate classrooms, for instance. And libraries. Mostly, I see handymen with word-of-mouth educations. Reminds me of people who sent in sketches from those old matchbook covers, hoping to start on a career in art. WJ

Everybody connected to this "story" was lazy and sloppy. But mostly, it was just ignorance on parade. Homeowners ought to have enough common sense to know that "mold inspectors" are just ripoff artists. "Mold inspectors" ought to be at least smart enough to avoid getting caught scamming. The "journalists" ought to be smart enough to anticipate pitfalls, trip-ups, etc. All of the people in the story deserve each other. Reminds me of the Hunter Thompson quote back during the Pulitzer trial. To paraphrase, it went something like this: He did it, she did it, they all did it. The cops ought to take the children away from these people, and sell them to the Arabs. WJ