allseason

Marc, Not sure, it is something I have heard through my travels.

Thanks Jim.

Is this considered a legitimate handle tie? Click to Enlarge 92.61 KB

Looks like a clean out.

From what I hear you cannot use PVC drain waste and vent in NYC, all metal and lots of cast iron. Has to do with toxins when it burns. Gotta look out for those 7 to 8 million people.

How can anyone who is so intimately involved with the sale and purchase of a product have so little knowledge of it? That is the problem. If you were on a car lot with a salesman and he asked you what that thing was, and you had to tell him it is the door handle, would you buy anything from him? F-------d up brother. F-----ng stupid.

I have also seen instances where they tunnel through foam board insulation on foundations to get to the food source. They were here before us and will be here after.

I'm a little late on this one. I tell my clients that if they are planning on renovating a kitchen they should get an electrician involved from the onset, so that the don't discover that after allready going over budget they now need a service upgrade when he shows up to wire the place.

I do the same, also with the traps and the stopper rod entry into the tailpiece.

Do not operate. On a couple of occassions I have to check to see if it is on or off if there is no water to the fixture. If it doesn't move with ease I let go. Now you can get ball valves that have the same ovate handles as the old valves and they work great and look old school.

I have one experience with mud jacking, my brother had a patio that settled near the foundation, builder mud jacked, patio sank again. That was Chicago area with apparently loose soil. How about remove, install controlled fill, gravel and then the concrete. Put some pitch on it to compensate.

No, heat only. For some reason the TPR went off, I could see the evidence on the floor. I do not know if the steamy basement was a result of the hot water coming from the valve, I only have the word of the owner as to what went on at 5 AM. She said the smoke alarms were going off and the basement was full of steam, which I associate with high moisture in the air. The owner says "steam" which may have just been tons of moisture in the air, like a fog. When I got there the boiler was off and I had no intention of turning it on and recommended a plumber.

As I had said, I tested the heat 7 days ago by upping the thermostat, look for flame, heat to baseboards, then returned the tstat to 50. Today I show up and the tstat is at 50, same as it was a week ago, but at 5 am it blows off as per the owner. I suspect something has gone wrong between then and now, 7 year old Utica Boiler.

I did an inspection one week ago. Hydronic boiler with baseboards for heat. Seperate a/c with independent thermostat. This morning my cell phone rings at 5:45 AM. It's the homeowner freaking out that her basement is full of steam and her smoke alarms are going off and I never turned off the heat and there is water all over the floor and she can't understand what is happening, OMG OMG OMG! She wanted me to come over to see what the problem was, so I obliged and was on the property at 7 AM. Turns out the TPR valve had discharged. She had enough common sense to turn of the service/emergency switch to shut the boiler down. I know that I had returned the thermostat to 50 when I was done with the boiler at the original inspection as I only had it running for a short time, the day of the inspection it was 90 plus degrees. When I got to the house this morning the thermostat was at 50. What can cause that boiler to discharge at rest? Bad TPRV,bad expansion tank? She's going to get a plumber to investigate after I told her I could not fix it (she asked me if I would).

Perlite.

Same here.

I had a house today, built around 1890. 80% basement, 20% crawlspace. Not common but does exist in NJ area.

No

Okay.

I will be at a newly renovated house doing a walk through with the buyer tomorrow. This is from a correspondence from a concerned party- "....had asked that the builder/seller not use Behr interior paint, which carries a warning on the paint cans as follows: "This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm." Does anyone have any information or heard anything about this? Is this a typical label regarding VOC's? Young children will be living in the house.

That radiator is definately cool. Where's Mr. Kibbel on this one?

Holy s--t, I didn't know Kentucky had a "hood". The other day three people in Newark NJ were shot within a 37 minute time period. These are hard times. Ha! We all have "hoods". It's just a matter of the number of players in a given "hood" and the degree of "hoodness" in the players. Alas, it is not where you live but what your doing that counts.

As usual, you are right on point Kurt. As an outsider (former ASHI member-originally joined in 1981) I am still amazed at how the organization's leadership thinks any of this stuff really makes a difference to anyone outside of their small circle of ASHI members. Nobody has asked me about ASHI since licensing became a requirement in New Jersey. Likewise.

Holy s--t, I didn't know Kentucky had a "hood". The other day three people in Newark NJ were shot within a 37 minute time period. These are hard times.

You can install solar powered also, uses no electricity.