Just Another Thing to Worry About....

If you haven't heard about Chinese drywall, here's a link that will bring you up to date:

http://www.workingre.com/workingre/chinese-drywall-understanding-and-uncovering.html

Any home built or renovated since 2001 is potentially harboring this stuff.  Much of it was imported under American brands and mixed in with domestic drywall.  Not all Chinese drywall is a problem, to further complicate the picture.  If you have enough of the bad stuff, it will wreak havoc with your electrical system and components, with the potential to cause arcing which could cause an electrical fire.  Here's another web site that has more information about the problem:

http://www.chinesedrywall.com/

Hire an expert, sometimes it doesn't pay to do it yourself.

Over the last few months, I've been taking some training classes in various subjects related to building energy efficiency.  The plan is to expand my home inspection business into services such as "green" home inspections and performing energy surveys/audits.  The goal is to provide home buyers or owners with enough information to get the most bang for their buck when trying to reduce their energy usage and make their homes more energy efficient. 

To this end, I have invested significantly in equipment and diagnostic tools such as a blower door, a combustion analyzer, various moisture meters, and most importantly, an infrared camera. So one evening, a few weeks ago, I was trying out my new camera around the house.  But first, let me tell you a little bit about my house.  It was built around 1890, give or take a few years and is a large Georgian style home with an attached wing and barn.  It's got about 3500 square feet of living space and costs a fortune to heat every winter.  We knew it was a fixer-upper when we bought it 10 years ago but basically it's turned into the money pit.  So far, we've put on a new roof, renovated the first floor bath, installed a second floor bath, renovated the kitchen, re-wired the entire home, installed insulated windows, converted the boiler from steam heat to forced hot water, removed all the steam radiators and replaced them with baseboard radiators. 

We've also had the attic rafters on the main part of the house insulated with dense pack cellulose insulation and three years ago, I undertook the project of injecting foam insulation into most of the second floor walls, where previously, there had been no insulation.  This entailed drilling holes in the plaster walls at three feet high, six feet high and at the very top of the wall, between each stud.  That's a lot of holes!  Anyway, the procedure is to time how long it takes to fill each hole so that the foam doesn't overexpand and shoot out the hole like Mount Versuvius erupting!  So after a few gushers across the room, we were able to reliably time the injections and filled all the vacant stud bays on the second floor.

So that brings us back to my infrared camera.  Here is a picture of one of the walls that I filled with foam:


Most of my second floor walls that I injected with foam look very similar. The infrared camera doesn't see through the wall, although it can appear that way. What it does see is the temperature of the surfaces of the wall. Variations in temperature show up as different color shades. In this picture, the red areas are relative warm and the green areas are cooler. And the reason they're cooler is that there is not any insulation behind those sections of the wall!

What I failed to account for is that with balloon construction (I knew we had that), the stud bays are open from the top of the second floor, all the way down to the bottom of the first floor (I knew that, too) and the insulation in some of the first floor walls had been compressed by the foam falling from above (I didn't anticipate that). So some of my initial foam insertion timings were totally bogus, resulting in some walls not getting enough insulation. Lesson learned: as noted in my title, sometimes it pays to hire an expert that may have run into a similar situation before.

The good news is that with the infrared camera, I now have the ability to go back and pinpoint those areas where I need to inject more insulation (and make more holes).

Back in the saddle...

Now that I'm back to full-time status, I thought I'd resume my blog after a few years of neglect. Here's some home inspection humor, courtesy of Bill Flanders (via Reader's Digest?), our Maine Coalition of Home Inspection Professionals (MeCHIPs) secretary:

Phone Repair

A Kansas farm wife called the local phone company to report her telephone failed to ring when her friends called - and that on the few occasions, when it did ring, her dog always moaned right before the phone rang.

The telephone repairman proceeded to the scene, curious to see this psychic dog or senile lady. He climbed a telephone pole, hooked in his test set, and dialed the subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring right away, but then the dog moaned and the telephone began to ring.

Climbing down from the pole, the telephone repairman found:

1. The dog was tied to the telephone system's ground wire with a steel chain and collar.
2. The wire connection to the ground rod was loose.
3. The dog was receiving 90 volts of signaling current when the number was called.
4. After a couple of jolts, the dog would start moaning and then urinate.
5. The wet ground would complete the circuit, thus causing the phone to ring.

Which demonstrates that some problems CAN be fixed by pissing and moaning.

Thought you'd like to know!

Is it skill or is it luck?

Sometimes when you find certain defects during the course of a home inspection, you don't know whether to attribute it to skill or luck. My guess is it's a combination of the two.

Not too long ago, I inspected a home and happened to notice that the laminated flooring near the front door had become slightly delaminated. Not a big deal, right? However, something made me get down on my hands and knees and take a closer look. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the bottom of the door trim was spongy and wet. And when I opened the adjacent closet door, I smelled a musty odor in the closet. This led me down to the basement and after pulling down the insulation stuffed between the floor joists, I discovered a large, wet area under the door and closet and possibly some mold.

Now I don't know whether this was due to a one-time spill or a leaky door frame (probably the latter) but it definitely got the buyer's attention.

A Day In The Life (Of A Home Inspector)

Most of the home inspections that I perform for my clients go smoothly and are incident-free. My clients usually attend the inspection, and for about three hours, they get an opportunity to become very well-acquainted with the property that they want to purchase.

Occasionally, things don't always go smoothly. And almost every time they don't, it's because the homeowner is present during the inspection. Usually, this is a recipe for disaster, especially if the homeowner is not well-acquainted with the home inspection process.

"Why are you inspecting the (insert one of the following: attic, plumbing, furnace, wiring, foundation), are you a licensed (insert one of the following: carpenter, plumber, HVAC technician, electrician, structural engineer) ?"

Essentially, what they are really saying is "Who are you to come into my home and pass judgement on it? My house is perfect, there's nothing wrong with it, and this home inspection is a waste of time."

Of course, taking the time to explain the role of a home inspector to the homeowner is the real waste of time, because all the homeowner is trying to do is reduce your credibility with your clients. For my client's benefit, I will take the time to explain how costly it would be to hire a specialist to inspect for each area of their expertise as opposed to a general practitioner (like myself) who has been trained to spot problems in a wide range of areas.

Typically, the rest of the inspection is spent in an adversarial joust with the homeowner as they try to defend the conditions that may be found:

• "That foundation crack only leaks in the spring."
• "That stain on the ceiling was from the one time that an ice dam formed on the roof."
• "There's nothing wrong with the attic ventilation." (same house with the ice dam above)
• "The chimney flashing only leaks when the wind blows from the north at 20 mph or more."
• "Nobody ever told us we needed a railing on those stairs."
• "Polarity, shlamarity, that outlet has always worked just fine."
• "We've been using the garbage disposal with our septic system for 20 years."
• "The leach field is fine, we just had a new one put in 5 years ago." (same house with garbage disposal above)
• And so on.....

For home buyers, my advice is to ask your real estate agent to contact the seller's agent and request that the homeowner not be present during the inspection. This will give you the time to look around freely, ask any questions of the inspector and not feel inhibited by the presence of the homeowner.

For homeowners, my advice is to vacate the premises during a home inspection. What you don't know won't upset you, and you'll have ample opportunity to challenge any findings, if they are even brought to your attention. At worst, you might find out about some conditions of which you weren't even aware.

What Killed Dana Reeve?

Although it seems like the purpose of this blog is to promote radon testing based upon my previous entries, I can assure you that it is not. However, I am passionate about radon and how uninformed the general public is about it's potential to cause cancer. As most of you know, Dana Reeve, the recent widow of film actor Christopher Reed, died this past week from lung cancer. The news stories that I saw stated that she and her husband were not smokers. However, most of these accounts said that it was a mystery as to how someone could get lung cancer without having smoked or at least being subjected to second hand smoke.

Well, it's not a mystery to me nor should it be to you! Radon is the leading cause of lung cancer in people that don't smoke! The U.S. Surgeon General has said it and the EPA has said it. They just do a lousy job of letting everyone know. More than 20,000 deaths in the U.S. each year are attributed to radon. Although we'll never be sure of the exact cause of the lung cancer that killed Dana Reeve, radon is certainly the most likely candidate. Get your home tested for radon. What you don't know can kill you.

www.epa.gov/radon/healthrisks.html

Dear This Old House

Dear TOH,

Having just received the December issue of TOH magazine, I want to applaud you for your "How It Works" article on carbon monoxide alarms. Most importantly, with this article you've reminded your readers of the danger posed by an invisible, odorless gas that can kill, while providing them with some interesting facts about CO alarms. However, one fact really struck me. In the article, it states that more than 200 deaths occur in the U.S. each year from CO poisoning. As important as this number is, it pales in comparison to the number of deaths caused by another invisible, odorless gas in all of our homes. Radon gas.

The EPA estimates that 21,000 lung cancer deaths in the U.S. each year are caused by elevated levels of radon gas in some of our homes. That number exceeds the combined number of annual deaths caused in homes by falls, electrocution, fires or CO poisoning, yet most homes have code mandated safety features like railings, GFCI outlets and smoke or fire alarms (only 1/3 have CO alarms as per your informative article). In the state of Maine, where I live, one out of every two homes has a radon gas level higher than the EPA recommended mitigation level!

There's a huge disconnect here and our government hasn't done a great job in getting these important words out: Get Tested! It's the only way to find out whether a home has high radon levels. The good news is that if a home has elevated radon levels, it usually can be mitigated to acceptable levels at a reasonable cost.

You folks have an opportunity to perform a great public service by making your readers and viewers more aware of radon gas and how they can get it reduced to acceptable levels, both in new home construction and in existing homes. Please check it out.

Here are some links that I have found useful when explaining radon gas to my home inspection clients:

www.epa.gov/radon
http://www.aarst.org/radon_info.shtml
http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/pressreleases/sg01132005.html
http://www.epa.gov/iaq/radon/images/rooftops_psa.mpeg (public service announcement)


Thanks for listening and keep up the great work!

Phil Petroska
Harrison, Maine