S01E23 - Insider Tips: What Services You Really Need from a Home Inspector

Transcript

Welcome to Moose Tales. I'm Jon with Two Moose Home Inspections and I have some short home inspection topics I need to get off my chest. So, let's dive right in.

I want to start this off with a disclosure. I want to fully address the conflict of interest.

That is, I own a home inspection company. I want people to buy home inspections. And in addition to that, I want them to buy add on services, because if I can increase the price of each and every home inspection, then my home inspectors make more money and I make more money and now I'm just a capitalist and so on and so forth.

So, take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt, because, you know, why would you trust me? I mean, I have a conflict of interest, but if I were getting a home inspection, which I will be getting a home inspection as of this pod coming out there will be a home inspection that I'll have on a house that I'm currently in the process of purchasing.

But what is important to me, what are the essentials? What are things that I cannot do without whenever getting a home inspection, those would include just to get them all up front thermal cameras to make sure that we are actually looking at things that we otherwise wouldn't be able to see. Radon testing because radon is dangerous and sewer scope inspections.

Now, granted, if you are on your own, well, then you definitely need to do water testing 100%. Without a doubt. I mean, like that is, again, your family's safety. However, I'm saying broad strokes. What do we need for just about everybody in this country? Everybody in the world, whenever they're getting a home inspection? And that is a thermal camera.

Sewer scope and radon. So, let's talk about thermal cameras. With that thermal camera, it's basically for us, like a flashlight. It allows us to go into a room that otherwise we can't see what we are looking at. We can pull up that thermal camera and now we can see, okay, there's differences in temperature here, here and here. What this tells us based off of our experience and our training, is that we may have some crushed insulation.

So, we're getting some thermal bridging. We might have a damp spot right here because the evaporative effect of water is cooling down that surface. And so now I'm going to take my moisture meter, I'm going to check that, and I'll look at that. It turns out that it actually is a moisture leak. And so, we have to resolve a few issues.

It allows me to see things like are the registers actually producing heat? Did the drywall forget to cut out a section where air is supposed to be coming out for one of those register vents?

Do we have an issue with any of the hydronic in floor radiant heat? Yeah, possibly.

Maybe this zone isn't working or actually. It looks like there's a leak. That thermal camera allows us to see so many things that are kind of behind the wall and out of the normal field of view that we otherwise would not be able to see. And so, when doing a home inspection or having a home inspection performed for you as a home buyer, thermal cameras are a must.

So, with Two Moose Home Inspections, thermal cameras are always included in every single home inspection. So, we take these thermal images of just about everything. I mean, we have appliances, we take pictures of the HVAC system. We are going through looking at all the walls, ceiling floors, especially underneath bathrooms or underneath sinks and things that whenever we ran the system, there may not have been a leak, but it takes time.

And so, what's the very last thing that we do? Well, our final checklist. But other than our final checklist, what is the second to last thing that we do? We go through the thermal camera and we're checking those spots where we know plumbing is going, where we know there's a plumbing stack, and we know that there could be a leak in these areas.

And so, we're using a thermal camera to hopefully identify things that have had time to kind of present themselves that otherwise would it like. That's why we love doing home inspections after a rain, because, wow, you can see so much more with a thermal camera. So thermal, that's a must. But we include it on every one, so that's great.

The next most important thing for me is the sewer scope, because underneath the ground there can be tens of thousands of dollars of repairs that need to be made that you just can't see, and you would not know about.

And so, from the house all the way to the sewer main is your responsibility. And sometimes it's like no big deal. We have, you know, a big grassy patch. There’re no big trees, there's no nothing. It's just some grass. And you know what? I can rent an excavator for a couple hundred dollars, and I'll dig it up myself.

I'll do the repair. Not worried about it. Okay. Well, what if you have a townhome? Or what if you have a house where it goes through a paved parking lot? Or what if the issue is actually right there at the main and now you have to pay for permits to shut down the road. You have to do the excavation into the road, you have to pay to fix the concrete sidewalk and you have to pay to fix the asphalt road.

And all of that requires paying not only the people that are going to do those repairs, but you also have to pay the civil engineer to make sure that everything is put back exactly the way it is, pay for the permits to make sure everything's put back the way it is and pay for the road closures. That right there I had a neighbor that this happened to and that right there is going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

That's not good. That's not a good amount of money to be spending. And so, before you take ownership of the House, wouldn't it be nice to know that that's something that needs to be done? And then you can say, hey, seller, I didn't cause this problem. You didn't cause this problem. It was kind of just, you know, natural settling and movement and yada, yada, yada.

But it's not my problem. Until I take ownership of the house, I need you to repair that. And if the seller says, no, I'm not going to repair that, then you have the decision of Do I want to have an initial $30,000 - $40,000 repair? Right whenever I take ownership of the house that has to be paid for in cash that can't be rolled up into the price of the house, or do I want to just move to the next house?

Whenever I talk about deal breakers, I try not to talk about deal breakers, but the reality is for each individual, a deal breaker can be, well, the curtains are the wrong color. You can replace the curtains. Well, for some people they don't want, right? And for others it might be. Well, we have had a displaced pipe, and all this raw sewage has been going for the last 20 years into the soil surrounding here.

And I have kids that like to eat dirt. And so, I don't really want to have this house because I feel like it is a biological hazard, having the soil having been saturated for the last 20 years. And so, if you can as an individual say, here's my tolerance of risk, this is something I'm willing to take on, or this is not something I'm willing to take on.

That's the point of the home inspection. And so, whenever we talk about sewers, then, yeah, that that main drainage line is very, very important to me because it is so expensive. And without having a sewer scope performed, you would never know. And so, then the other dealbreaker for me sometimes would be foundation issue, some foundation issues totally fixable.

I mean, a friend and I for three days dug out around his house and completely took care of a water management issue that was going on with the age of the property. And what needed to be done was new French drains put in a whole bunch of new backfill and new waterproofing, and that was great. We basically dug out the entire foundation of their entire house.

It was fine. It was a good three days. However, not everybody is into doing that kind of stuff. And so sometimes foundations can be a deal breaker for some people. So then, why wouldn't I say, foundation inspection? Well, because every inspector is looking at the foundation. We're looking for cracks, we're looking for signs of water intrusion, we're looking for all of that.

So, these are the add-ons that I'm talking about, thermal camera, sewer scope. So, what's last? Last is going to be radon. You need to do radon testing. Now, I don't know what the deal is with everybody, but everybody's like, radon is not real. It's like, yes, it is. Look at the periodic table of elements. It is an element.

It exists, it is real. They're like, well, I don't know. And I'm like, well, have you ever put helium in a balloon? And it just floats away? Yeah, that that's an element. Have you ever breathed in oxygen which realistically you breathe in some oxygen, but you're actually breathing in a whole bunch of nitrogen and some argon and some other things.

But anyway, you're breathing in these elements, right? And they, they form, and they combine, and they do a whole bunch of other things. And now you've got H2O and hey, that's some water. Look at that. But what we're talking about is radon and radon. Israel Radon is a decay product from the uranium that is all around the entire earth.

It takes billions of and takes like one point something billion years for it to move to its next decay product. And then it keeps going down, down, down, down, down. Ultimately landing in lead, meaning that you're going to have led all over your house. But the real issue is the alpha particles being shot off as radon is trying to get down to that point.

Wow, this got a little bit deep. But radon is dangerous. It is second only to smoking tobacco for causing lung cancer. And so, if we are talking about radon, it's important to understand any house can be mitigated against radon. Basically, radon is neutrally buoyant. And so, it kind of just goes wherever the lowest amount of pressure is. And so, all that we need to do is just create an area of slightly lower pressure and say, Hey, radon, come over here with me.

We're just coaxing that radon and saying, let's go through this pipe and then go over here because we don't want it going into the house. Because whenever you turn on your vent in the bathroom, you turn on the vent over top of the kitchen. So, we're creating low pressure inside of the house and there's already low pressure inside the house.

But we're creating even lower pressure inside of the house and that radon is going to come into our house in very, very concentrated numbers. And we just don't want that to occur. So, we're going to coax that radon out of the house and then we're going to be a lot healthier because of it. Now, the EPA has a level we're not going to worry about, you know, units of measure.

They're going to say level four, that is our EPA action level. Whenever you get the number four, that's a problem. Now, we've had houses into the seventies. We've had houses as low as one, you know, and whenever we are below four, you really don't have to do anything. It'd be great if you are two or below, but whenever you're below four, no big deal.

Whenever you're above four, whether you're at 4.5 or you're all the way up to 100, the mitigation system is the exact same and normally they're the exact same size as well. We're just trying to coax that radon elsewhere because we want our lungs to be healthy. We want the indoor air quality from a radioactive standpoint to just not be radioactive.

There's a whole bunch about ERV’s and HRV’s which are energy recovery, ventilators to make sure that you have clean, fresh air inside the house. But do not be confused. ERV’s and HRV’s are not radon mitigation systems, and the EPA has very, very strict guidelines on what radon mitigation systems actually are.

So, you should get radon testing if you're going to have a home inspection performed because it's just one of those things that is super dangerous and going to hurt you. Now, again, as I said before, water testing very important as well. However,

Not everybody is on a well, a lot of people are on public water.

And so therefore, it's less necessary, not completely unnecessary, but just less necessary whenever you're on public water.

So thermal imaging, sewer scope and radon testing, those are the three must haves for every single home inspection.

Those are the essentials. And that's a part.