Nov 2020 In-Service Training

Hey this is Jon with Two Moose Home Inspections and welcome to the November 2020 in-service training before we dive into it I want to show you a few things that we updated so that way you have a little bit more information about our company.

If we first head over to Two Moose Home Inspections website what you can see is that we've updated a significant amount of things on the website we have new videos we have new text we have a whole bunch of just everything on the website so an easy place to start let's say if we were to click on the 360 degree photos , then that would bring us up right here to our 360 degree photo page and on this page , you would see that we have a video that's describing our 360 degree photos you'd see that we have 360 degree photos that you could click into move around do whatever you need to and that would be that so then moving on from this we also have if you go to the bottom you can see like here our sewer scope pages so if you go to the sewer scope page again you are brought up to a video you have a whole bunch of text a whole bunch of information if you want to schedule a sewer scope inspection if you just want to contact us we have all the information that you need to be able to basically make an informed decision about whether or not you want or need a super scope inspection this is probably a bit overkill but I just figured the more information we can give you guys the better off that you are so if we just go back again to the main home page if you'd like to we have our online scheduler in the upper left hand corner we also have the ability to schedule home inspection here or to view our sample report and , if you want to know what we do we have our thermal imaging 360 photos we have our sewer scope inspections radon testing drinking water testing well recovery testing and walking on roofs so if you want to know about any of that stuff that is probably the best resource for you to go to get that all taken care of so now moving on , we updated a whole bunch of our videos and so now we have 15 new videos that were just added that basically talk about our thermal cameras they talk about , booking us they talk about HOA's and what you have to pay water testing we even have an update on our COVID-19 response and procedures in addition to that we have a whole bunch of other videos such as our inspector tool belt series , our introduction to our newest member shay , then we also have our FAQ series and then just some older videos from , whenever we first started , working with our multimedia or social media I should say so anyway that's basically the overview of what we have going on there.

So without further ado let's go ahead and jump into , our training that we went over this November with our inspectors so for our training , we are here at our dashboard and , there's been a lot of updates to our policies and procedures and right now we're just going to hop into November 2020 in service training so as that loads up give me just one sec there main thing is as far as safety is concerned we got new climbing gear we also looked at some fall line protection resources online video stuff these are the procedures that we've been using but we just kind of made the process a little bit better documented so that way we have a much better documentation of the procedures that we're doing this goes into our whole osha safety plan which we'll be talking about , in the December in service training , just a lot of updates to make sure that our inspectors are extra safe not just for the pandemic but also just safer when walking on roofs safer when just interacting , with the house because the house can hurt us and can hurt us very badly and , we just want to make sure we're safe so then , the next thing is , we ordered new roof climbing safety equipment new video protection production equipment which was all used for our short report series which we just , which we just saw right here this is all our short report videos that we did and so anyway the video production lights and all that kind of stuff has really helped up the game a little bit which is which is very nice , so , shea got his snowshoes for the winter season , we were just at a house we almost had to pull out the snowshoes we aren't quite there yet , but we're getting closer , and then of course we updated our employee profit sharing program , that gives our employees bonuses based off of the profit that is made at the company , and then basically , we've just been exploring call center options I don't think I really do anybody any justice whenever I don't answer the phone , and so we're looking at services that will be able to help us because , both she and I have been so busy this past year we thought there would be nothing with covet 19 and then this past year has just blown up and so , with that being said , we've kind of started looking into call centers to see if maybe there's a way that we can alleviate some of the strain of needing to answer the phone while still giving a quality inspection to the people that are actually there present in the moment so we're working towards that so the next thing , we're just adding notion is the program that we use so I’m just having Shea myself add the notion , taking social media photos , Spectora just talking about what does and does not get published in the final report meaning , that whenever we're filling out the report it's possible that we could think that we're filling in information and then it doesn't get published unless we do a specific action and so we just kind of discussed that kind of stuff , so then we talked about like yeah so that example would be the sewer scope passing or failing , and then we talked about lead asbestos and mold there's a blog post that we wrote basically , we don't check for lead we don't check for asbestos and we don't check for mold what we do check for though is if something looks like lead we'll let you know but if we touch it and disturb it then it makes it dangerous same thing with asbestos if we touch it and disturb it makes it dangerous and so then with mold we aren't looking for mold we don't put a mold test you know inside of your house and say mold exists somewhere inside of the house because that's just silly we are not experts at mold , and anybody that says that they are unless that is the only thing that they do there is just so much to know about mold the main thing is we look for areas where mold might exist we look for moisture and the main thing is we are seeking moisture and if we find moisture and we can eliminate that moisture then that just means that , that we have stopped that mold growth and so obviously if we see anything it looks like mold if we see anything it looks like an asbestos product if we see anything that looks like lead we let you know but just as a disclaimer we don't look for lead we don't look for asbestos and we don't look for mold in a standard home inspection just want to throw that out there so , we also talked about 360 degree photos during , of the roof during the winter you know we can't get onto the roof because of the amount of snow that we have on the roofs and it's important to document what the roof looks like so it is possible from time to time that you could see an issue that would be wrong with the 360 degree camera but most of the time it's just to say hey we weren't able to see the condition of the roof because look at how much snow is up here that's more or less just something so my inspectors know hey I know you can't see the roof I know you couldn't inspect the roof but let's just still give those photos to the customer so that way they are very aware of what the condition of the roof was on the day of the inspection so , let's jump into it.

I guess first thing first we were talking about some dimmer switches and that these dimmer switches were inoperable now they were inoperable because we had an led light and so basically led lights , what happens is whenever we reduce the voltage in a normal dimmer then that led light doesn't actually turn off there's a certain threshold that that led that light emitting diode will be damaged if that electricity voltage goes down too far so it actually cuts off and it will not dim there are dimmable LED's , but basically if you get a modern dimmer that modern dimmer could have what's called a pulse wave modulator and that pulse wave modulator actually turns it on and off , at a high frequency and then that way , we're actually turning the led light on and off at a rate that our eyes cannot see but by having the light off and then on and then off and then on is actually dimming the light and so some LED's require that pulse wave modulator , to make it work but basically if they just update their , bulbs or if they update the switch both will have the things that it needs to be able to do what it needs to do so , plumbing this this was great this isn't a condo whatever but the problem was that the drip pan , didn't have any kind of drain going anywhere so it could fill up but then once it filled up it just overflows and it's doing nobody a service and so if that's the type of drip pan that you're that you're going to make then you need to make sure that that drip pan is high enough to be able to support , to be able to support the amount of water that could end up in it and drip hands are just you know for whatever reason a hot topic , some people are all for them some people are against them the main thing is things can be damaged by water and we just don't want water to go places it shouldn't so if that means we have to properly route drainage then so be it so laundry , I think it's pretty safe to say this could have been done a little bit better , coming out of the soffit like that is , less than ideal that is it's ugly it's just ugly then we have a service panel where we had multiple issues we had some wires that were you know multiple wires going into the same circuit breaker we had this circuit breaker where it looked like a piece of the plastic had broken where they had bridged the connection between two , circuits and , and that's fine to bridge that connection but now they're bridging the connection between two totally different circuit breakers , not on the same you know unit basically and so I think what they did was that piece broke and then they just shifted everything up and then they doubled up the wires which is not ideal so here is a big deal really big deal , so polybutylene pipe so this house that we were in had a bunch of leaking issues we'll get into some of the other leaking issues based off of this polybutylene pipe but basically , just it's no good if your house has this there's a lot of different ways to see what it is if you'd like to read this whole deficiency , here's the deficiency then I’ll scroll up here in just a second but the main thing is , if your house has that we don't want your house to have that and it is less expensive to replace all the piping than it is to do all of the drywall repairs mold mitigation and everything else that would be required if let's say that pipe were to leak and so it is known to leak there are there's enough lawsuits , that had occurred that there's no more money all the money's dried up the pipes have not dried up they're still leaking and I think it's just important to know that if you do have that kind of piping , don't cut any corners just get it replaced there's a lot of different ways to get your piping replaced but it is less expensive to replace the pipe than it is to deal with a leak let me just scroll up just a little bit further so that way you guys can read that if you want to finish reading that you can always pause the screen and then read through it but that's just this is what was basically written in that person's individual report so then we talk right here , the air admittance valve was inadequate and so basically the valve was all damaged and was hurt and so on and so forth but the main another thing about it is that with that air admittance valve like if you were to take a straw and you put your finger on the straw and then you lift that straw up and then you can just drop that water down that is all well and good , but the thing is , whenever you have a house you want the water to just go down the straw you don't want to like stop it by plugging up the top so to open the top we have to have an air admittance valve if we can't go all the way up , and out of the house so the air mittens valve basically allows air to come in but it doesn't allow air and water to go out so sewer gases can't get into your house the other thing is if I have the basin of a sink then I want that valve to be higher than the edge of the sink so that way if I get sewage that is backed up it won't just come out of the valve and then make everything wet and moldy what it'll do is it'll actually fill up the sink and then the sink is going to basically overflow before anything else , before the air mittens valve does so that way I’m very clear whoa my sink is filling up with a whole bunch of stuff well that's because we have a backup and so the air mitten's valve one was damaged two was in the wrong location and three it just could have been done better I guess so moving on this house had a door that you could see through the door and snow was building up and we had this whole freeze thaw issue and then it appears as if water had come all the way into that property once it came into that property the problem is that it damaged all of the floors once all the floors were damaged instead of fixing the issue which was the door they ripped up the carpet put down a really cheap laminate floor and called it good and the fact that you can see through that door the fact that that there was such a gap that pine needles were being you know pushed in with the water and just fix the door put on a new weather seal or just replace the door entirely the quick fix that you did not benefit anybody and quite frankly it seems like they were trying to cover something up I’m not saying that but it's just why would you not fix the underlying issue because fixing the underlying issue could be more expensive however to just rip out carpet and replace everything because the carpet was just I guarantee nasty just based off of the stains elsewhere it must have been very bad so just be mindful weather seals are very important for your door so just make sure you have a good weather seal on your door let's take a look over here so this was , in that house that had the polybutylene piping , there was a vapor barrier that was underneath the house and you could just push up on that vapor barrier and it was like a water bed it had just completely filled up from the leaking polybutylene pipe now the problem is so mold shouldn't be able to grow in a fiberglass insulation however I don't know if I necessarily want soggy old fiberglass insulation so let's just say you have to pull down all of the vapor barrier then once you've pulled down all the vapor barrier you then have to go through and you have to basically remove all the piping redo the piping remove all the insulation redo the insulation and who knows how many of the joists have been damaged the floor had some kind of bounce and sag to it and so with that floor having a bounce and sag more than likely the wood is damaged and the cost of repair like I said if your house has polybutylene pretty please just get it fixed that's all you have to do just get it fixed because the cost of any other repair because all this work is going to have to be done in a really tight crawl space and a really tight crawl space makes the work more expensive because the more the work is more difficult and getting supplies down there is more arduous and it's just it's just not ideal so please polybutylene piping get it fixed if you're buying a house with it figure out a way to either get the seller to fix it or give you one heck of a good credit to get that resolved so , let's talk about this 1930s house in gyps, , it had the most issues for 2020 and it's in third place overall keep in mind third place overall that that's a pretty big deal , but it's the most for 2020 and it was built in 1930. , really like neat house like there are some very cool things about it and whenever I was talking to my inspector shea he's like how do you always find all these gems you know and like he referred to them as a gem and the reason why is because these are really cool houses to inspect there's so many things that could go wrong that do go wrong and it's just really interesting I think the majority of these next issues are all based off of this house just because it's a good learning point so what we can see right here is this is knob and tube so they have basically their hot and the neutral wire is going to be separated and it goes around those glass insulators and then they run the wire so if you were to grab those you're done however they weren't attached it's just you know just old tech and it was interesting to see that old tech speaking of old tech going down into , the basement this is an old coal , coal furnace that basically this this red box right here , this red box you would fill it up with coal and there was still coal in the basement which was really interesting fill it up with coal an auger rotates and then pushes it into the furnace the furnace was then an octopus style furnace where all the heat came up and then it went out , to go everywhere else in the house really interesting it's it was decommissioned but very interesting to see , the next thing in this 1930s house no surprise to anybody is the existence of lead paint now I know that earlier I said we do not inspect for lead correct we do not inspect for lead I did not go over to the chip and like peel off the chip and then do the test I didn't eat the paint chips you aren't supposed to eat the paint chips especially if it's lead and so the main thing is that yes I could tell this was lead and in a 1930s house you're guaranteed that you have lead you have asbestos you have coal there's coal inside of that house like I mean that's not even a hazard that most people even think of , it's just it's just interesting so again here is that , that burner I just think that that was just one of the neatest things , ever not a neat thing was their garage so here's the garage we have junior inspector stickers so let's just assume that I was able to hand you a junior inspector sticker you earn this whenever you find an issue and you report back to us so I’m going to ask you the junior inspector side of things oh and actually if you want to see so junior inspector badges you can see them right here beside me that's a junior inspector badge and so we give those to people if they find an issue and they bring it back to us and they say hey this and that because the fact is there's just so many issues in a person's house that if you see something and it matters to you let us know because the whole thing is we are writing a report to give you the ability to understand the house that you live in and to negotiate for a better price for the house that you want to buy and so yeah just let us know but as a junior inspector can you tell me what's wrong with this structure and if you guessed the structure has failed , all of this step cracking so people will see in their CMU’s also known as concrete masonry units they will see these like little steps and they're like you couldn't even get like a human hair into their but it looks like a crack they're like oh my gosh step cracking it's failed you know the foundation we can't buy that no you can buy the house the house is fine there's just normal natural anything I I’m even afraid to say that it's like settling because then people are like well the foundation's settled yes the foundation is settled there's no evidence that the movement , is continuing there's no evidence that the movement has stopped however this this is structural failure what you're looking at here is structural failure whenever you look at your house and you see like the littlest hair like you can pull out of hair and maybe put it into the crack that's not a structural failure that is that is the concrete I mean the mortar just shrinking or it is just the expansion contraction from cold weather or it's settling however even if it's settling it's not a big deal it doesn't seem like it's a big deal now granted if yours looks like this then yeah that's game over that's not great so yeah we talked about structural failure I’m not safe to be in there in the attic there was a joist and it's really difficult to see , basically where the three arrows are , there was a joist which is a beam like this and that beam just cracked and so whenever that beam cracked , because it cracked downwards there are these other ones which are where the two arrows are that go across and for every single joist it holds it in place that way they are like this because if they're like this then the roof will collapse and that's bad so the pieces , fell off because the joists broke now the piece of wood that holds them together isn't there so then now they can fall from side to side which could cause you know with heavy snow loads structural collapse of the roof now we are there's nothing to worry about really because you can make that joist more secure you can reattach those supports there's a lot that can be done for a very inexpensive amount of money but it's just important to note that if that trust in this case it was a trust , cracked that's just not great this was interesting too , the fireplace , had a stone , basically was made of stone but there were these holes in the stone where the air from outside was coming in from inside you know the chimney was coming into the house and basically having looked at it if I was a flame if I was heat and I’m coming up that chimney instead of just coming up that chimney what will happen is it'll actually come up the chimney but then go through the chimney wall into your house's wall and then what it's going to do is basically catch your house on fire so that's bad so fix it I guess but the reality is if you have a clay line chimney or any kind of masonry chimney the interior I like 95 99 likelihood it has failed and it's time for a replacement so if we can get some type of a metal sleeve insert which is also expensive that would be the best way to do it otherwise there is a risk of fire whenever you have older chimneys and the fire risk is that the heat and the flame can escape and it can go into the house and it can catch the house on fire from the inside out which is bad here is another example of a different this is actually where all the exhaust gasses from the new heat system go this is an old exhaust chimney basically and lots of things falling apart you could see in the through the walls with the thermal camera how much heat is coming through this thing , and then at the bottom it was just full of dirt and debris and a whole bunch of other bad stuff the whole thing needs cleaned out it technically needs to be sleeved but it's a 1930s house what are you going to do so then down here the plumbing drainage so there is a floor drain and the floor drain has a p trap and so basically the drain goes down comes back up and then it drains in that little shape which is like the letter p if the p were to fall down in that shape normally there should be water and if you're not going to have water in this you know p-trap then you need to fill it with something like mineral oil mineral oil if you fill it with mineral oil then that will not evaporate and because oil and water don't mix whenever water comes in from the floor to go down that drain the oil will float above the water the water will go down and then it'll seal itself all over again so that's the way to do it at this point there is nothing stopping sewer gases from coming up from the sewer and then filling up the house so yes that smells bad and I don't want my house to smell bad but the real reason that this is such a bad thing , is mostly just because if this sewer gas were to come in that's high in methane and because it's high in methane that means that your house could if there was an appropriate spark could catch on , could explode or catch on fire or whatever and that of course would be a bad thing and we don't want that to happen so let's , let's scroll down just a little bit further because that's an easy fix it's an easy fix a little bit of mineral oil you're good to go or you can put a cap on it and you can just cap it off and be done with it so then whenever we come into here plumbing supplies so there are galvanized steel pipes problem is they can rust from the inside out if the pipes rust from the inside out then basically the flow is reduced , you could get you know sometimes there's like other issues with that but basically just say the flow is going to be reduced and eventually you're going to have to replace it and there are some health potential health issues so I just say replace it if you can next thing this is an old door lock 1930s door lock if you are a kid who's learning how to pick locks and you have just like a bobby pin or if you have a paper clip then you can just go ahead and open up that door that is not an appropriate way to keep your house safe and secure there are better ways to do so and my recommendation , would just be nowadays we have these , electronic locks and these electronic locks are amazing you put in your door code there even ones that can tell you if the door is locked or unlocked you can do it from any you know distance you can do it from anywhere in the world to lock it unlock it or know what its status is there's just a lot of improvements for your own security and you don't have to necessarily have a physical key especially if you're going to rent if you're going to rent the property having a physical key means that anybody at any time could make a copy of that and they can go into that home whenever they want versus having a code that only has a certain life span where if you had a short-term renter they can come in put in the code and then once you know that date has passed then their code's no longer valid it's out of the system and they can't get back into the property that is you know a preferred way to do it not an old you know skeleton type key like this like that's not modern and it's not safe so , moving on so the parging so parging failure so basically that is like think of it as like a thin , a thin coat of like a mortar and or concrete basically and if you guys want to read through what we you know wrote up about this particular house here is all of that and yeah it looks like you can read the entire thing the main thing is that it fails over time and on this particular house which again 1930s house water was coming in behind that foundation wall and you could just tap at that parting and whenever you would do that it would just flake off which means that it's not doing what it's supposed to do we try not to damage people's houses but like if you just touch it and it falls that's not really damaging the house the house is already damaged and it's a 1930s house so anyway interesting thing there , we really want to get like proper chinking and we want to cap the end grain whenever possible with a log cabin and the chinking expands and contracts a lot more than like a standard caulking wood and so you want to make sure you're using chinking because otherwise , you just aren't doing exactly what needs what is needed to prevent water intrusion air movement and keep in mind that if I had a hole about this big throughout the course of a year I can have gallons of water of moisture , water vapor coming through the house and could be causing issues now we're in a very dry area so it doesn't cause that many issues however that does make the house less comfortable because you have to you know deal with air movement and that taking away the heat so if you're walking through certain parts of your house and some rooms are colder than others that's probably because you have a little bit of air movement inside those areas so that's why we want on those log cabins for chinking to be extra good now I was in a 2.5 million dollar log cabin gorgeous absolutely gorgeous here in Silverthorne and there were so many flies there were just so many flies in this house there were hundreds of dead flies around the windows on the floor and whenever I took the thermal camera it was so clear it's so evident that the wood naturally kind of like twists and cracks and as it shrinks it opens up these like gaps and coming through these massive logs coming through these massive logs were these cracks that would make it all the way through and then these flies were flying through that or entering the house and yeah chinking all you need some chinking just put that in there it still looks good and it prevents that air movement because not only did you have flies but you also had a bunch of air movement in these sections of the house so just something to think about you don't have to have a 1930s house you could have a very modern build that still needs to have its chinking updated and fixed so yeah we talked about the extreme likelihood of lead paint already so I have a video and the video that I have is a thermal video that we did and let me get that going there it is so this thermal video here is a video that we did of a person's property and what had happened was that and I’m going to turn off the volume here so what had happened was there were two different zones and you can so clearly see where they took the in-floor radiant heat and where they did not and so I’m actually going to play this video one more time sometimes it's just easier for us to sometimes it's just a lot easier for us to just go ahead and record a video of what we see in the thermal camera narrate over top of it than it is to try to explain what we're seeing now what happened here was that these particular people they had a house and the house was getting way too hot because they had so much heating in it and the house was very airtight and so they didn't need as much heating as they had planned as they had you know originally accounted for and so they had shut off different zones , in the house so in the in each floor area there were different zones where it was no longer producing heat and for good reason because they were you know overheating things now from a home inspector I understand , I understand what we're saying about you know the heat and that was on this this right over here and I understand what they're saying about the heat however I want to make sure that all the systems work and it would be very easy for an individual to say oh yeah it works great we just turned it off well I still want to test it I think we talked about an elevator on the last in-service training and it said oh yeah elevator works great it's the best elevator ever it's amazing such a great elevator don't test it so what am I going to do I’m going to test it and what happened the elevator didn't work because the door even though the door was closed had to be like jammed closed and that was because there was a defect with one of the sensors so same thing , if somebody ever tells you oh it works perfectly fine just I don't know maybe I don't trust people who knows I would just say don't take them for their word you know don't take them at their word because I want to have the data I want to have the knowledge that everything is actually working the way that it's intended so speaking of which drainage lift station multiple issues so yeah there are a lot of issues on this particular lift station I guess , one of the things to keep in mind , one there's no main clean out but that's because this was hundreds of feet of sewage that was you know in the pipe that was being lifted up and out and anytime that you see a house that has a lot of and we're looking at this , this top picture here that has these control boxes whenever you see a house that has a lot of smoke detectors they probably had a fire whenever you look at a house that has a lot of carbon monoxide detectors they probably had a backdraft situation that created a lot of carbon monoxide in the house it was very dangerous whenever you see somebody that has had an issue with their sewage ejector pump then you'll see that they have a ton of sensors to tell you if there's a , an issue with it leaking or not being able to hold back , all of that sewage they probably had an issue and I believe that these people had an issue because in certain sections of the basement in the carpeted areas and wherever you would just stand in this space and you would just be just smacked right in the face with just some terrible smells and in fact it did at one point have an issue , where there was some backflow that was not prevented and possibly flooded the basement and so that smell is just still kind of lingering and so anytime you see somebody has a lot of warnings like smoke detectors carbon monoxide detectors , backflow detectors water , you know detectors for leaks they probably weren't proactive and they were probably reactive and they probably put that stuff in after they had an issue so just something to keep in mind also you can see it on one of these pictures right up here but , using a painter's tape green you know green frog painters tape and electrical tape sorry painters tape lid and electrical tape to seal an airtight sewage system that's not adequate that is not actually an airtight seal you need to have the proper seal so using again that lid from your painters tape and using some electrical tape to hold it down not going to cut it just not at all going to cut it so then we move on electrical receptacles so I think we've talked about these before but anytime that there is a GFCI trip that's inadequate within 200 milliseconds this one was 349 you can see the sink directly behind me which means that if I were to put my device into that water accidentally drop it then we're going to get electrocuted and electrocuted you can't tell people about shocked you can tell people but electrocuted you're dead because this is not going to trip within 200 milliseconds and that is extremely dangerous so whenever we test something it's strange to think that you can feel 200 milliseconds whenever you press the button to trip the GFCI but you can 100 feel if something is a little bit slow and then you plug in your next level device and you're like oh yeah 349 milliseconds holy cow like that that felt real slow and sometimes like around like 150 milliseconds you'll be like oh that seemed really slow because a lot of these are tripping at like 40 milliseconds it's like almost instantaneous whenever you press the button to trip it and whenever it's like click trip click then that's like oh okay that seemed a little slow and you look at it's like 120 milliseconds which is still fine but you just want to make sure if you have an old GFCI sometimes , the mechanical workings of it are not quite as good as they could be so please don't paint your service panels there's a lot of reasons not to do this but the thing is we do our best that if it is painted shut to take our razor blade cut out around it and , and get it taken care of however this was so severely painted shut and it was like a centerpiece of the room and nobody like a lot of times people just put a picture frame right over top of it and nobody put a picture frame over it so if we were to open this up it would be , ugly because no matter how hard you try the paint is going to chip it's going to look bad and so we just let it go we opened up a receptacle elsewhere to make sure we had copper wiring and we're good to go so , this house here had a lot of potential for erosion just a lot of potential for erosion very steep inclines and not a lot of support and a lot of runoff from roads and other things like that and so you just want to be mindful best thing to stop erosion is plant more plants do more landscaping , and of course have proper water management systems but overall I would say yeah if you could plant a tree in there then that soil is going to stay right in place so and you plant a tree so like that's good so moving on to this the well supply head was unprotected and what that means is that if I was a snow plow driving down that road and I’m pushing my snow my job is to push snow my job is not to protect your well heads your my job is not to you know really do anything other than push your snow and I’m going to push it to the easiest place I can this was dead center I could not get a plow to the left or to the right which means that if I’m going to plow that driveway what am I going to do with the snow I’m going to push it into your well head and what's going to happen to your wellhead it's going to get damaged so something to think about I would say here I love it whenever people say hey there's an issue I’m like great there's an issue that goes back to elevator story if they were said something is wrong with the elevator I’d be like okay something's wrong with the elevator we're not going to touch it and with this they said they caution there's some things that were going on we're still fixing we're still doing whatever that's great now the one thing that came up with this and I believe I have a better picture there it is that in order to support a hot tub hot tubs weigh like 6 000 pounds easily and so we need to have adequate support and everywhere that you see a green arrow there is there are doubled up joists and then where you don't see the green arrow there's just a single joist and basically we were partially supported by supported by that single joist and so we want to move the tub probably 10 inches I would say onto all of those doubled up joists because we want to make sure that what is supposed to be supporting it is supporting it in this particular instance would it be just fine yeah more than likely it would have no issues whatsoever however the architect and engineer designed this in a very specific way to be able to manage those loads and I want those loads to be exactly where they wanted it to be so there is that here are those , heating zones that were inoperable , that we were told that they were just fine whenever I manually bypassed one of the zones it heated up no problem and everything was good so you can do that if you if you're so inclined but basically if somebody tells you something works just fine that's great that they told you that but I would definitely want to make sure that it does work just fine so that goes back into all the different zones and a whole bunch about that so this exterior structure , probably the least safe structure that I’ve been on in a while I don't think you can see it on these particular pictures but on these pictures you can start to see it and what you can see is that almost every wooden piece was rotted was not being properly supported if you were to put your body weight up against the railing you just fall right off probably to your death who knows you might survive cat like reflexes and whatnot but the stairs , had how do I want to do so had a screw you know lag bolts going into the step the problem is that the step broke and so the step is now falling like this and it broke and is so broken that if you stood on it I’m very confident that with my own body weight that I would just fall right through on that stair and so they're just so many so many dangerous things the whole deck is rotted and just it just needs replaced and just be mindful that whenever you're getting a home inspection there are things like this that could come up and deck replacements are not cheap not at all and I would just say make sure that whenever you're buying a house if the seller knows the deck needs replaced maybe the seller shouldn't be selling the houses like a house with a deck they should be selling it with a house that needs a deck replacement and therefore the price should reflect that however everybody wants to make their money so you know that's on them but if the structure is unsafe another thing if it's predictable it's preventable if it's predictable that you could fall and hurt yourself on this deck it's preventable meaning you need to do things to prevent injury if you're going to rent a property that has a bunch of issues and you know about the issues and somebody gets hurt oh golly that just like opens you up to liability hardcore so whenever you find issues like this you don't have to replace the whole deck there are there are a lot of things that could be done that are much less expensive than replacing the deck to make this deck safe again and I would say if those things were taken yeah you could you know for a relatively smaller amount of money you could make that deck safe again and I think that somebody who would be renting it would definitely want to make sure now you know you who's watching and myself we've probably been in some very dangerous houses and we've probably had friends that had dangerous houses and as a kid we probably did some very dangerous things whenever we were like at the age of 10 and we were just fine so if it is your house you can assume whatever amount of risk that you want but if you're going to rent it just don't open yourself up to liability be very cognizant of what predictable and preventable looks like so that was a soapbox and I’m sorry I’m off that soapbox now so moving on wall repair yeah wall repair so they clearly made a repair they did not disclose that they made a repair and there was just the freshest of fresh , drywall , that had just been sanded and painted and all this and they still had the dust you know on top of the light switches and it didn't look like there were any issues you know currently but then whenever you went downstairs underneath the cabinets in the kitchen a place that you wouldn't really see very well underneath the cabinets in the kitchen which are those bottom photos right by my shoulder there was so much water damage it was just it was silly it was absolutely silly so clearly there was an ice dam or something else that had caused water to back up into the house and they did what they could to fix everything on the face of everything but , but they did not fix inside the kitchen and that was the telltale sign that there was a repair that they made that they were completely aware of that was very recent that they did not disclose and that's just rude so please make sure that if you're selling a house you disclose this and that and another thing like there's a video that we just made about pre-listing inspections if I was selling this house and I did an inspection I had an inspector come and they found all this kind of stuff then I could sell the house and I could say yeah there's all these damages and I’m not going to touch any of them and you can have an inspection the person has an inspection the inspector doesn't find anything else or they find a few things and they bring it to your attention but what this does is it puts me in power and control because right now if I were buying the house I’d say hey you told me everything was okay you lied to me what are you going to do about it because whenever you blatantly repair something that's just rude it's just rude if you were to say yeah there's an issue and I’m not going to pay for anything you know I like you I like you because you're a straight shooter and that's awesome you keep it up but if you're going to try to hide it and then an inspector finds it , I just don't like that I don't know poor integrity I guess and I’m not saying that these people had poor integrity because you know liable and slander but what I am saying is that there's a better way to approach certain issues so let's move on what we have is the electrical receptacles hot neutral reversed clearly an unsafe kind of thing we just want to get those the electricity going the direction that it goes one it's bad for devices too at least the potential of electrocution or shock and we just want to make sure that things are where they need to be on this particular deck it was very funny beautiful house love the house wonderful house but it was as if they did not know how to measure and there were so many instances where they made the notch too large and I think what it was they measured whatever and it wasn't level and then they forgot and then they tried to hold it together with bolts and it just for the quality of that house it was sad to see such bad craftsmanship and at the bare minim, what they could have done is they could have just you know put a block or a spacer or something to help support that rim joist because right now that's holding on to everything and you can see it is failing you can see that it is falling and there are just other issues there you know a whole bunch of pictures , from that one and it's just , you know do a good job if you're going to do a job do a good job so moving on to the exterior wall here this is funny so this radon , mitigation system is great because they're mitigating all of this radon they are pulling it out of the house you know just truckloads of radon just right out of the house just being sucked out of the house and blown back into the atmosphere the people can sleep , happy and safe that there's no radon in their house this is great and where did they exhaust it to directly under the soffit vent and if you're unfamiliar the soffit vent is where fresh air comes into your attic space which is basically where your living space is and so they are effectively pumping all of this radon from the crawl space into the attic which then could be vented in one way or another which could then be back and it's technically back into the living space so if you're going to do things do things right and don't , exhaust your radon directly back into the house that's just seems counterintuitive , but teach their own so moving on from here it was actually the same radon mitigation system and they did all of this great work and they had all this conduit and they did all these things that was just wonderful absolutely wonderful , oh and there was no GFCI on this breaker which is right next to a hot tub what that's a whole other thing but , on this one they then used an extension cord wire and wired that in and had it plugged in why not permanently wire it get a weatherproof switch if you want to turn your radon system on and off which is what most all radon systems have this installer ran the conduit and then just had an extension cord plugged into an exterior outlet and the exterior outlet had a cover on it that was unable to fully close while something was plugged in meaning that it was no longer weather sealed for a permanent installation in a high alpine environment come on come on so it's an easy fix it's of supplies maybe twenty dollars’ worth of supplies and if you're you know keen and you understand electricity yeah you could knock that out you know in an hour if you're not then you know don't do that get a contractor but it's just it's the little things like that where somebody just didn't want to go back to the hardware store one more time they wanted to be done with the job or whatever it may be I don't know their intentions but it was just done poorly at this house they had the deck being supported by concrete masonry units which is perfect these cinder blocks however the cinder blocks were not supported were not attached to anything were not anchored to the ground in any way and if I was a young kid practicing my kung fu then I could very easily knock out one of those cinder blocks and then have the entire the entire structure fall down on me more than likely so just silly just silly stuff just silly speaking about silly , this was an a-frame that had no insulation in it zero insulation whatsoever now there are a lot of things that can be done where if you love the way that the wood looks if you are very interested in the way that the wood looks and all the exposed beams that's awesome the next time that you replace the roof which should be very soon the next time that you replace the roof what you can do is you can actually put the insulation on the outside of the house it's like putting on a jacket you can just put on that jacket and you can insulate the house from the exterior and then you put down the sheathing on top of that insulation and then you , then you put on your shingles on top of that if you look at any passive houses so the a passive house is a house that basically meets a certain amount of , air tightness like an air tightness standard and then also a certain amount of insulation standard and what that allows you to do is have a house that and this is an over exaggeration that you could have you know one little space heater , you know you’re you could have your wife's hair dryer or your hair dryer you could have your hair dryer and that would be enough to heat the house during the winter because a passive house is so tight and if you look at passive houses that's how they do a lot of their installations they'll actually put it on like a jacket on the exterior and then that prevents a lot of thermal bridging and a whole bunch of other things and you can see the thermal bridging going on as well in this photo but the main thing is that it is 95.3 degrees Fahrenheit on a 60 degree day that is just baking the inside of the house and what do you think happens on a 10 degree day it's just not ideal so in this house in between the balusters the spacing was too large and I like to think of myself as I said before as grandpa as a six-year-old version of myself and his water droplet in this case has a six-year-old version of myself I could just fit right through there and fall off the balcony and that's no good so you want to reduce that spacing now the other thing that you'll notice is that to fill in those spaces they have this kind of translucent , glass and the glass is inside these channels and when it's inside these channels there should be a stopper at the bottom of the channel just a little nail little screw a little anything at the bottom of the channel because how do you put the glass in you slide the glass up and then once you've slid the glass up then you should put a stopper in there so the glass can't slide down right now if there was a vibration or a bump that glass could fall just slide all the way down and out and it would be just like a guillotine and , that would be bad it could kill somebody so just that's why it's red just put in some stoppers and you're good to go you got I mean what do you need 10 cents for enough nails to fix that perfect anybody can do it the main thing is some people just don't see these things as risks or as hazards or as other things like that and as a home inspector I’m probably hyper sensitive and hyper aware of some of the things that can be dangerous to a person and some people could go their entire life and never have an issue and just never even realize how close they were to having a dangerous situation befall them so just something to keep in mind then we talk about this here so the constant neutralizer , the cartridge just needs replaced so basically this here , whenever you have a high efficiency furnace then the condensation is normally very acidic and before that goes into your pipes before it goes back to the water treatment plant before it goes into your septic system you want to neutralize that so that way we aren't having any corrosion issues or any other issues you know down the line and the you can just get new , little beads that go in there that do all the neutralizing and you replace that once a year and it's no big thing just something to be in my like to be aware of for an ongoing maintenance type item that every year this might just be something you want to check so this particular house was not getting enough heat we did a whole bunch of just thinking and talking and so on and so forth and what it looks like is that it could be that we have a bad recirculation pipe it could just be that the thermal load is too high for the size of the system which I think is more along the lines of what we're looking at and what happens is that the water whenever it is , I guess whenever the water is cold well I will say so the water , is cold as it goes over and then it loops around so sorry what I meant to say this did a bad job the water comes as hot coming from the furnace it then goes through the pipe and then it comes back cold and so whenever it comes up and it's hot then the cold is coming back in and then that's just really hard on the boiler to take that freezing cold water and very quickly get it to be hot so what they do is part of the hot goes to where it needs to go and part of the hot goes to warming up this cold water that's returning so that way the boiler doesn't have to work as hard , the problem is that I think that the thermal load for this particular house was just too great and so therefore it wasn't able to you know do what it needed to do and so if you were to close that handle then what that does is that that then puts it into like power purging mode where we basically close that off and the hot goes out and then cold comes back and the hot goes out and that means that your boiler is going to have to work double time it's going to have to work really hard to heat everything up so energy efficiency it's much lower however the ability to handle a larger thermal load should be increased potentially but I think there's more that might need to happen in this particular house in order to make that work it's just something that I would then want to have some HVAC professional come in and say you know actually yeah this is going to be the solution for this particular application because every application is different absolutely different every single one so here there are some wooden accents and it's awesome that they put in these wooden accents it was just huge beams you know doing their thing looked gorgeous except that the wood shrinks and the wood had shrunk and it left these gaps that I could probably put you know three of my fingers into this gap and it just looked real bad so what do you do I mean you could replace the timber but then the next timber is going to shrink so if you just go back to chinking if you just put just a bunch of chinking in there you just fill it up with chinking and then you're good to go it fills up the gap it can expand and contract and it will then look more like a finished log cabin more so than just some random pieces of wood butting up against each other , so it could definitely make that look a lot better moving on , I don't like live electrical wires that's just that's bad I don't want to die when I go to work , yeah back to the osha safety plan we were talking about there's a lot of things that can kill you as a home inspector and I love my job I absolutely I love it I just don't want to die while doing it , so yeah keep a safe don't have exposed electrical wire that's all I have to say about that these two water heaters are my favorite so these two water heaters , were 38 years old they were they were born in 1982 and , they are still working that's insane to me that's absolutely insane that they are still working so my recommendation is , get them out of here get them gone because the risk of a failure increases exponentially with age and if there is a failure it is extremely expensive and at this particular place the way these condos were and there were two of these side by side at this particular condo the thing that would happen is that you would not just flood your space but you would flood the common space and you would flood all of the , adjacent condos which I think they were like it was like this crazy underground , like social area and had maybe 20 different condo doors and if one of those were to fail and put you know how many gallons was this like I want to say , 66 80 I don't know I think they were like 80 gallons each they were massive but , anyway if that were to fail you're flooding all your neighbors and you're paying for the repair you need to get that taken care of all right so fireplace glass dirty so basically we just have a bad air fuel mixture when you get that resolved there's a lot of things that can cause that additionally we may not be getting air coming in and if we aren't getting air coming in , then what that means is that , around that glass it should be able to you know clearly like bring air in and that kind of protects the glass and then that is what's used for combustion and then if there's a bad air fuel , mixture that's just you know obviously causing some buildup of other things and so we just want to get that serviced ideally so moving on , let me just tell you this is not how you wire things in so they had an electrical wire that was going into a new construction junction box that was supposed to go into the wall that then had a dimmer without a cover plate on it that then went into the extension cord back to the light it was it was nutty anyway not safe , so next things next , what we have is we have a loose receptacle the receptacle had a loose wire connection and with this loose wire connection it was really not ideal , I plugged in my tester and everything was fine and then whenever I touched my tester again and started to pull to pull it out all the lights shut off like in one portion of the house and it just went and anytime you hear that noise that means it's arcing which is not good because you could possibly you know catch something on fire , so anyway I pulled it out and you have these quick connections where you can take the wire and you can put it directly into the quick connection and the problem is those fail very frequently so what you want to do is bend the wire and then put it onto the nut and so then whenever you bend it and put it onto the nut and that nut can be tightened down and then you don't ever have an issue with that pulling , out of that connector and causing arcing and there were no scorch marks no nothing but , you know elsewhere but the risk of catching the house on fire is extreme , anyway bent the wire put it onto the nut onto the bolt I should say and then put it back in and everything was fine normally we don't do repairs but I mean this this was this was so severe that I’m like oh my gosh we're going to catch this this place on fire we didn't so it's good everything's fine , but yeah and it was repaired should an electrician still look at it yes was that still my recommendation yes , but it was it was nuts so then , this exterior structure here was missing balusters was rickety was I mean it was just it was silly there were there were areas and again I think of myself as like as myself as grandpa the if I fell three feet off the edge of that deck if I didn't have a railing to walk on if the structure was just built completely wrong I’m not going to I’m not going to do well I’m going to break my hip or something and so that was just this the whole thing was just not ideal so then on this one the , chimney the flue tile was damaged so basically this is the , clay liner and as I said earlier the clay liner that is very prone to failure and this particular one the clay liner I guess was going up you know going up on the inside and it had like broken like this which means that all of that stuff could come into the house not only could you have you know toxic chemicals coming into the house but you also could have , a situation where your house catches on fire like we talked about earlier and that's not ideal now when we talk about multiple electrical issues this this like I was almost like somebody has to be joking with me like this this has to be some sort of a practical joke because oh my gosh there were I don't even know if there was a single I mean like there were cover plates on things but there were just so many exposed wires and whenever I say exposed it was like okay we'd have an electrical receptacle and the sides of an electrical receptacle are dangerous and so we would have this electrical receptacle that was outside of the junction box outside of the wall just kind of hanging there and if you were to bump up against it if you were to touch it you'd get shocked guaranteed and then there were areas where they just didn't have the electrical receptacle anymore and there were just three wires you know there's a ground and a hot and a neutral and they're just sticking out of the wall and it's not like they were sticking out of the wall freshly cut they were sticking out of the wall with you know quarter inch of exposed metal that then makes it , extremely likely to either touch each other and cause you know a short circuit to basically touch you to touch anything in the house to light things on fire like it was nuts this was place this this one takes the cake as far as the most unsafe electrically unsafe house that we had been in , this particular one so basically , this particular wall had just some basic damage and like water type related damage and the whole everything there was not a single wall that was good every single wall had some type of some type of damage it just I don't know I just blew my mind , so this one here , the stair riser , separation so basically all the stair risers were like separating and falling apart and not exactly safe however not dangerous yet but getting not safe soon , so we kept it just as an orange issue but to repair this like you really have to take out the entire stair set and try again , this here interesting thing they said okay we are going to take our dryer vent and we're going to just route it outside so if we route it outside that's great but they just took it right through the bathroom and they went straight through the bathroom and right out the wall and whenever they went straight through the bathroom and right out the wall not only does it look hideous inside of the bathroom but that opening that space was completely open all the way to the exterior which means any kind of insect any kind of rodent any kind of anything could just come right in through any one of those holes I don't know just do better is all I have to say like if you're going to run it encase it in some drywall paint it make it look nice , if you're going to run it all the way outside put some spray foam insulation or some caulking or something to fill up the void just something to do , this particular exterior structure had some , chemicals and other things that were just in these like 50 gallon drums not sure what the chemicals were but my recommendation would be have somebody else have a hazmat person have whomever go through and see what those chemicals are and properly dispose of them and if it's possible have the seller be responsible for that not you as the owner because as soon as you buy that house as soon as you sign that paperwork those chemicals are now your issue and what if the chemicals leaked what if it condemned the house what if whatever like stuff like that needs resolved immediately by you your realtor the seller we need to know what those chemicals are and we need to get them gone before you buy the house is my opinion however you guys do what you do I just feel that that strongly about it right so this this house had more mouse droppings than anything I’m going to zoom in on a gross picture so be prepared if you want just don't look but there is a dead mouse and next to that dead mouse you may notice are some dentures with only one tooth this house was disgusting absolutely disgusting there were dead mice everywhere there was mouse poop everywhere and whenever we say everywhere it's as if you had an entire crate of pepper and you were walking and you tripped and you just spilled that pepper onto the floor like we're talking just so much mouse poop it was terrible and then the fact that they were just dentures and the bathtubs were just filled with trash and this just oh golly it was it was very bad we'll just go since , we already looked at that picture we'll just go we'll just go past it but yeah one tooth in the dentures ridiculous so this , was an un was an abandoned terminal they had just removed some appliances just buy the one dollar cap put the cap on it to make sure that nobody dies yes the valve is closed however it's I mean I guess it could be a red issue I mean it's a red issue because if that valve has ever opened then we're putting gas into the house and that could definitely cause an issue but the main thing is we just want to make sure , and I think both these last two issues I guess are on the fence of like red issue or , or not and this next one here they had a vent pipe and remember we're talking about sewer gases so methane and they had this vent pipe coming up into the attic and with that vent pipe going up into the attic , you're basically just filling your attic up with methane and then if that catches on fire then that's bad and then also you just get all that if you're smelling something bad that's because there's bacteria or there's you know proteins breaking down or there's volatile organic compounds I guess is what it would be referred to as that are breaking down and that's just going to make your house smell and they're just routed outside I know they put on a new roof and the roof and forgot to take that one up and out hole saw you're just going to you take put a pilot hole in take a hole saw and then you put on the boot you do whatever it's an easy fix you just don't want to have that stuff going on , so then anyway this one here on the day of the inspection there was a whole bunch of issues the day before there were no issues whatsoever so the realtor was like this was not like this whenever we were here just a day ago and what happened I believe is that I think that the unit above had a leak that then came down into the unit below but who knows there's a lot of things that could have caused this issue and a lot more research needs to be done but at this point that ceiling is toast it is completely saturated it is done absolutely done so then here again , balancer is inadequate we just want to make sure we keep our kids safe , this one here is not like grossly you know it's just two inches larger than it needs to be but it it's just not ideal and this was actually , shea our inspector here and , he recently he and his wife had a kid and I think now the kids , like nine months old and he's like man I’ll tell you what I you know I noticed these things and I’d note them and whatever but now that his kid's like crawling and walking almost walking and doing all this kind of stuff he's like man I am just like so hyper vigilant about child safety now and I’m like that as an as a home inspector I’m like heck yeah that's about as good as it gets to be hyper vigilant I’m loving it so then we move over to this water heater it could have been done a lot better should it take the seams does have a backdraft , potential , hazard you know just depending if there's enough combustible air coming in just easy they already taped down at the bottom why not just you know put a little bit of tape in the top just the thing , and then you know all over the place we have bongs that we find we have a whole bunch of drug paraphernalia from time to time this one was a grow house , underneath and it was like somebody was living inside the crawl space I don't know if the owner knew about it it's just you know weird stuff there's a lot of weird stuff that we find , whenever we do things so , the crown on this chimney was damaged , which basically means expansion contraction we're just going to get cracks onto the clay liner we're going to get all kinds of other ongoing damages and it's just something that needs to be touched up fixed repaired whatever it may be.

So basically that is everything well not everything we also did , you know a fun activity where we would throw the sonde for our sewer scope into the snow and then we had to find it , and we did a whole bunch of training on locating , sondes and to make sure that whenever we do our sewer scope that we are getting you as accurate of a location as we possibly can and that was that was really fun so , throw it into the snow see if you can find it because if you can't that's obviously bad we want our sonde back , but , it was it was a lot of fun and , then with our in-service trainings if you know if we haven't talked about it before we always treat you know our inspectors families to dinner , and allow them to , you know just relax and have a night to themselves and so our in-service trainings I think are a good thing one for our education but two I also think that it really helps family dynamics as well and I think that we do we do well by our inspectors and I really like that about our business , maybe that was a brag I don't know I was just reminiscing about the other day so it was a good time , overall I would say we covered a lot of really good topics we went into a lot more detail on a lot of these issues I think we spent maybe five hours on this stuff and , it's you know it takes up all day pretty much but I love doing it I love making sure everybody's educated I love that our inspectors want to educate our clients and I think it's just great but anyway I hope that you enjoyed it if you made it this far if not no worries and , well you wouldn't know that I said no worries if you didn't make it this far think about that so if you have any questions or if you'd like to schedule a home inspection please visit TwoMooseHomeInspections.com have a wonderful day you