resqman

If you are carrying around a foot long dangleing tool, it might increase the attention you get from the ladies.

Scanning the chart referenced, you only need expansion joints in lengths of conduit over 25 feet. I don't see much electrical conduit over 25 feet in residential construction.

Buddy of mine use to explain, "If it wasn't for bad taste, I wouldn't have any taste at all."

The XE weighs about 10lbs less than the classic. You'll be glad you spent the extra $100 everytime you pick it up. The leg leveler weighs about 5lbs last time I checked. Worth the $40 and weight. As often as we use ladders, the 10lbs adds up in a hurry.

By the way the leg leveler is worth the $40. If you don't have one, you need to get one. They are stable and so easy that you will use it. It does add a few pounds but I leave mine attached so it is always available.

Joe, Watch the instruction video on teh LG site about raising the LG ladder as an extension ladder. It shows an easer method to extending the ladder. Might save you some work. What I do is open from a step into an extension ladder. Stand the ladder vertically. Lean the ladder back and walk backwards until I reach the catches. Unlock and extend the top section and lock in place. Walk the ladder into a vertical position. Now you have 3/4 the height vertical. Unlock the lower section and lift the upper from inside the lower section. Lock off and lean against the house.

Silly to have 3 different levels. It is hard enough for those inside ASHI to track the meaningless levels. Why anyone outside ASHI would care is beyond me. At most there should be 2 levels. Member and Certified. The new gold certified logo is snazy but as already mentioned seems to be a copycat of the the other club. If ASHI is all that and more, than they need to raise the bar in minimun education. The SOP is already the de rigur national standard. Radon and Thermal Imaging are loose and free. Develop a SOP for each of those disiplines.

Most homes built in the last 15 years in my area either have a shutoff in the front foyer closet or kitchen pantry. One national builder put them in the garage near the water heater. Prior to that the shutoff is usually in the crawlspace. The shutoff in the crawlspace is frequently in the far corner away from the entrance into the crawl. The crawlspace entrances are usually along the rear foundation wall or rear corners and the water enters the crawlspace along the front foundation wall. Usually a hose bib type handle on a gate valve. 1950-60's ranch homes often have a hole in the floor of the master closet. A square metal rod was supplied that went through the closet floor and fit into a valve in the crawlspace. The shutoff was in the crawlspace but was operated from inside the house. The metal rod fits into a receiving notch and can be removed if you would prefer to store items on the floor of the closet. Threading the rod back through the hole and into the valve is a tricky.

It is not the man's job to put the seat down, it is the womans job to put the seat up! We have been brainwashed all these years that men have it wrong when in reality it is the women who are doing it wrong. Repel against conformity!

National associations might add lines to your resume but don't make you a better inspector. Inspectors make the association better. Join an association that has local meetings. The tech sessions will help keep you current. They will also hopefully keep you up to date with local politicial issues regarding home inspections. The association sends a member to every licensing board meeting and reports at the monthly association meeting. Local association pays a lobbist to shape home inspection laws in my state. I joined ASHI and got 4 referrals in the first month.

I'll second that sentiment. You can be be the most technically knowledgeable inspector and the best report writer in your area. But first you have to get consumers to find you and choose you. You must be a good marketer to do well. The most concentrated location to find home buyers is through real estate agents. But they tend to be fickle and offer your name today and shun you the next. You are relying on a third party to drive business your way but you have very little to offer that third party to entice them to continue to recommend your services. Often the home inspection puts the sale in jeopardy or makes the agents job more difficult. So you need to develop other channels to find and drive clients to your business. There are numerous certifications available but none are universally accepted. Each of the schools, associations, and certification bodies claim they are the best. Getting and holding more certifcations than all the other inspectors in your area costs money and time. If there is licensing in your state, everyone is licensed so in the customers eyes, all inspectors are equal. You are running a business first. That means taxes, insurance, licenses, bookkeeping, expenses, marketing, advertising, answering the phone, maintaining a website, handling disgruntled customers, submitting bids, priceshoppers and tirekickers, loosing jobs, cancelations, working nites and weekends, looking for the next job, continuing education, and slow periods. The actual task of inspecting the home can be fun. Writing the reports is a chore. Attics are unbearably hot in the summer and crawlspaces are icky all the time. Everything else is work. Boring drudgery. If you don't do it, no one picks up the slack and your business fails. 1/4 of the inspectors in my state did not renew or put their licenses onhold last period. 1/4 of all inspectors in the state with an existing business, existing clients, referral base, and all the other business items in place. Licensing only happens once a year and so there is no way to know how many additional inspectors are not making a living at inspections until they don't renew Oct 1st. What special skills do you have to drive more home buyers to your business in a down market?

Here is what the North Carolina Licensure board recommends... Recommended language for houses with non-bonded CSST The gas piping in this house includes corrugated stainless steel tubing (CSST). There is no electrical bonding connection between the gas piping system and the electrical system, other than connections at the gas appliances that utilize the grounding conductors for the appliances. The lack of strong electrical bonding may increase the potential for lightning strikes to cause arcing at the CSST gas piping that may result in perforation of the piping, gas leaks, and fires. For safety, it is recommended that this installation be further investigated by a licensed electrical contractor. Standards of Practice/Rules/Interpretations Committee approved: 5-12-11 NCHILB Board approved: 5-13-11 Effective Date: 5-13-11 This is what I use... Flexible gas pipe manufacturer’s installation instructions require bonding of gas pipe to the electrical grounding system. Bonding provides a path for electricity to safely flow if the metal gas pipe become energized. Bonding of the gas supply system to the electrical grounding system was not located. Have the gas pipe system further investigated to determine if it is bonded to the electrical ground system and repair by a licensed electrical contractor if it is not bonded.

Momentary drift. A CE class I attended today covered an article that you wrote for the ASHI Reporter 'Inspecting Tandem Circuit Breakers'. Thought you might want to know that you're getting around. Good article. Marc Interesting since I have never written any article about anything remotely related to electricity. [?] I only joined ASHI about 2 months ago. My guess is that you have me mistaken for someone else. But thanks for recognition.

I use Verdana 10ptid="Verdana">

Was the wire accessible from the exterior?

Let me try again because you guys went too far afield. The state SOP requires that I inspect the roof system and specific components. So in my report it says: Roof coverings, drainage systems, flashings, skylights, chimneys and roof penetrations were inspected. The roof was inspected for readily visible and accessible signs of leaks or abnormal condensation on building components. If I did not have a the above statement or checkbox for each of those items indicating Inspected, then I have not documented I inspected those items. The state requires text that something happened. Kurt at one time suggested an all photo report. State will not accept that. Must have text. Photos are nice but are acceptable but not what they want. There was a discussion questioning does a description of an element count as it also being inspected? State is wishy washy about that but generally believes that Inspecting and Describing are two different tasks and must be recorded seperately. I can tell you that the window is a single hung, wooden frame, single pane window. Does that mean I inspected a representative sample of a window in each room? No, only that I described one window.

[] Sorry, I just happened to be get all nostolgic. Occasionally I just can't contain myself.

In a former life I was in the medical field. If you didn't write it down, it didn't happen. You could have taken the blood pressure every 5 minutes for an hour but if you only documented the values once, you only checked the BP once. Legal issue. I brought that prejudice with me to home inspecting. If it is not documented in the report, then I would presume you did not do that task. In my report I list that I inspected these items. I then list every item in the same exact squence and wording as the SOP. Standard boilerplate that is at the top of each section. Wrote it once and never change it since I inspect every one of those items at every inspection. Then I have a list of all the must Describe items. Following that is the list of defects. Clients likley read the first "These were inspected" paragraph and skip the rest. The Describe items are very simple descriptions that can be easily scanned.

The spring I turned 8 yrs old, my family moved to a new neighborhood. Maybe 1/3 of the homes were complete. Each morning that summer while school was out I had breakfast and then wandered around watching them build houses. I would spend all day watching them frame, shingle, plumb, wire, and every other possible trade. At 3:30 when they all went home, I would collect all the bent nails off the floor and take them home. Three months I watched all day everyday while they built my neighborhood. Barefoot and bare chested I walked around the building sites watching, studying, absorbing. I can't imagine any parent now a days wishing their 8 yr old a good day at 8am and not expect him to return until 4:30. No supervision for 8-9 hrs. One of the greatest summers of my life. Every since I have been drawn to homes and building. When I worked for a computer company in the 80's, I moderated a nationwide internal corporate forum before Al Gore invented the internet. It was a DIY forum for the 130,000 employees to ask questions about how to fix their own homes. I read every single post and reply for 3 years as a moderator, about 34,000 in total if I remember correctly. When I look back, I started my career as a home inspector that summer. More that four decades later I am still excited to just wander around building sites of any kind and marvel at how it all fits together and works. If you don't get excited just walking onto a building site, you probably won't stay a home inspector long. Don't become a home inspector because it is different from what you do now, seems like a low cost entrance fee to get started, or have dreams of making big money working for yourself. None of that is true. Become a home inspector because you LOVE buildings. A background in software will help you in choosing and learning a software reporting package. That is such a small part of home inspecting as to be totally inconsequential. When you are flopped on your belly in a crawlspace in a puddle of who knows what looking at a rusty drum trap, knowing how to program C++ is not very pertienent. Any two week course offered by any school will barely scratch the surface. You will learn the names and definitions of many parts of a home. You will learn a basic overview of how the major systems are supposed to work. You will be told to look for defects and report them to your client. All good stuff but nothing really to do with home inspecting. The real job of home inspecting is knowing where to look for clues to unseen failures. The only way to get that is to go in the field and look at used housing stock and being shown by an experienced home inspector. Looking at stuff that makes you scratch your head and wonder why anyone would do that to a house and think it was sensible. Reading code books for fun and entertainment. Ask any home inspector who has been at it at least 5 years and he can probably tell 20 things he is going to find in a house before he even walks in the door. As a middle-aged old fart, I have finally found what I should have been doing all my life. I am not opposed to new people entering the field, but people who think it is easy are very mistaken. It seems easy only because we have been doing it for a very long time. In my case almost all my life but now I get paid for it.

Ruben and Rob, Check your email for a report from me.

Hey Bruce, Yeah, four. . .that's why I underlined *one* condition. . . And, yep, I don't want a kid killed by glass shards. You wouldn't comment in the report? Okie-dokie. Me? I'm gonna document. Nothing personal. Each of reports safety hazards as we see them. In a previous life I was the Disaster Recovery Planner for a large company. I was a responding member of a fire and rescue squad for over 10 years. I have planned for and responded to numerous safety events. Safety is and has been a large part of my life. The wonderful part about being a home inspector is that we have great freedom in what and how we report issues. I did not mean to imply that should not report the windows as a safety concern if you feel they are. I was just trying to make sure you understand that all 4 criteria must be met for code requirement to kick in. Code does not cover every possible scenario.

Check your code reference again. ALL FOUR conditions must be met for safety glass to be required. ONLY exceeding 9 sq ft is not enough, it must ALSO meet the other 3 requirements. If they are thermal pane windows, you talking $200 per window to replace them. Not a huge sum but enough to make most people think twice about the hassle. Are you concerned about the toddlers falling through the windows some height above the grade or you worried about injuries due to broken glass? I wouldn't mention anything in my report but you certainly can offer as many safety suggestions as you like.

Buddy of mine used to say: If it wern't for bad taste, I'd have no taste at all.

Another fallacy, Potential customers certainly do not consider all licensed inspectors equally qualified. Seriously, where do you come up with this stuff? Where is the proof of that? We have licensing here too. I'd say that before licensing the field was already very level. There were no standards for inspections, no standards for a report, no requirement for contracts, no requirements for basic competency, and nobody to go to for help if you were a home buyer and got a crappy inspection. Other than an inspector's word and the recommendation one received from friends or a realtor, there was no way to know whether an inspector had ever met a basic level of competency. The profession was already dumbed down and everyone was viewed just as suspiciously as every other inspector because consumers had no way to know whether an inspector could walk and talk at the same time let along inspect a home. Licensing here forced every inspector - the guy who'd been in the business 30 years as well as the guy who'd been in the business 30 days - to prove that he or she could do what he or she claimed to be able to do, inspect homes, by forcing all to, at a minimum, pass a test of basic inspector competency. How does that hurt the consumer? It seems that the consumer benefits from that. That was a starting point but not the end point and consumers I've encountered certainly know that licensing doesn't mean that all inspectors are equal; yet I infer from your statement that when a consumer knows everyone is licensed the consumer apparently loses all motivation to interview an inspector to decide which inspector is more qualified than the next. That is a little bit odd - especially since consumers apparently still choose their plumbers, electricians, architects, engineers, lawyers, doctors etc. by comparing the experience of those professionals and by getting referrals from friends and co-workers. Odd that it doesn't work the same way with inspectors - oh wait,.....it does work the same way with inspectors; in fact, it's been my experience that during first phone contact now consumers are asking more questions than they ever had prior to licensing. If anything, it seems like consumers don't want to assume that an inspector's license means that all inspectors are equal in skill. Then again, maybe we simply have smarter, more discerning consumers out here than can be found where you are. Maybe over there they are all automatons that are easily led around by the nose and deceived into believing whatever they are told. I dunno, I don't live there so maybe I've got it wrong. ONE TEAM - ONE FIGHT!!! Mike Licensing is not bad, but it does not solve all problems. Yes, licensing limits the worst from becoming inspectors. According to the licensing board 1/2 fail the state test, regardless of how many times a candidate takes the test. Yes, it forces a basic minimun knowledge base to pass the test. Yes, licensing defines an SOP and reporting standard. Yes, licensing provides an enforcement body that can penalize inspectors that do not meet the minimun. Yes, continuing education is a good thing. But licensing standards are so low that just because one is licensed, does not mean the individual is capable of providing a reasonable inspection or report. I am a member of the statewide associations Peer Report Review Committee. Members submit a report which has the client name, client address, inspector name and identifing information removed before it is sent to the committee. I would presume that canidadates would submit reports that they felt would presumably meet the SOPs. Most reports are about 90% there. Most are horribly written. If I as a home inspector cannot figure out what they mean, what chance does a layperson client have? The License Board has the legal ability to request audits of inspector reports but has never in 13+ years. They claim not enough manpower or money to hire manpower. Unless a client drops a dime to the licensure board as a complaint, inspectors are left to their own devices. Once licensed, unless the inspector fouls up enough to piss off a customer so they lodge a formal complaint, or does not meet the ConEd requirements, they are left unmolested by the board. Less hassle is nice but does not provide any assurances to the quality of the inspectors for clients. Potential customers call me and their very first thing out of their mouths is how much do you charge. Not how much experience do you have, how much training did you attend, what format is your report, can you provide references, are you available during these days/times. Only how much do you charge. I have my phone pitch and dont say anything about price until the end. My phone pitch could be the worlds worst and maybe that is why I am not convincing more callers. But I am also hearing that pricing is the overiding factor. My customer reviews are positive and I often get referrals from my customers. But they have to become a customer first. "Seriously, where do you come up with this stuff?" From talking to potential clients.

Associations have nothing to do with the customer. It has to with the inspector. Associations are clubs for home inspectors. They are used primiarily for marketing to convince potential customers that associations members are somehow better than non-members. As already mentioned, horse hockey. Associations provide a marketing channel. They sometimes arrange and deliver training. They provide a way for mostly individual business owners to discuss common business problems and bitch about stupid customers. Belonging to a particular association does not instantly make an inspector better. I belong to both statewide and national associations. Neither made me a better inspector just because I belong. The entrance requirements consist of me paying dues or something so simple it only means I have been an inspector for a year or two. Once in the club, there are no ongoing requirements besides sending them a check every year. The national club "requires" I take X number of Con Ed each year but they only radomly audit so I could belong for years and take no Con Ed. Licensing is about as useful. Pass a simple test, pay your annual dues, and take 16 hrs of continuing education. At least there is a mandatory con ed requirement. But since all inspectors are licensed in my area, we are all the same from a customers point of view. Inspector who got his license yesterday and one who has 10 yrs experience are all the same. TIJ is really just a virtual association. Inspectors come here to bitch about stupid customers and ask an occasional question for clairification because it is easier and quicker than looking it up in the code books.