There is roughly only about 40 more hours (a few more if you live on the right hand side) for you to submit your post to the contest: On My Planet.........(a new ActiveRain Contest!!) I don’t have an “exact” count on the numbers yet (at least 100), but I have a feeling that Kristin, Tammy,
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04/29/2014
The following is from the Electrical section of the Washington State, Standards of Practice, for home inspectors. It states that the inspector will: “(d) Report, if present, solid conductor aluminum branch circuits. Include a statement in the report that solid conductor aluminum wiring may be haz
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04/27/2014
The short answer is NONE. The long answer is NONE. Wet insulation will obviously become less efficient as an insulator the wetter it becomes. At some point it ceases to be insulation at all. Part of the “building science” of insulation is keeping it dry. We must construct homes that are capab
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04/22/2014
When I walked into the master bathroom there was the ever so slight odor of mold present. I did not think too much about it. Musty odors in bathrooms are not all that uncommon, and perhaps that is why plug-in air fresheners are so common in bathrooms. When I opened the shower door, it became cl
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04/21/2014
I was thinking about doing a long and involved treatise on the myriad ways that air moves out of homes and into roof structures. The reality is that air moves in and out of our homes in too many ways to cover in a post that would not result in novel of boring length. All we basically have to know
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04/18/2014
This is the grand entrance to a fairly expensive home. It was raining hard at the time of inspection and the moat created by obvious settlement of the walkway at the stairs was giving itself away. Ponding water in walkways can create slippery conditions year round--but especially in the winter
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04/17/2014
While in the big picture, there are far worse things that can go wrong with a house, this is a small issue that I see fairly often. In the following picture you can see the fall restraint bracket attached to the roof. The hole in the end of the bracket is where the worker would attach their rope
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04/15/2014
To continue in the spirit of how things would be different on my planet, let’s talk about B-vents. This particular issue with B-vents is something that is likely going to correct itself, all on its own, as we move more and more to high efficiency gas appliances. The problem with B-vents that I a
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04/09/2014
I remember all too well my very first inspection. It was ten years ago—almost to the day of the start of this contest. I was fresh out of the 120 hour inspection training course I had taken at Bellingham Technical College and all my ducks were in a row as far as having my Structural Pest licens
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04/07/2014
The other day I was talking with several non-inspector friends of mine, and one of them asked me what was the most common defect I see in homes regardless of cost or style of home. It was a surprisingly easy question to answer, and it got me thinking about the overall quality of homes. It got
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04/03/2014