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 Previous Tip of the Day-- When painting with red paint you should use a dark primer first so that the base color will not bleed through. If there is white or some other color under the red it will bleed through. It may take a week or more, but eventually you will be able to see streaks in your paint. if you use a dark charcoal primer under the red it will not show through and it will help to achieve a truer shade. Be sure to have some of your primer on a piece of paper when you go to get your red mixed up so that the person mixing the paint will be able to show you what your new paint looks like. Another tip for red is to have the person mixing the paint use a clear mixing base for colors like fire engine red- it will help get the brighter shades of red to a truer shade. Remember - a limited amount of tint can be added per gallon of paint so if the paint has had tint added several times in an attempt to ge the right shade, it might be a good idea to start over with a new bucket of mixing base. Be sure to use a really good paint for reds. You want it to last, and touch up usually means painting an entire wall since dark colors are hard to 'spot' touch up.
Here's a good one for the inspectors-- I must have some bloodhound in me. Nothing gets me going like finding something that someone has tried to hide. I was in an attic the other day on a new construction. The first thing I noticed going up the ladder was a gable end that was drywalled - not finished, but wall board was hung on the gable end truss. 'Why would anyone carry drywall up here and hang it on that?'. It was not a condo, not a firewall, but a lot of trouble for nothing--why? I could see through the seam of the drywall and sure enough, there it was. They had not installed a gable end truss with all the uprights. They had used a howe truss(like the body of the roof) instead of a gable end truss. So when they knotched the truss for the lookouts to support to eave and rake at this end of the gable they violated the code. Hence the drywall covering. Of course you know that trusses can't be drilled, cut, or knotched, but most codes allow you to knotch for lookouts on gable end trusses. The rest of the home was well built- so I figured it must have been a mistake in ordering the trusses and no one caught it until it was too late. The builder had to go back, remove all the drywall and modify the howe truss in place so that it had the proper supports. It took some effort, but would have been a lot less effort if they had just fixed it in the first place instead of trying to cover it up.
TIP OF THE DAY--
Oops, Edison based fuses were noted in the main fuse panel. Picking the right fuse can be confusing but once you understand what the various codes mean, you can pick the right fuse for the job. The codes on a fuse relate to two things, the type of base and the degree of time delay of the fuse. Fuses have two types of bases, the Edison Base (Type T fuses) and the Rejection Base (Type S fuses), also known as a "tamper-proof base". The Edison Base Type T fuse works with the typical socket used in the fuse box seen in older homes and the fuse base looks like a light bulb base. A Rejection Base Type S fuse actually consists of two components, an adapter base that screws and locks into the Edison socket in the fuse box, and the fuse itself. Each different amperage rating of a Type S fuse has a matching socket base adapter with a different sized thread that prevents mismatching (rejection base). It stops a person from putting a 20 Amp rated fuse in a 15 Amp circuit. Putting in higher rated fuses than a circuit was designed to handle was a problem with older homes. Once the wrong amperage fuse is installed you really can't tell it is improper because the wire size is the determinant of circuit capacity. So what happens is that people replace the wrong size fuse with another one since they assumed the blown fuse was correct. This resulted in many circuits being dangerously unprotected. Using a Type S fuse with its rejection base adapter prevents tampering or mistakes from being made.
Dryer venting. The question asked at a NACHI meeting was 'Are there codes for dryer vents?'. Yes there are. And here they are. Remember this changes from county to county and older homes are grandfathered in. Getting the moisture out of the house and not clogging full of lint are the objectives here.
IRC M1501.1 Dryer exhaust systems shall be independent of all other systems, shall convey the moisture outdoors and shall terminate outside of the building. Ducts shall be in accordance with manufacturers installation instructions. Screens shall not be used at the duct termination. Exhaust ducts shall not be connected with sheet metal screws or fasteners that extend into the duct. Exhaust ducts shall be equipped with a backdraft damper. Ducts shall be constructed of minimum .016 inch rigid metal ducts having smooth interior surfaces and joints running in the direction of air flow. Flexible transition ducts used to connect the dryer shall be in single lengths, not to exceed 8 feet and shall be listed in accordance with UL 2158A. Transition ducts shall not be concealed within construction.
This section shall not apply to listed and labeled condensating (ductless) clothes dryers.
M1501.2 Exhaust Duct Size. The diameter of the exhaust duct shall be as required by the clothes dryer's listing and the manufacturer's installation instructions.
M1501.3 Length Limitation. The maximum length of a clothes dryer exhaust duct shall not exceed 25 feet from the dryer location to the wall or roof termination. The maximum length of the duct shall be reduced 2.5 feet for each 45 degree bend and 5 feet for each 90 degree bend. The maximum length of the exhaust duct does not include the transition duct.
Where a clothes dryer booster fan is installed and listed and labeled for the application, the maximum length of the exhaust duct, including any transition duct, shall be permitted to be in accordance with booster fan manufacturer's installation instructions. Where a clothes dryer booster fan is installed and not readily accessible from the room the dryer located, a permanent identifying label shall be placed adjacent to where the exhaust duct enters the wall. The label shall bear the words "This Dryer Exhaust System is equipped with a remotely located booster fan".
NACHI Members-- Inspector Tip -- Most everyone expects electric 220-volt connection for Dryer. Note if the only connection for dryer is gas. Note if both are available as a plus. Also note if the gas pipe is capped. Sometimes there is no cap, just a valve in the closed position. This has to be capped in case they bring an electric dryer. The valve could get turned to the open position if someone were digging around trying to get a lost sock from behind the dryer and without the cap in place (with pipe dope) gas could leak out. Try to inspect the vent pipe in the attic for exhaust booster fans and to see if they terminate outside. Remember - no screens on the wall or roof vent termination. Most times you will not have a dryer available to test the operation of the booster fan. If there is a dryer in the house, ask permission to operate it or better yet have the owner or realtor operate it when you get in the attic. Not all booster fans are in the attic. Check for the label if possible. Be careful moving dryers- it is easy to tear or wrinkle vinyl flooring or mark up tile flooring. There is also the chance that you can pull the dryer loose from the exhaust vent and they can be a bear to put back sometimes. Stay away from the big dryers that match front loading washers-these can be heavy. Also remember that foil tape is better than general purpose duct tape. Foil tape is a lot stickier and stays on longer. Make usre that the back draft flapper is operating properly- momma does'nt want to open the dryer on a winter morning and get an artic blast in the face. Also birds, ect... love to nest in the end of the pipes.
SO YOUR HOUSE IS BUILT ON EXPANSIVE SOILS . . .
In East Tennessee we have expansive clay soils. Soil with the potential to shrink or swell are found throughout the United States and in almost all parts of the world. Soils with this shrink-swell potential create difficult performance problems for buildings constructed on these soils because as the soil water content increases, the soil swells and heaves upward and as the soil water content decreases, the soil shrinks and the ground surface recedes and pulls away from the foundation walls.The effect of expansive soil damage on a local, regional, or national scale is considerable. Among the first persons to attempt to quantify the extent of damage resulting from expansive soil movement were Jones and Holtz (1973), who estimated the annual cost of expansive soil damage in the U.S. -- an estimated $2.2 billion -- to exceed that caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods combined in an average year. Krohn and Slosson (1980) estimated the annual cost of expansive soil damage in the U.S. to be $7.0 billion in 1980. Krohn and Slosson further estimated that damages to single-family and commercial buildings accounted for nearly one-third of the total amount of damage resulting from expansive soils. An earlier damage survey conducted solely in Dallas County, Texas, identified 8,470 residential foundation failures which occurred in only one year (1974), 98 percent of which occurred in expansive soils (Wray, 1989)During periods of normal rainfall in our area it is very important to keep the water from ground water flow and from roof water from reaching our foundations in excessive amounts. Proper grade and drainage, periodic examination of foundation walls and crawl space areas can help to stop problems before major damage is done. Having roof water drain away from foundations is also critical. The amount of water that is captured and drained away from the foundation in the gutters and downspouts can create serious structural damage. Cleaning and maintaining gutters and downspouts and having gutter water diverted or piped away from foundations is critical. Overflowing gutters and improper drainage of gutter water are usually easy to avoid, but are a very common problem that we find during inspections. Now that we are in a drought what should we do? Many areas of the country employ the use of foundation watering systems. This is not an unusual situation. Many people with homes in the eastern half of Tennessee don't realize the clay soils are notorious for expanding in wet spells and shrinking in dry times. Most concrete slab foundations have been built to withstand limited movement, but extremes of either can buckle a foundation that is not maintained. "The key is to maintain an even moisture level in the soil around the house," says Jim Burris, Agricultural Extension Service housing specialist. Mike Matinez water-saving efforts during this year's drought came with a cost. He didn't keep a lush lawn. He didn't run up his utility bill. He didn't use water that might be better spent for human needs. And now he's facing a $10,000 bill. The Matinez home in College Station has a telltale crack in the brick veneer on one side of the house that can be traced across the foundation to the north side of the brick veneer and up to the wooden facing. His foundation literally cracked under the extreme dryness of this year's drought. "If I ever want to sell this house, it has to be fixed," Martinez said. "And that means about $10,000, according to the estimates I've gotten." I have been using a soaker hose on one sectin of foundation at a time. I lay the hose out and turn the faucet on just enough to get a small steady flow. My bushes must love the extra water they get. I leave the hose in one area for about 2 hours each morning while I get ready for work. Then the next day I move it to another position for 2 hours. My hope is to keep the soil moist enough during these dry times that it will maintain a steady position around my foundation walls and footers. And hopefully the dry times will soon pass and we will get back to more normal rainfall conditions.
ELECTRICAL TALKLet's talk about the electrical system in the house you are considering. Whenever I do an inspection, the deficiencies in the electrical system always get a lot of attention. Like all deficiencies, they can cost you money, but those in the electrical system can also "bite" you.
To begin with, let's make sure that we understand the difference between amps and volts. All dwellings are supplied with 120 volts, with a higher voltage of 240 volts. We used to call it 110 and 220 volts, but today it is closer to 120 and 240. The service panel (fuse box or circuit breaker panel) determines what maximum amperage you can get. The water analogy sometimes makes it easier to understand amps and volts. The voltage is like the water pressure. Higher voltage means the electrons are more energized, like "Arnold Schwarzenegger" electrons. The amperage is just a method of counting how many electrons come in to work. You hardly ever use all the amperage you are allowed, but the voltage is always the same.
Once you find the fuse box or circuit breaker panel, you should have easy access in front of the panel to inspect it or work on it. I have occasionally found a panel buried deep inside a closet with tons of stuff in front of it. If an emergency occurred, where someone might want to turn off the electricity quickly, they couldn't do it. It is important to have easy access to this important piece of equipment. The panel should not show a lot of corrosion. If it is a fuse panel, make sure there is an inside cover so that you can unscrew a fuse without the danger of touching a hot wire.
People assume that a circuit breaker is inherently safer than a fuse. Actually, in a corrosive environment, a circuit breaker could freeze in the "on" position and fail to "trip" when an emergency actually occurs. A fuse just has a frangible link that melts when too much current passes through it. The circuit breaker can be easily reset, but you have to go to the hardware store and buy a new fuse when it blows. There are problems with fuses, including the potential for putting a penny behind them. The biggest problem was that we made the 15, 20 and 30 amp fuses with the same screw base so that they were interchangeable. It took Uncle Elmer about three trips to the hardware store before he discovered that the green fuses didn't cost any more then the crummy blue fuses and they lasted a lot longer! Most old wiring was rated at 15 amps, and, therefore, needed a fuse rated at 15 amps. These fuses were almost always blue. The green fuses were almost always rated at 30 amps. Using a fuse (or breaker) that is too large allows the wire to overheat and possibly cause a fire.
There are only a few places where you can actually see the wiring in a house. If you climb up into the attic or crawl into the underfloor crawl space, the wiring is there for you to see. If you have a basement with an unfinished ceiling, the wiring can be visible as it passes through holes in the floor joists above you. The theory is that someday you will nail gypsum wallboard up on the ceiling and cover the wiring (and plumbing and heating ducts). If the wiring is stapled to the bottom edges of the floor joists, that's a code violation. It may seem like a small difference in location, but it turns it into a code violation. In the garage, if you have an unfinished wall, the wiring can be visible if it passes through holes in the studs. Again, it is assumed that someday you will nail gypsum wallboard up on the walls and hide the wiring.
The wiring used before the second world war was called "knob-and-tube" wiring. The hot and neutral wires were kept separate and protected with ceramic knobs and tubes. We had to keep them separate because the insulation in those days was not very good. We hadn't yet invented plastic, which makes a very good electrical insulator. In those early days, connections were made without junction boxes. The wires were coiled together and soldered and taped with friction tape. That is legal today only by the "grandfather" clause. If you see modern "Romex" wiring attached to knob-and-tube wiring without a box, it is not legal. People always ask if knob-and-tube wiring is safe. In my inspections, I have not found a lot of dead bodies lying around old knob-and-tube wiring, so it must not be terribly unsafe. Seriously, knob-and-tube is somewhat less safe than modern wiring. In the same way, grounded wiring is somewhat safer than ungrounded wiring. The difference in safety is not enough to warrant declaring that all old houses need to be rewired. There are a number of lending institutions that say they will not lend money on houses with knob-and-tube wiring, and there are insurance companies that say they will not insure houses with knob-and-tube wiring. If a house was originally wired with knob-and-tube wiring (any house built before the second world war), the chances are it still has some knob-and-tube wiring somewhere that is still active. When the kitchen is redone, it gets new wiring. The addition on the rear may have new wiring, but somewhere in the house there are lights or outlets still using knob-and-tube wiring. A house has to be "gutted" to replace all of the wiring, and this seldom happens. My experience is that something like 50% of houses built before the second world war still have some knob-and-tube wiring.
It would be nice to know if your "new" house has any aluminum wiring. Aluminum wiring caused some fires when it was first introduced in the smaller guage wire sizes. It is still common to use larger guage aluminum for circuits such as ranges and heat pumps. The aluminum wire that was introduced in smaller gauges has the bad habit of not making a good connection. If you tightened that stuff down tight enough to make a good connection, chances are it would break the wire or crimp it down too small so that it would not carry the amperage properly and that generated too much heat-- FIRE!!! Aluminum wire can be made safe without completely replacing it, but this should be done by an electrical contractor. There are special splices that allow copper to be spliced on to the aluminum in a manner that the two dissimilar metals do not touch and the connection is made with special crimp tool . To see if you have any aluminum wire, you have the choice of taking off all the outlet and light switch cover plates, or removing the cover for the circuit breaker panel.
All connections in the wiring must be inside a junction box of some type. The box can be metal or plastic, round or square, as long as it is a UL-approved box with a cover. If you see an electrical cable with a big gob of black tape at one spot, it is probably a connection. This can be dangerous and must be placed inside a junction box. This is one of the most common electrical deficiencies we find that is of importance. Many times, I have gone up into the attic and found electrical connections with no box where the homeowner has been adding a new light or ceiling fan.
Another thing we are always interested in determining is if "Mr. Homeowner" has been doing his own electrical work. There are several things that would indicate this:
1. Sloppy wiring, or wiring that is visible in the living area
2. Three-hole outlets that are not grounded
3. "Pay-N-Pak" stickers on some of the equipment
4. Reverse polarity on the outlets
Usually I can look at the wiring and tell if the person who did it was any good.
I like to check the polarity of the outlets as go through the house. Polarity refers to the fact that one of the slots in your outlets is short and one is long. The short one is supposed to be the hot wire, and the tall slot is supposed to be the neutral wire that has no voltage. The neutral wire is the return wire for the electrons after they have done their work. When the outlets are installed 'ground down' an electrician calls that 'monkey face'. The "mouth" below the two "eyes" is supposed to be for the ground wire. It never has any voltage or amperage unless something has gone wrong. It is for emergencies only. Houses built before about 1963 did not have wiring with that extra ground wire, so in those houses, the outlets should have only two slots. In a lot of cases when outlets in an older home have been changed to three prong outlets I will use a special meter that tells me if the outlet is wired properly. The meter can also tell me if the white wire has been used to simulate a ground wire - a condition that would appear normal to any standard test equipment.
If you want extra safety, you can install the newer outlets with the two push buttons. They are called GFCI outlets, which stands for "ground fault circuit interrupter." A regular fuse or circuit breaker breaks the circuit only if the flow of electrons exceeds the rating on the fuse or breaker. Sometimes, this is way too late. The GFCI outlet does something different from a regular fuse or breaker. It has a current transformer that compares the current coming in on the black (hot) wire to the amount of current going out on the white (neutral) wire. If it senses a difference in potential of 6 miliamps or more it trips. The way it is designed is that it 'assumes' that if there is a difference in potential that the extra 6 miliamps is going somewhere it should not - maybe into a person - so it trips. These are really good advances in electrical safety - but sadly they seem to get installed incorrectly as much as they do correctly. (I have no idea why so many of them get hooked up wrong - it's pretty simple.) They were first required in about 1978 in bathroom, garage and exterior outlets. In 1990, the kitchen was added. If your new house is older and was not required to have these (grandfathered in) it is a recommended upgrade.
There are other things that can be important about the electrical system, but this is a good start.
If you have a tip or need an answer, email me. If you have not seen your tip yet, just hang on its coming. Make sure to let me know if you want credit for your tip.
Whats Happening
This time last year the calls for mold inspections were three to one over radon calls. With the lack of rain recently the mold calls have dropped off quite a bit and are about to be passed by radon requests. We have two monitors in use and one has been sent off for annual calibration (always ask about calibration records), so we should be ready for the summer season.
Many folks already know that Knox and Blount counties are rated by the EPA as being in the highest radon levels in the nation, and that radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the US. What most folks don't know is how easy and inexpensive it is to test their home.
My office is in a finished area of our basement and this is the kind of place where testing should be done. I spend a lot of time down there working so I have high exposure level. The effects of radon are increased over time from exposure and from elevated levels. The EPA sets their high tolerance level at 4 pCi/L. This means that more than 4 pico curies of radon per liter of air in a living area is too much. But what they consider is a reasonable average time that a person might occupy a space. There is a likelyhood that you or your family members might be in a living space more than average or less than average amounts of time depending on how you ustilize the space. This would be the exposure time. If there is an elevated level of radon in an area that is occupied it would be a good idea to take measures to reduce that level as much as possible. About 5 years ago I tested my basement and found that I had 5.2 pCi/L. That is pretty high. More than I want to spend a lot of time in and more than I want my family to be exposed to. So I had to reduce the level of radon in my house. Thats where mitigation comes in. Mitigation is actually pretty easy. Having someone that can do it without making a mess or putting the system in an unsightly place is usually the hardest part. What is mitigation- simply put it takes a negative pressure on your slab or your crawlspace. Uranium 238 is decaying in the soil somewhere near or under your house. It will travel along the path of least resistance, so it could be quite a ways from your house and finds a crack in bedrock or a easy path through soil and comes right up under your house. Then it finds an opening in your slab from a crack, plumbing opening or whatever is the easiest way to travel. It could even be in your crawlspace which usually has no concrete slab, so it is a lot easier to penetrate. So mitigation is simply adding a special fan by drilling into the slab or crawl space and piping in a fan that draws the radon gas out of the slab area and forces it out of the house. Pretty simple. But there are some rules- like, don't have the fan expel the gas next to a screen porch or a window. I have even seen where the fan pumped right up to the eaves of a home where the attic was a storage area, outboard of a bedroom. When we tested the house to see if their new radon mitigation system was working we tested that bedroom storage, just see if it had elevated levels- and it did. Testing for radon is easy and so is mitigation, if you know what you are doing.
I hope this information helps clarifiy some of the radon mystery. I get a lot of calls with a lot of really good questions. I might not be able to answer them all, but I can direct you to a place where you might find your answer. Feel free to call, I'd love to hear from you.
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