Please, please, please read the instructions.

JUGHNE

Ed, that is Ted Cook.
Always interesting videos.
He is always looking for installers and will pay well.
But.....attic or crawl space....seldom even a furnace room.
He often has to follow up on his own installers to correct their minor mess ups.
But I am fairly sure he would check out any gas change over to LP himself.
He only works in fairly new houses and they are still loaded with hack installs.
Permits....inspections....we don't need any stinking permits! git er done!

I just watched an interview with Ted. He and another HVAC guy talking about workmanship. They mentioned another tech who install pipes and duct like a "Yankee"....meaning picture perfect. Straight, plumb and square. Rare down there apparently.
And to think most of the "Yankee" installs are buried in a crawlspace or attic.

mattmia2

So i see, especially in AV, is all decisions being made on price, we select contractors on price, the local companies get bought by national companies where how quickly they can do something is the only that matters, they don't care if it works. They have some people that are decent but they are scheduled such that they have about 1/3 the time they need to do a job right, they don't have time to read instructions or figure out weird problems. Most of their good techs leave when they find something else(but their good techs rarely would fix something because they didn't have time to). They are being managed by people that don't understand their work.

I think it is the same thing with new construction and the GC trying to keep as much money as possible and banks building larger projects trying to pay the GC as little as possible. If you know what you are doing, there are options where you don't have to deal with this race to the bottom so good people don't end up on these jobs(or mostly in trades in general).

JakeCK

EBEBRATT-Ed said:

@JUGHNE and anyone else that watches HVAC u tube videos. Try "antidiyhvac. I think he is in NC or SC. Anyhow. Hack hvac jobs are the norm down there. Mostly gas (natural or propane) or electric AHUs and some heat pumps furnaces in attics or real nasty crawl spaces. Nothing is right down there IMHO. CSST run all over the place and the wiring is just awful, lack of plenums and mostly all flex duct. It's just the "normal trade practice" or the "way it is" down there" I would hesitate to lay my head on a pillow in any of those houses And I am not picking on this fellow's channel, it's just what he is faced with.

You know, I've never really thought about it but now that I've seen several of you mention it I've heard there is a difference between the north and south. A good friend of mine who's a mechanic moved to Greenville SC over a decade ago. He was the first I remember mentioning anything along those lines. Both regarding work ethic on the job, and that his family liked the much more lax building codes where they could pretty much do what they wanted to the house.

Another person I know, a former co-worker, grew up on the sc/nc boarder near Myrtle Beach. He had made more than one comment over the years about these different attitudes. One thing I remember him telling me was how his father had rebuilt their entire house and added an addition. I got the very strong impression it was all done sans any inspections. Both because of his attitude and because of some of the things he said his father did raised eyebrows. At the time I asked how his father could have built an entire addition without any permits and his attitude was almost insolent about it. 
It was not much of a loss when he quit either. 

Another thing to consider about this is poverty can be much worse. Yea there's poverty up north but everytime I've driven away from the highway down south I've been taken aback by the extreme level of poverty...
Or extreme level of income inequality might be a better way to look at it. And that change seems evident even in northern states like Ohio as you drive south. 

Jamie Hall

Ever been in rural New Hampshire, @JakeCK ? Or some of the odder corners of any of the northern cities? Or parts of Oakland, California? The poverty is just as bad, and -- at least in the cities like Oakland -- the inequality staggering. At least down south in the country you can eek out a living, one way or another, without hurting others. A person with no money in a northern city doesn't have much in the way of choices.

JakeCK

I'm not claiming that there isn't bad pockets of poverty and inequality else where in the US. But in the south it's wide spread, and might be a contributing factor? Just look at the statistics. Or are they wrong?

Paul Pollets

Boiler inspections are spotty in WA state. Seattle has a boiler department and requires a permit and inspection of all installations. Commercial installations are inspected by the state. Unincorporated King county does not require a residential boiler permit or inspection. Very few city boiler inspectors (except Seattle or Bellevue) have a background in boilers. A manual test of the LWCO and MRHL are required for Seattle inspection. I'm interested to see if smoke or CO detectors will fall under the building inspector's purvue, the electrical inspector (if it's hard wired) or the boiler inspector?

SlamDunk

Here in NC, there have been boom times when homes went up so fast that steps were skipped. Made the news when they started going up for sale and buyers' inspectors were shutting down home sales due to the defects. Municipal Inspectors were not able to keep up during construction. We're in the middle of another boom. We'll see it again, I am sure.

Jakek

Perhaps this is beside the point but that article was impressively reported and written, particularity for a small town community newspaper. I had to go back and check it wasn't an industry publication. That's the sort of Journalism which can save lives by being so detailed. Nice to read they went as far as to interview most of the contractors and then went back to check their word vs the local code.

Most news outlets would have reported it only as a "Heating malfunction" and left it at that.

JakeCK

Jakek said:

Perhaps this is beside the point but that article was impressively reported and written, particularity for a small town community newspaper. I had to go back and check it wasn't an industry publication. That's the sort of Journalism which can save lives by being so detailed. Nice to read they went as far as to interview most of the contractors and then went back to check their word vs the local code. Most news outlets would have reported it only as a "Heating malfunction" and left it at that.

So true. And for everything else as well. Social media and the internet has ruined everything. I have a high school friend who was a sports writer. Just had a class reunion a few months ago where we were talking about this too. He went to college for journalism, combining his love of sports and writing. Today he is a manager at a Kalahari. Print news is dead and everything is sensationalized for clicks and likes.

I miss the early days of the internet when those who used it needed at least two functioning brain cells to get online. And most actually had a legitimate reason to use it.

Condoman

I am commenting about the responses regarding what is being taught in high school these days. We live in a small town that supports farming. Without our own high school the kids that live here have multiple choices for high schools. One school has an excellent agriculture curriculum. Another is a state operated technical school for the trades and the final school is a world renowned academy.

We know kids that have attended each of these schools and are well on their way to careers that will make them good community members. I am aware not everyone in America has these choices but, some kids still can get it.

DanHolohan

For your consideration:

https://heatinghelp.com/blog/tracks-and-animals/

Paul Pollets

So true...