News from the CO front

Steamhead

which I attended last night with a friend who is in the home-inspection business. The speaker was with BGE-Home, an "affiliate" of Baltimore Gas & Electric that does equipment installation.

He was saying that if you hooked a 90%-plus furnasty into a chimney, and there was an atmospheric water heater on the same flue, the furnasty could backdraft thru the water heater's draft hood for up to ten minutes! His reason was that "a properly adjusted unit will not produce CO".

HELLO!!!???!!!!! Earth Calling BGE-Home!!!!!

I was ready to explode at this man, but the ASHI members beat me to it. Seems they were better-educated than BGE-Home's sales force! Maybe they've been reading Tim McElwain's manuals?

Those of you who have had bad experiences with home inspectors should take heart. I met some great people at the meeting who really want to raise the level of their profession. Oh, and the food was great too!





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Firedragon_4

I've had the honor

to teach several groups of ASHI members and they are not teh 'dumb' home inspectors many tradespeople make them out to be. In addition, many know more than a lot of the hacks in HVAC, FACT!

Steamhead

FD, I wouldn't be surprised

if some of your former students were there last night. I was impressed, FACT!

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Larry_7

Backdrafts

Maybe the guy misspoke and meant to refer to 80+% furnaces. I've seen a number of those cause backdrafts in water heaters the entire time the furnace is on. Haven't seen the problem when connectors were separately connected to the house flue. The ones I've seen were common before entering a B vent stack. Usually re-configuring how the connectors enter the main vent corrects the problem. I don't think it occurs to many furnace installers to check other draft hood appliances connected with furnace running.

I hope most home inspectors would condemn a 90+ vented into a chimney whether it causes other appliances to backdraft or not. It could get expensive having the chimney replaced every year or so.

Larry

Steamhead

Could be....

I doubt he anticipated the knowledge that ASHI audience had. He had to back-pedal a few times.......

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Mark Hunt

Fan assisted

draft appliances at 80%+ AFUE will destroy masonry chimnies in no time flat. These pics were taken in a home we performed an energy audit in recently.

The furnace was vented into an exterior masonry lined chimney, or at least it WAS masonry lined! ALL of the flue gases from this furnace were venting into the basement because the clay liner had rotted and collapsed.

After we installed the new chimney liner the owner said that it was the first time he had EVER seen "smoke" coming out of the chimney!!!

Home inspectors in this area do not check heating appliances beyond whether they are operational or not.



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Mad Dog

I'm sure there are SOME home inspectors that actually know

what they are talkin about, George, but of the dozens I've come across only 1 or 2 were competent. The biggest problem with them is that they weigh in and comment, and critique things they have no business doing. Example: We had a job several months ago repiping a real steam butcher job. "another" contractor thought it was a good idea to "relocate" all the steam mains, so the ho's could "finish" the basement. To make a long story short. We repiped the boiler and turned it into a vapor system ( Very low pressure)just to get it working right - Had it cutting out on 12 ounces...finally working right. Fast foward to last week...ho now selling house.....HO "....you have to come over...the home inspector is here, and says the boiler is not working right..." So, I fly over to meet the nosy fella. I walk to the boiler room, where, he and the prospective ho are waiting to ambush me: "the pressures all wrong here...its supposed to be 5 pounds when its running...there's too much water in the boiler....it doesn't have good draft...and it smells when it starts up..." Now, the lady selling the house is in there too, they're all looking to hang me. The Inquisition was in full swing!!!!!! I started: "ma'am, tell the gentlemen what was happenning before we fixed this." "we'll, the boiler would run for 30 minutes and then shut off on low water...and then, the basement zone, which is supposed to be independent would get blazing hot - even though the thermostat was off....also..tons of banging and most of the radiators spit water." Ok, I replied, and how has it been since we corrected the piping? Great, she said, quiet, doesn't go off any more and basement won't overheat. With her put in her place I turned to the other two doubters: "sir, did you know that the Empire State building works on 4 pounds of steam pressure?" "uhhhh!!! No! I didn't. The lower the steam pressure the less the fuel spent the better,this is a goood thing!!!! oK? "Ok I get that." Now, I said, " what was your draft guage reading?" "We'll, I uhhhhhh" I figured he had at least tried the smoking match trick, but no not even that - just his "feeling' because the boiler room was warm. Made to look the fool twice, he tried to recover: "well, that water line is still too high!!!" At this point I directed my maglight to a black magic marker line I had drawn on the jacket: "see this here? This is where it is supposed to be filled to, as i looked at the lady. She blushed and then recalled that indeed I had shown her that back when the job was done., but had been overfilling it. All my foes defeated I left, with everyone now being nice to me - what a turn of events from when I walked in...."Hey, guy, do you have a card, I could use you on some inspections...the lady..."Can I get you some coffee Matt???" and the prospectus " Yeah leave me a card, we'll be needing some work done.." Another "engineer's report" on another job wrote that "the newly installed hot water boiler is "wrong" because the circulator is on the supply side of the boiler." This almost hung up the sale of the house, and I had to embarrass this chap too. I'm going to start charging for these situations. I think many in this field like to act like they are "engineers' (and they let a lot of ho's think they are). I regard them as lightweights unless they can show me they are not. They are much like security guards at The mall. They dress like cops try to act like them, but they ain't got NO GUNS!!!!!! Mad Dog

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Steamhead

The hacks are certainly out there

but from what I've seen, the industry wants to better itself. Can't argue with that, can we? In this case they knew more than the guy from BGE-Home.

BTW- is that the Ultimate Drop Header or what? Beautiful job!

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Steamhead

I remembered seeing those pics

but couldn't remember what type of furnasty was involved. Thanks for the update, Mark.

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Mad Dog

True enough Steamking

i would like to see more of 'em - less headaches for all of us. Cool job huh. I really went out on a limb with that one but she works fine Thanks When you comin up??? Mad Dog

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Unknown

Actually the ASHI folks

turned me down when I offered my services to do some training. They hired an ex marketing rep from one of the utilities to do their training.

Steamhead

Tim, I think

they will reconsider that at some point. Maybe sooner than you think!

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rudy_2

Like Steamhead said.....

alot of home inspectors do want to improve their skills. I just got back from a NAHI (National Association of Home Inspectors) meeting. A bunch of folks gave up a Saturday to come and attend training sessions on mold, structural issues and, of course, carbon monoxide.

Interesting, most tested for CO, the biggest problem they have is finding a heating contractor that has test instruments to follow up and take care of the problem.....

Sounds like a 'business opportunity' to me. I'd suggest hooking up with your local home inspectors and letting them know you have test instruments and know how to use 'em.

Years back, I worked with a local home inspector (retired building contractor) who called me in a bunch of times for a second opinion. Worked out great, most of his business was in the springtime when my work was tapering off.

The hvac system was slowing down a home sale so everybody (realitor, seller and buyer) had a vested interest in getting it take care of asap. Most of the time there was no "I'll need a couple of other bids", it was "How soon can you do it".

Mark Hunt

Good idea


I will start calling inspection companies next week.

Many of the folks we have done Energy Audits for have said that if they ever buy another home, they will call us to perform an audit before they buy it.

I never would have guessed the number of homes that have serious problems.

Mark H

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