Inspecting Four HVAC Systems

hey everyone i'm ben gromicko from internachi and this is an internet u webinar we do free live online webinars open to everyone you don't have to be a home inspector you can just join in and today we're doing a webinar it's unique where we have four master inspectors in four different locations inspecting for HVAC systems and and feel free to ask questions if you're attending the webinar live there's probably a little question box you can tap that and ask your questions or a little chat box if you're watching this on youtube live you can ask your questions there what we're gonna do is a round robin we're gonna I'm going to ask each inspector to provide us about 10 to 15 minutes worth of their inspection tips their process on how they inspect a heating system that they're in front of you don't have to follow their tasks it's really what they're sharing on how they do their home inspections and inspect the HVAC systems in their own way there is a standard though it's the internet see home inspection standards and we'll get to that in just a second but we have with us internachi certified professional inspectors Daniel : char's belfontaine marks tango and Rob Klaus and according to the home inspections standards of practice oh wait I wanted to show you a couple URLs so we're at natural slash webinars that's any c-h-i dot org slash webinars and if you need help with anything with training or online courses or internachi feel free to email the education team at internachi that's at internachi education at internachi org education at internachi org and i also wanted to share with you some home inspection checklists so it's a really long URL and I apologize for that but it's a natural slash home - inspection - checklist if you'd go there we provide a bunch of checklists that you could use there's a home inspection checklist there's a gas furnace inspection checklist there's a pool and spa checklist there's a radon mitigation inspection checklist it goes on and on and on if you take a look at the gas furnace inspection checklist that pops up is the standards of practice and according to the internet GE home inspection standards of practice the home inspector is required to inspect the heating system using normal operating controls the inspector shall describe the location of the thermostat of the system the energy source and the heating method the inspector shall inspect readily accessible and visible visible portions of the chimney connected to the heating system where applicable and the inspector shall report as needed correction any heating system that didn't operate and if the heating system was deemed inaccessible and those terms accessible and readily accessible and accessible are actually defined in the standards of practice and also our glossary and if you go through the checklist at that URL you'll see a checklist on how to perform a gas furnace inspection and I recommend taking a look at that checklist and go through it and if you have a mobile device you can keep that checklist with you as you perform an inspection so you I do that so I can look smarter and I don't make any mistakes so there's that URL there Nachi org slash home inspection checklist and the first person up that we have is Charles and let's see Charles is there and I'm gonna see my screen yeah hopefully everybody can hear me okay yep I think so Charles terrific so my name is Charles belfontaine and for for Charlie I've been doing home inspections since I think around 1993 we did open up a school here in Illinois and I don't know what else there is to it I just love looking at houses and talking about this stuff I'm a little bit of a nerd so my home I do have a basically less than two year old high-efficiency furnace and that's what's shown in the background and when we do our home inspections we're a little bit more I should say technically exhaustive then it's from the most so the biggest pound of Rory's gonna find with the forced air furnace is the cracked heat exchanger a hole in the heat exchanger something that makes this thing unsafe that we want to do it so one of the first things that I'm going to look at is down underneath in the floor fan so if you can get under this area here and shine a flashlight in there that should be dry now this isn't going to be a telltale sign that there's a hole or a crack in the heat exchanger but if there's rust condensation or anything else there shouldn't be there so it could come from the humidifier overflowing it could come from the air conditioning overflowing what we don't want it to come from is a hole in the secondary heat exchanger and usually going to get the condensation that absorbs into Dan and then that eats away at the secondary heat exchanger and drips down on the floor so if everything is drying just a fantastic sign with it then we're also gonna see if I can do this right way up there is the blower door cutoff switch and you could probably butt all the way in in the upper left of your screen on the furnace you see that white little switch down there make sure those are connected if you're calling for heat obviously it shouldn't start up when that doors off that's kind of the simple things then we open up the top and I had to put the blower door back on otherwise the unit isn't gonna run for me I'm you know kind of particularly you know I like to people should know how all the different parts on these things and the sequence of the startup and as long as you know what it's supposed to do when something's not right you're gonna be able to start diagnosing and figure out what's going on or what might be broken you know I'm always want to want to know more so the steps of operation and also the components that are in here I think are important so the first thing is going to help in our thermostat is gonna call for heat once that happens then right in here is our inducer fam that's gonna start spinning once they an inducer fans start spinning it's gonna create a positive pressure and the exhaust over here negative pressure inside the heat exchanger down lower we have these pressure switches down here this particular furnace has two pressure switches one of them goes to the inducer fan and the other one goes to the secondary heat exchanger I should be making a positive pressure in one and a negative pressure in the other so backing up a little bit thermostat cause for heat the computer says yeah let's start turning the furnace on the inducer thing and start spinning the computer doesn't know if the feelings are broken or the motors burned out so it needs to have some way to verify that your apt is being created those pressure switches that are on there they basically they'll flip and that way the computer knows that it's ready to go once that gets past that stage then up at the top is where my burners are and we're gonna have a silicon igniter up there the next stage is it's gonna start glowing orange there usually but the computer lets that happen for about 5-10 seconds then it turns on the the gas valve and start setting gas up in there there's also going to be a flame sensor in there or some sort of thermocouple up in there something to verify that that gas is ignited that's also sends a signal back to the computer saying okay we're good up to this stage and keep moving forward if we didn't make a fire then obviously the whole furnace would shut down the next step is after that is the blower fan kicks on and it's gonna start circulating air to the house one of the things we look at is the data plate on these things and I look at a temperature rise and a simple turkey thermometer you could put it up in the plenum and start taking those readings and let me go back and switch to the main furnace so this would be taken way up there usually whether the humidifier is I could find an opening where the air-conditioning lines come into it um and that's gonna have a reading usually it's a 30 degree spread so depending on the furnace will be like 25 to 55 or 40 to 70 whatever it is so if it's 70 degrees in the house and I got it two-sixty rise it should be anywhere from 100 130 degrees up in there and these furnaces are designed that as much heat as it's created it's gonna pull that heat out of the furnace and send it into the room so if all of a sudden it starts getting higher than a 130 degrees one of the first things I like to check for is the air filters so I'm gonna pull that out if the unit is running boom I'm gonna look at it anyway just to make sure it's clean but if my temperatures start dropping down that's actually a good sign where it comes with it um if they don't well then there's a possibility that our blower fans on the wrong speed or maybe our air conditioning coil is clogged Nega just end up being a lot of other problems other sensors you know so way in the back right above the you'll see a couple lines going in there now it's gonna be a square little thermostat or sensor in there that's gonna be my high limit sensor that's also going to indicate on the data plate when that turns the furnace on most of them are somewhere between 165 and 185 degrees I've seen some of them up to 190 but nonetheless if the temperature gets up to that high then the whole unit shuts down so if you have a hole in the heat exchanger if my blower fan is not working if I have a clog in the air-conditioning Club my air filters restricting flow these are all things that slow the airflow going over the top and can cause it to overheat and come in there shutdown is kind of in Reverse the first thing that shuts down is gonna be our flame the inducer fan keeps going we're gonna let the furnace cool down to somewhere around 100 degrees after that point there's just not enough usable heat you know to send through the room so as long as that metal is intact we're good I like to get out before I check for time on this is there's kind of three different safety things that are built into a furnace and by no means doesn't mean that if you have one bad thing you can ignore the others alright but let's say the first thing is going to be our gas air mixture if it's you know in good shape then we're gonna be producing hardly any carbon monoxide whatsoever if it's a bad gasser we get high levels of carbon monoxide then obviously if we have a hole or crack that can come into the breathing air as well number two is going to be the heat exchanger itself so we're gonna have the fire inside the metal box inside the heat exchanger we're gonna blow air outside the heat exchanger as long as all that it's intact then there's no way for the carbon monoxide again to get into the circulation air and then the third safety feature is going to be our pressure differentials so since we're gonna have an inducer fan creating a negative pressure inside the heat exchanger because they have blower fan is after the fire after the heat exchanger and that's gonna create a negative pressure inside and then the blower fan is before the sheet exchanger and that's on the outside of the heat exchanger so if I do have a hole air is gonna be flowing into the heat exchanger instead of carbon monoxide coming out of the heat exchanger sometimes you can look at the flames if the hole is way up high by the the tubes or the flames themselves where the heat exchanger is sometimes a flame will flicker or do something weird truthfully with these metal port burners I would never be able to recognize that we take it a step further in our company we use combustion analyzers we know what the oxygen levels are gonna be we know what the gas level should be when they come to the end of it and then we run those things if you like I could go ahead and do that but it'll take about a minute so I could always do that later after somebody else has a chance I did see that one question underneath there but I don't know yeah yeah maybe do the combustion analyzer later if we have time and John asks do you test the heating system in the summertime I do you know there's it's an inconvenience you know that's about it but to me this is one of the big expensive items in a home you know so I'm pretty aggressive when it comes to the furnace foundation and the heating system quite frankly so yes I do air conditioning we don't because we get cold temperature here and let me rephrase it air conditioning we don't test in the colder weather just because we don't want to take a chance of pushing liquid through the compressor so when do you draw that line for wintertime and and you know what the goin thing around here is 65 degrees I think it's pretty conservative but I don't want to buy an air conditioner so we're gonna go with the conservative number of 65 degrees cool and what is the catagory furnace category behind you is a low mid high it's a high efficiency category for furnace which means that it's a condensing furnace so usually we're gonna create somewhere between three and five hundred degrees worth of heat and we're gonna capture ninety-five percent of that heat ninety-five percent of the heat is gonna go inside the house so five percent is gonna be sent out there plastic pipe because we have such a great temperature change we will be creating condensation right that condensation is very classic I'm one of the reasons why we have to use plastic pipes in that metal pipes because if somebody did try to put a metal pipe on this and I am seeing it once then condensation will eat through the end about a year or two usually by the time we get there it's already through and then you're dumping carbon monoxide straight into the house obviously that's a problem so it needs to be plastic one more thing to get on the bottom of the floor is where my condensate collector is right underneath here yellow hose that you see going across so thats collecting condensation from the secondary heat exchanger that's also pouring into there and then that goes to a floor drain it's not customary here in Chicago that we put any neutralizers or anything like that we just kind of send everything straight into it I don't know if that's customary in other parts of the country but not here yeah that's pretty common not to neutralize it go through all that cool Charles and again if anybody has any questions we'll try to answer them as we go I think mark you're up next I'm ready all right show us what you got all right well this is my simpler system it's a 80% efficient forced air gas furnace originally installed when I purchased this house six years ago it has some common elements to Charles system and we've added a few other things to it but initially we have an inducer fan that comes on and unlike Charles system we have a conventional chimney goes from single fan to be vent all the way up to the roof through another story and we always check our furnace vents very carefully that's one thing that we we like to do we look at they do a roof inspection on a regular home we check the vents for a rust and leakage and we often find that they've been they're deteriorated and need to be replaced and upgraded and older homes this furnace has the same come I've already removed this front cover and here you see the burners and in this area you see the control system and it's not on now because you have the safety interlock which is here that turn everything off when you pull up the cover so what I'm going to do is fire this thing up in just a second go up and show you the thermostat and here we have an April air steam injection system and that's one thing we've added to enhance our perception of warmth in this Colorado climate we inject steam into the system when the furnace is running and that he made a Faiz the house and we like to keep it about 35% and it keeps you it keeps you feeling warmer so at this point I'm going to go upstairs and turn on the thermostat churn so essentially you've got a humidifier but it's actually creating steam yeah it's an electric steam humidifier and it has a cartridge that's replaced every some of the years depending on your your concentration of contaminants in your water yep and different from Charles's heating system you had a category one not a high efficiency now 80% efficient and it's pretty much the second generation now here I'm turning up my thermostat at 72 in the house now and I'm turning it up to trying to turn it up to he doesn't want to go above 70 for some reason mm-hmm well I'm gonna circumvent the control system Oh those darn electric high efficiency thermostats I hate them yeah I mean they're they're smarter than we are we want to run some people like to keep their house very warm so at this point I'm gonna go grab fortunately I'm in my workshop lab area here and I can get a clip lead in the connector is exposed to run a humidifier and I'm going to now clip lead these two connectors here to do that and we'll start the furnace up and we'll go through the cycles of operation so you're gonna do something that a home inspector would never do this is only because this way too smart for me and I would never I have done this when the thermostat is bad to do a quick test on carbon monoxide yep would always stood by now here my furnace is starting the inducer fan has started setting up the artificial draft as a Charles system does and the previous generation of furnaces that was out there the a 60% earth and even before that the 60% the Senators did not have that they would start and they would have to have a natural draft now here you can see the igniter getting ready to ignite the heating up it's a hot hot surface igniter and those sometimes do go out that's a maintenance issue and then here is the furnace running and the hot air is going up through that fan you see up above now one of the next things that I do after I've verified that the flames are operating burning quickly and of course in this furnace you can check for any dust accumulation or dirt buildup and I always look for that as well I have here a carbon monoxide sensor that I use frequently it's a can you see this one okay yep you know and I carry this with me it's like a dose meter but once the burner starts once the fan comes on and I hear it coming on now I'll go to a heat vent you know it only has to run for a few seconds for about 10 seconds but here's one in here in the hot air is already coming out and you can see I'm the sensor opening is right there and there's also a tube you can put on there as well you let this run for about a minute and then you're able to determine if there's a carbon monoxide level and I'm still at zero now and I'm have tested this system many times so I'm assured that it's burning properly and there's no leaks in a heat exchanger but one other thing that is good to do I'm turning this off now is that when the system shuts down sometimes you'll have back full of carbon monoxide come through come down into the chimney and exhaust into the heating room and you get some indication of the efficiency and the performance of the chimney and the blower system once that happens and it's going to shut down and now what's going through the cooling cycle again this this right has a diaphragm system here to make sure that fan is operating correctly when it does and then we also have the burner system itself the ignite it also has its own safety system that will not allow the system to move forward in ignite if it's not operating correctly and then in this furnace you can see two little red and green lights beeping and there's a legend on the front of the furnace and that tells me that everything is operating normally so based on on this indication I'm saying this furnace is in good safe operating condition what was the most filter I always think that's the one of the first things to do I spear filters here's the filter chamber and it's not it's tough to open right now and so this furnace has like an oil canning thing that it does when it ends and that's always an indication to me that the vent system has an issue and there's pretty high pressure in there and actually since I've owned this house I've determined that the vent system is under sized the return path is but the house does warm properly so I'm pleased what the front of says it is and I look forward to some day years ahead that I would update it to a nice front of system high fishin see one like Charles desk one other thing I want to mention is that this home has a large vent here that you can see six inch vent goes directly outside and there's another one up above right here and that brings combustion air into this mechanical room which contains both the furnace and the hot water here and you need that because it's not category four you're not drawing the inner directly from the outside you know that combustion air menís Amana air and many houses built and you know say over 20 year ago in this area do not have that combustion air supply so basically what you're doing is you're burning air that you've already paid the heat to heat your house in whatever air is coming into your house is leaking in your house through various defects in construction and our just other venting systems that exist like your bathroom vents and so on and in the world of building science we'd like to understand those things so we also in our business we do blower door testing some some duct testing duct leakage testing for energy efficient measurements I'm a Colorado licensed engineer as well and we do other environmental tests for inside the home for air quality as well you know particles maldehyde organic other organic compounds they're coming off your furniture and off of carpet products and such we like to think about that too because there is in this area there's a real high concern about your environmental health in particular so John asks are the vent pipes stamped to what type they are well this this one is a single wall but up above is its be vent and it's not stamped but I know it's being meant because I've installed it plenty of times and I'm very familiar with it yep yeah I didn't see it on the don't see a stamp on it it can be very well the event is the event and we don't have a code requirement to look at a stamp on the be venting yeah it can be it can be imprinted into the pipe itself but rarely do we actually need to look at that from 10 feet away you should be able to tell the category of the furnace and what type of pipe is attached to the heating system whether it's plastic or metal well if you got a plastic then you're definitely category for high-efficiency condensating closed chain a kind of heating system so what are the one of the things that I actually do is uh you know I can't stop myself when I walked through Home Depot I go to the heating aisle and I take a look at all the pipes and and the plumbing aisle in you know identify there so that's kind of like a fun thing you can do so John yeah you can identify it but really you should be able to tell from about 10 feet away any kind of connection pipe that's attached to the heating or cooling system let's see let's see I wanted to share with you one thing before we go to Daniel who's up next and so apparently there's a sequence of operation that you're all talking about and so I wrote it down for you there's a thermostat calls for heat and if it has an inducer motor that turns on to draw that draft and then pressure and limit switches limit switches host already for problems and then he is disabled Oh start yeah yeah I'll get it Daniel and then hot surface igniter turns on and glows or the electric spark igniter sparks then power is sent to the gas valve which opens up and it usually clicks and then then the burner is ignite and you just saw marks port shot the shot burners blow and then the flame sensor concern confirms that there is a flame and the flames heat the exchanger and then the blower fan turns on and circulates the warm air throughout the house and a delta T is achieved and Charles talked about measuring a delta T so let's see Daniel is up next so Daniel if you're available all right ready yep can you see me we can that we can see me so I'd like to expand just a little bit take a bigger look at the HVAC system starting with the building show so when I'm with a client in the house I like to try and predict even though we don't have to the standards tell us that we don't have to predict how a home is going to be heated or cooled or adequately I still like to try and figure that out and see if it's gonna work all right my house here we have south-facing windows we get a lot of sunlight in the wintertime so it can be 10 degrees 20 degrees and we may not have the furnace again because it's so much solar gate so I'd like to explain that to my client let them know that that's what they can expect when I bought this house just last year my wife and I the lovely Vanna White behind the camera we looked at it and I thought man I'm not gonna buy this house it doesn't have any return air down low on the second level on the lower level it's a two-level townhome our only return air on this floor is here as ceiling and we're on a concrete slab I thought man it's gonna be miserable down here we're gonna be all the cold air in the house as we all know cold air is dense and it's lazy and it just wants to sit down low so I'm going to be sitting here in the living room my feet will be cold and I'll be angry so I thought well maybe there's some things we can do so one thing we did was put in a quart floor over the tile floor in the kitchen I didn't add any additional return air although we have the capability here we can come down the unit is right above us I will when I in conjunction with remodeling of the guest bathroom on the brain they return air duct down here probably eight or 10 inch round and right near the floor and then in the wintertime we're going to pull that cold air off the floor get it back to the unit recirculate it and send it back out let's go upstairs and look at some of the equipment so we have our ducks in and I one thing I'd like to point out to my clients for an inspection is our register holds seal especially if we have ducks in the floor so I like to go in take a look put my camera down in the duct itself and as we all know there are some dangerous things that can happen in in under subfloor ducks in ducks that are embedded in concrete we can have asbestos ducks in there we can have write about metal ducts in there or we can have quite often PVC ducts that are much more impervious to impervious to moisture so what I did in order to stop in training air from the gravel layer below the slab whenever the unit was running was to use great stuff with the long metal tube and the trigger handle and seal all the registered woods slab as I said we don't have enough return air on this lower level and that's something that absolutely point out to my clients just this morning I had an inspection of a three level townhome with inadequate with low return air they're gonna be miserable there in the winter time it's not going to be warm enough in that lower level and many of these two three and four level townhomes that lower level isn't tenable in the wintertime because we're on a slab and because cold air is dense and sinks and we don't have the capacity to grab that cold air off the floor send it back to the unit and regurgitate it so to speak let's go upstairs so here's our main return air up here it's helpful in the summertime air station see however in between cycles of heating and cooling obviously the air is going to stay there and that's why a more modern equipment that has 40 blower motor and ECM motor electronically commentated motor which we can run much more frequently and constantly D stratify the air send a bantam unit ascend a bank teller to the supply registers that can be very helpful in a house like this with we had a permanent split from castor motor a typical one that you would find that most conventional furnaces that would cost about three hundred fifty dollars a year electricity to run 24/7 365 within ECM or electronically commentated water that goes down by about a factor of 10 so if you leave about 35 dollars a year to run your blower motor 24/7 constantly recycle reese d stratified layer and sending it back out for your supply registers the HVAC system is the heart and lungs of the home it's it's really one of the most important parts of a home it's what's going to make you make or break your comfort and a lot of your happiness in the house if you're miserable if you're down on the first floor and your feet are cold in the wintertime and you have to you know put a blanket on just to watch TV that's one thing if you're renting an apartment if you're buying a house paying a mortgage working your tail off to meet the expenses that can really stick in your craw according to the National Association of Realtors survey done a little while ago twenty five percent of people who buy houses are sorry they bought that house and what we try and do in our little company is make sure that we give them enough information so that the condition of home is not one of those reasons that they're sorry they bought a house okay so this is a two level townhouse it's probably about 2,500 square feet or so we saw the inadequate return air on the lower level now here's our guest bedroom we have a supply but no return so it's a really good thing to have a return air in every separate habitable room so what I will do again we just moved in here last fall is put transfer girls here over the door one low one high to muffle the sound a little bit and so that when we close our doors at night we're not over pressurizing the room and forcing our conditioned air into noticing crannies and leakage from the windows stuff where it could condense and create a problem there's a fire safety mnemonic kind of like stop drop and roll and the that saying is closed before your doubles so it's a good idea to close your bedroom doors at night to increase your fire safety and again if it close your door it right you're pushing air into a room with a supply register but you're not trying and backed out return register you you're creating a positive pressure in there and it's not good for energy efficiency here's the actual equipment itself and again little bit to the kind of the the concept of the HVAC the HVC as part of a system we talked a little bit about solar orientation here and the benefits it brings us in the wintertime a big part of any house is the end the Attic if you talk to any weatherization contractors they'll tell you that when you're trying to save energy in a home you do ABC right so atticus number one because attic a home has what we all know as a stack effect air one is the trailer Article II up and out and that's the air that we're paying to eat cool it's also airless laden with moisture if we allow that up into the Attic we not only who's that money that we spent heating and cooling it but we also create that risk for condensation in the egg the way to avoid that is to put our thumb on the straw and I hit local weatherization company come in they put insulated covers on every single can light they sealed all the gaps and the partition walls at the wall plates every single penetration plumbing vent piping conduit everything sealed it perfectly installed baffles all the way around and gave me about 12 inches of cellulose on top of the existing fiberglass pads and it's made an incredible difference here so I made sure I did that before I had my contractor come in and put a new furnace in because obviously when you do those kind of weatherization improvements it's gonna change our eating and cooling mode and we don't want to oversize our equipment as we all know oversize some of the equipment is can be even worse than under sizing if we oversize our air conditioners we end up with the kind of situation where it runs for a short period of time gets the air very cold brings our satisfies our thermostat but doesn't run long enough to pull what the HVAC contractors called latent or humidity out of the air there's not enough contact time with our return air across the evaporator coil to wring that moisture out of the air and these are all things that I like to look at in addition to the more technical things about how the unit is operating I like to look at the furnace in the context of the whole building shell the windows the air and I didn't finish that ABC concept of weatherization so after the attic then basically we don't have a basement here but in a typical house with a basement you want to then if you've done your weatherization you get it you're insulating air sealing and ventilation you want to focus your energies on the basement because the rim joist areas are very very leaky we have a lot of different framing joints there in the typical which is still cold complaint believe it or not just a rectangle of fiberglass shoved in there doesn't work very well so it's nice to to phone those or to cut in lots of rigid board insulation and those into place so a couple months ago I had a friend of mine HVAC contractor come out he took off the 20 year old carrier 80 percenter and put in high-efficiency sealed combustion this is 97% infusion I believe we this was the furnace I'm sorry no this is where combustion air came in for the combustion room we closed that off and this is where we took our exhaust out into the end and up through roof mounted roof mounted penetration that's where our PVC pipe ends up and as you know every um I'm sorry it's totally wrong this was the make up air duct for this combustion air zone we ended Y here and then tapped in for combustion air so this just goes up above the insulation layer and it pulls our combustion air from the attic not from outside from the end which is huge and probably 14 feet tall to people and supplies our combustion air for our sealed combustion furnace the vent pipe goes out here up through a roof-mounted roof jet neoprene roof jack we installed a high efficiency air filter which I see Charlie has and I think marked - these are great I try and convince all my clients to switch to these instead of the 1 inch cartridge filter a 1 inch cartridge filter is either going to give you good air flow or good dust capture it really can't do both only a pleated media filter like this the nice big ones can provide that good dust capture and good air flow there's a couple things here that that my contractor did that eventually I'm gonna have to change these guys what I really sharp have already seen it one is this is not a proper drip leg right you have to you have to have a change of direction this is a proper drip leg here right because the gas is coming down and then particles go straight down into the into the extension into the nipple before they come into the gas valve here we have our gas flowing this way and there's really nothing that's going to make the particles or moisture drop down here that's it's an correct another incorrect thing that he did just out of expediency was to use a flex connector here that's totally forbidden the final hook up to a permanently install appliance has to be hard right however this is such a smooth quiet unit that there's no vibration here it's got a rubber grommet there's really no danger to it but eventually I will change it to metal not only does the unit have an ECM air handler blower motor it also has an ECM inducer motor so it's super quiet and if the difference in efficiency and cost and comfort is incredible are you still with me yeah where's the condensate go do you have a condensate pump or a drain no that's a floor drain and it's shared with the pan and the washing machine drip pan and it all comes into one floor drain and I see a catch pan underneath the condensing furnace yeah he made a custom pan in his shop and I this is a little pet peeve of mine I hate seeing feeling all the cold air and hot air blowing out of untracked kind of state drain right so I had him put in the nice pre-made trap once another thing that really shouldn't be in this house what we have it maybe eventually change it is a bypass humidifier so in our temperature like you guys in Colorado it does get dry in the wintertime and it's not only more comfortable to have humidity in the air it's also healthier as they've found out recently with the kovat virus on when there was adequate humidity in the air it gives viruses bacterias and and mold spores something that plate onto and fallout in the fallout from the air when air is super dry those type of little tiny very fine particles stay suspended longer so humidity is important for a couple of reasons now this one is a by PS humidifier as we all know that works on a pressure differential between the supply and return site pushing the moisture across the humidifier element in a house like this where we have two levels and only one unit and not really great return air set up this ideally would be the type of humidifier with the little electric fan here that doesn't steal air from the front supply in order to push that moisture into the air stream Daniel I really I like your approach on the building science approach to inspecting the heart and lungs the lungs really of the house sorry I can get I can talk about this forever as you can tell that's okay that's okay I appreciate it Rob I think you're up next and then we'll go to charles i can see he's all set up to do a carbon monoxide test on the outside of his heating system Rob excellent thanks Ben I guess my job being fourth is is a little bit like the closer the wrap-up guy and so my my colleagues have done a masterful job talking about some of the idiosyncrasies and and and technical aspects of the of the home inspection and the furnace inspection and and I wanted I wanted to summarize a little bit of that if I could been but I also want to want to lay out a couple of twists 100 Charlie talked about dial thermometers here at the BRIT kicker we have offices all across the country everybody uses dial thermometers for furnaces I you know it's a simple Delta check you know every furnace he's got a portal you know in this particular furnace I have a hole here not in the cold air plenum and I can always find a seam up and up in the warm air side newer Delta Jack my goal in thirty years of experience is everything I do is replicatable somebody else can do the exact same thing I did I try not to be technically exhaustive with such fancy equipment that oh look your equipment measured in this ppm and all this equipment measure to this ppm you found a gas leak I didn't find a gas like who's right who's wrong well if I take a temperature check across the system take a simple picture of the thermometer and say this one's here and this one's there and do the math I went to public school I can I can subtract a little bit and if I come up with that math being being higher it's like going to Vegas if it says between 40 and 70 Delta works 71 fails just simple as that you don't get up you don't get 22 and they go well you're almost 1 and so that's what I do but so I do that so what's also interesting that like like Dan does and like Charlie does is they walk their clients through these systems I'll tell my clients to take the cover off these things stare down here and a high-efficiency furnace in the condensate you see moisture call attack just as simple as that as she rust I see scale I'm gonna put on my report but you let your clients know where their pitfalls are you're good to go you can move on from there I'm gonna take this thing off the tripod real quick to show a couple of more tricks um every furnace and I don't care how old or how new it is they've got this heat exchanger inside on this apparatus and there's typically some form of insulation that insulation is between the heat exchanger and the outer cabinet and so when I have this thing fully running it's in full operation it's doing its job I should be able to massage this furnace it's weird it's kinky but it's something that you and you train your clients to do this they can do this every time they change their furnace filter get this thing running they should be able to touch every square centimeter of the outer wall of the cabin or their furnace on the three side that are not the business end of this first and if they touch on hotspot you know and you don't have to go to your spouse you don't go to your neighbor you don't forget does this feel hot that's pronounced if you feel that hotspot you're gonna know you got a problem with your furnace and so your clients can just simply walk over the furnace when it's running and give it a little massage and by doing that they'll probably identify the issue much before they're tacking now you asked us Dan earlier about a condensation pipe bomb there's our phone excuse me nice simple condensation pump it's hooked up to the the electric of the system and it's it's their design because we do not have a floor drain anywhere near this furnace it catches the condensation of the air conditioner and it catches the condensation of the furnace and so we'll look look for the operation of that but my big thing for us is all these fancy tools most of the technicians don't carry them most uh most others don't you're a tech which is like the least technical tool we own it's not designed to takes any surfaces and so so it doesn't work now I could do a hand check I took I couldn't check my East my e5 and I could take a beautiful picture of of the hot spot but your hand your hand is all you need and so so I wanted to kind of show you know everybody else has done such a wonderful job of looking at that stuff I wanted to show the layman's point of view the touch it measure it and take pictures of what you did awesome that we have a couple questions you want to take a question wrong I'd love to or anybody actually and then we'll check out Charles so do you use a CO detector and what I don't know I don't you know I'm in Illinois and Illinois is a very unique space when when we went got our licenses in in 2000 the plumbers got in the middle of it and so we're not allowed to inspect plumbing we can observe it we can't inspect it so we can take a gas analyzer but the challenge with carbon monoxide testing is there's so many different monitors out there there's so many different calibration tools out there where like I say where you might test one today with this piece of equipment the next piece of equipment doesn't read and that's that exact calibration and so in in my 30 years of experience I've found issues with my equipment that might the gas company might not find because their equipments a different brand and my equipment so so no I typically don't but however an interesting tool because I like to read I like to make my stuff very visual your phone case and a simple flame mirror I can take a picture of escaping flue gas from a natural draft inverter by looking at the cloud right and I can take that picture and say flue gas is escaping I'm not going to tell you what it is when it's flue gas yeah yep another question from Jeff he asks when you have a gas or propane fired furnace do you use a gas leak detector we all carry them here yes we try to look for them we're not gonna be perfect I think bubbles and soap but but we do try to invest there's so much hidden pipe in our house that you're not gonna find every gas leak but I think a good home inspect your ought to be looking for them know and rub you uh you your part of the brick occur franchise right yes sir yes sir so if I'm sorry no go ahead yeah we we have franchises coast to coast we've we've been involved with internachi for for for many many years now we're always looking for new great team mates to be on our be on our team but we we are from Washington to Florida and from Vermont the Southern California excellent excellent thanks Rob appreciate it Charles your pleasure alright so I did come outside and basically this is where my air conditioning units are located at and also my exhaust for my furnace we're on a nest so I did go ahead and fire everything up so we're calling for heat one of the things that we do and this is you know it's not required by any standards that I know of anywhere we just found that this is the best way to find bad furnaces so we use test those we had three 30s and three tens these are like little tanks that we use and they last for a long time they're battery operated so right here's the furnace for my I'm sorry the exhaust for my furnace this is my intake there's a pipe and a pipe here so what I do is we have to use undiluted air and we come on to it and I'm gonna get this thing running let's see if I can get close enough to show numbers I may not be able to go with the light can you see any certain numbers you pull it back a little bit there all right we'll hold it and I'll stretch so right now it's normal when these things start up especially if it hasn't been used that it's going to spike up we know that there's 21% oxygen in the air fire if it's a good gas mixture we're going to use anywhere from ten to fifteen so I should be left with anywhere outside to ten percent of oxygen the ASHRAE standard you'll get some people say that carbon monoxide keep be higher than 100 keep you higher than 200 these little machines will both measure the carbon monoxide they were exhausting you can see the bottom number keeps dropping I personally like it under 10 but there's nothing that I can find anywhere that proves that that's what it is but I've seen these things tuned so well we go with a hundred is our magic number and any time it's over that we're gonna bring in a heating contractor tell them and that there's a so everything is a clue there's nothing that's guarantee that water that I mentioned before underneath the the blower fan on the floor that's a clue or an indicator all right with this thing here oxygen levels that they're too high and if you think about it I got a burner and then it goes through the heat exchanger if I have a hole in that heat exchanger it's going to add in additional oxygen after the fire so that's going to go ahead and get that level up there we can also scroll through a few other readings on here let's see what we got so this is my temperature that's coming out we're at 82 or 84 degrees you know and like I said we're using 95 percent of the heat was kind of hard to realize is that the event plate that Rob mentioned that you should be touching or the and that's only on high efficiencies mind you it is going to be really hot on the mini fishing seas but that's going to be cooler than the duckworth that goes through it so we scroll to back here and then this is going to the top number now that 21 is showing my air free so that's calculating if this furnace was in a hundred percent oxygen environment it would be producing 21 parts per million of carbon monoxide so we'll leave that back is the oxygen this can also calculate and tell me exactly what efficiency we're running it so this thing says ninety eight point one so it's running nice and clean what else we got here there's my delta T but I usually don't use that one because if I'm outside like here it's going to give you the difference between the vent pipe and the outdoor here that doesn't help me too much the excess air is big this is another one of our clues that needs to be under a hundred percent so right now we're at 64 percent it's a calculation it figures out the carbon dioxide it figures out the oxygen and other NOx gas is what it should be and if we're getting too much fresh air after the fire then that's going to start shooting up so if I get over a hundred I give water on the bottom high levels of o2 or if I get extreme high levels of carbon monoxide and I've had these things show them where we're exhausting like 2,000 parts per million something is wrong you know and it just gives us a clue to bring somebody out there so something I should in on a lot of our heating contractors around here don't use equipment like this and because of which you know they come out there and they're gonna bring a kid up you know carbon monoxide detector in the house and they're gonna turn it on and they're gonna go see no carbon monoxide you may not be producing carbon monoxide in the house but that doesn't make the furnace safe so we thoroughly push on and we have a few heating contractors that use equipment like this so we know that they're gonna back up what we say any questions on it so what is your opinion about home inspectors using specialized tools and going way beyond the standards of practice because that's you know home inspectors we don't hardly measure a thing and you're using a device that measures and quantifies certain things and then you have to evaluate what you're what you're measuring and you're asking me a very personal question and how we run our business and I think we should you know and I believe in it we market differently we don't market to real estate agent we market directed consumer and because of which we spend a lot of money in our marketing and we use more tools more equipment than anyone else but that's the reason that people choose us so we keep six inspectors busy and we're actually looking to hire more so if there's anybody who does want to go in-depth and doing their home inspections then please give me a call and we'll see if there's a good fit and you know what you all consider that to be the case that it's okay it's really a personal call to exceed the standards of practice Rob dan mark yes absolutely I agree totally I admired Charles and what he does and I take exception with some of the home inspector insurance companies who say never go beyond the standards we go beyond the standards all the time a couple of things that I didn't get a chance to show is one is an atom an anemometer for quantifying air flow at the registers both supply and return and the other is thermal imaging to make sure that we don't have black ducts disconnected ducts have excessive heat loss up in a plenum or something I'm all for it and I've known it that Charlie has done this for a while and it's something that you know I I don't want need to be the best inspector in the world but I don't want anybody better than me and if Charlie's doing something that's better than I'm doing well I'm gonna pay real close attention so well I don't know what your experience are your experiences are but like when I was doing home inspections for the first time twenty five seven years ago we didn't have any devices we had flashlights and a GFCI tester maybe now we have all this equipment so I would wreck I wouldn't hesitate in grabbing an infrared camera like rob has to check out the the temperature of the ductwork at the surface myself I have every tool that has been shown here I just been really holding back we have a question about heat pumps if anybody wants it would you test the heat pump in the summer or or not absolutely we just see pumps we don't have a lot of heat pumps in this marketplace but if he pumps working in the summer it's going to work in the winter the only difference really is is that you know is is that is that transfer and so we've always we've always taken to the point if I test the heat pump in the summer mode the only difference would be in our climate and and Charlie and Dan would would attest to this the only difference is our heat pumps are typically attached there's some other supplemental heating either a gas force there or electric force there so we would want to test the emergency eat as well but on my report I would log I tested in the heat mode or I tested in the air conditioner mode yeah and there's always that 65 degree temperature limit where you know you get a little you know a lot of inspectors if it's cold outside they don't do anything like turn on the air conditioner but I personally haven't found that written anywhere that's 65 degrees it's always been a general rule of thumb written by an opinion by somebody well and the other funny thing is and I bet we could take a poll between the six of us then what is the exact temperature Delta across the narrow condition you work because you can go to 15 different books and get nine different answers and yeah and opinions are like like other things everybody's got one and you just got to hold your guns pick your number and let's go yeah and in in some of our courses there's one particular course the building science course and the healthy homes course we have a healthy homes program we teach how the Daniel talked about this how the the insufficient or deficient amount of insulation and lack of air sealing can actually have an effect on the heating system in its efficiency so you may be a home inspector who comments upon the entire performance of the heating system and its efficiency but actually what you're actually doing is talking about the system that was installed the efficiency of the heating system maybe Daniel can talk about this actually is affected by the entire house right it could be a 95 percent efficient heating system or cooling system but if the if there's no air sealing or weatherization that system isn't is no longer that efficient could you absolutely and even the ductwork right has an impact on efficiency right those efficiency ratings are done in laboratories with zero static drop and you're never gonna duplicate that in a house so there's always some reduction in efficiency I saw on your duct work some gray stuff at the seams yeah I went a little wild with it so what about the other gray stuff duct tape yours is mastic what about duct tape mastic I think it works so much better it's easier to apply it doesn't peel off we've all seen duct tape peel even the good stuff the UL label stuff peeling off because the Installer is not going to take the time to prep the duct work to get the dust off to get the oils off so we have a question from Nereus sorry if I mispronounced your name Marius with all this equipment involved when inspecting systems how much time do you guys spend on a regular home you pull out all these equipment and huge tool belts I imagine you guys each have is this just adding extra time Charlie you and I can probably go you'll play ping-pong with this one for an hour and a half you know it you know it really depends on experience then you know and I know for me I might move more effectively through a home after after 30 years and 12,000 inspections then somebody that's been doing it for for two years and 700 inspections Alan and so I'll let Charlie answer it but I'm not adding any more time I'm being more effective with my time yeah I'm not as efficient with my time so we've actually changed things and we've decided that we're only going to do one inspection a day well we only do them in the mornings we are then we've been doing this now for two years so only one a day only in the mornings were on-site on average at least three hours we've been known to be on site for five hours real estate agents don't like that very much by the way but our clients do all right and we make that pretty clear up front what's gonna happen and then we do the reports in the afternoon and that does not include writing reports on my on-site we only take photos we only talk to our clients then when we leave we write our report to me get them to him by evening so are your fees in accordance with that extra time are you able to charge significantly higher fees than most inspectors I don't know I guess it's who you compare it to I think you me Mike's big errand I think we're all kind of pretty close together on our fees but there's also people out there charging around $300 here in the Chicagoland area a basic you know our lowest fee is about 500 is what we're charging and you know what our guys are happy I'm happy and we're with the families and the evenings so even in these hectic times because we're losing I want to say I lose maybe seven now we're up to about seven bit time jobs a day that we're not able to do because we're a week out and I'm okay with that you know it it is what it is so we're picky about the people to come and work with us and and we work for those reviews as crazy as it sounds so Charles you're saying that you're booked out a week in advance yeah people want inspections quick I can't do it yeah we're they're scheduled with us right now we're scheduling Tuesday Wednesday next week so what do you do and this is off the webinar topic but what do you did in that situation do you hand it over to a friendly competitor um no maybe I should figure out something like that I'm uh I really believe that most of and please forgive me I'm not trying to be insulting to anybody but this profession our clients expect us to be a plumber electrician heating contractor roofer window installer every other trade that's out there you know and I know when we all go to our 60 hour classes and that's not criticizing the the trainer's we've done it for nearly 20 years and I know Ravi as and other people too you just say you can't learn all those trades and all their knowledge in 60 hours in 77 hours and then you listen to us view for five field events and then to you know you're a highly trained professional out there helping everybody with the biggest purchase of their life it just doesn't happen so you know it's hard for me you know I know that my competitors are the the people that we count as competitors they're booked up to you know so I don't know what else I could do I am looking for other people but we do expect our people to know quite a bit we want to be able to go toe to toe with a heating guy a plumber an electrician and so forth so it's it's what we look for Rob you got a question but Charles you run a school right what's the name of this home we it's called bellman group we did not renew our license in Illinois yet but we decided that we are going to go ahead and get our legs and said I'm in the process of working on it now so we've been running it since 2002 rob us yeah dovetail on what what Charlie was saying and in this marketplace were because of Kovan we're all in the middle of the March market now and it's June and so everybody's busy and and Charlie said it really really well we're all working for the reviews and and like everything else everybody's doing this to find who's best and and unfortunately in the marketplace we can't use Nick's philosophy from Picasso you know you know and the old saying hey you know this is $10,000 for the autograph you know really only took you a second I'm I'm 30 years Chinese 25 or 27 years I know you're 25 or 27 years Ben I know Dan's that long as well unfortunately the marketplace does dictate a little bit where our thresholds are but what what really can predicate and what people need to understand is you can't you can't be afraid to speak up and so for for a business like Charlie's who's looking out for Wednesday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday next week if the client wants charlie they're gonna go get an extension in their contract because everybody's in the same boat I know I know my regulars I mean I I I'm not saying what you know anything about anything I try we try to do three jobs a day for our guys at our operation our 19 guys that's that's how they're able to be compensated why do I only do what I've already done by 15,000 square foot this morning in my industrial building but that's NASA neither here nor there if I have a client that wants me I'm already booked out through next Thursday and they'll just go get an extension to make sure if they want me that's what they're doing I know that's what Charlie's doing I'm sure that's what Dan is doing too because the market is just that flooded right now with the consumers and the demand for the home inspector is very very very very strong hey getting back to the topic Julie is asking and a couple other folks are asking about the air filters I think it was Dan's or someone's air filter was leaning over maybe it was Marx it was that it was dance yeah I could and what Dan say was that filters either you're going to sacrifice flow or filtration in filtration the higher the filtration is on one inch filter the less flow you're gonna have and Dan was he's still here he can comment on that himself and the angle you see a lot of filters position that way because there's not a proper mounting channel in the in the furnace are it actually adds to the surface area of the filtration to lean them over like that if they're set up properly dan still here he can speak to his filter you know that was the housing so sometimes if you don't have enough room to put one in and true vertical position you can buy a different that's an air bear tryin housing specifically made to have the filter on that angle and it's it's gasketed right so there's the squishy foam gasket to prevent filter bypass which is important hey one more question and then we'll wrap this up have you ever said anything to kill the deal may be related to the heating system you can you can comment on if you had ever said something about the entire house other systems but maybe the heating system in particular like if it didn't turn on or if it if it was a low efficiency sixty percent the natural drafts and then you tag would that be I didn't come here yesterday and break it I showed up here this morning and 11 o'clock Central time to talk about this furnace that's right here and all I'm gonna do is tell you about it what you decide is up to you please Charles so we just got an old phrase everything really boils down to how much it pays so we can help somebody identify about how much something cost but it's really our client decision whether or not they want accepted and every market is different right now it's such a seller's market and these houses are moving so fast and there's multiple bids and people are just accepting whatever they're accepting right no matter what I say and they're still going to buy it you know what I don't really honestly is husband's as it sounds I don't care if they buy it or not what I do care is that they know what they're buying right exactly yep I hope they don't buy it so they call me next week and I didn't see him again it's a Tom Corbett theory well fellas I really appreciate it that was really great we're gonna try to do that again sometime I know you took a precious time out of your busy life and business life to do something that I really highly appreciate which is when you have an experienced inspector sharing what he or she knows and that's that's really special and it's night and day in time so it was really great for you guys to do that I really appreciate it I the bottom of my heart and thank you no no you got it hey everybody stay safe and healthy and I'll see you back online Charles Mark Daniel Rob I really appreciated again everybody see you later bye

Channel: International Association of Certified Home Inspectors (InterNACHI)

Views: 8,445

Keywords: International association of certified home inspectors, InterNACHI, NACHI, become a home inspector, home inspection training, home inspection education, gromicko, HVAC, havoc system

Id: eAWvcSFUEkw

Length: 75min 50sec (4550 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020