New Construction Home Inspections (1 hour class)

hi i'm ruben saltzman with structure tech home inspections and today i'm super excited to share with you a one hour ce class that we have made available to real estate agents we've taught free ce classes to real estate agents throughout minnesota at their offices for years now and then this year 2020 when covet happened we had to change up our learning platform and make all of our classes available in webinar format we kept getting people saying hey can you offer a class at this time or this day or you know maybe it'd be nice if you could do it at nine o'clock at night and all this other stuff and you know what we're doing it we have gone on demand now we've taken all five of our ce classes ranging from one to 3.75 hours in length we have gotten the final approval from the minnesota department of commerce to offer these in an online platform we found an online learning platform we partnered up with another company to get all this done and all of our classes are available on demand now and we're offering them almost for free we're given we're we're selling these for five dollars per hour of credit so it's not much it's enough to cover the online learning platform that we're paying a boatload for but this is a free taste of it this is our one hour class on new construction home inspections and i'm just so pumped to be able to offer these i hope you enjoy it oh and if you're a real estate agent don't watch it here we'll go ahead and watch it skip through a little bit of it check it out see if you like it see if it's worth your time if it is head on over to our learning platform and watch it there and that that and then that way you'll get one hour of ce credit when you're all done if you're anybody else enjoy [Music] the purpose of this class is to let you know that there is value in getting a home inspection done on a new construction home by the end of this class if i've done my job you will unquestionably recommend a home inspection with every transaction whether it's new construction or not now some of the objections that we hear are that the home has already been inspected dozens of times and there's really no need to even get a home inspection yep we hear that all the time we get that the city's been out another objection is that the home is already past all the city inspections it's built to code now let's just be clear on what built to code means it means that it's the worst possible job that could be done and still passes another is that the builder won't fix anything it doesn't matter what the home inspector comes up with the builder already did a perfect house so you're wasting your time and money getting a home inspection you'll hear that objection objection and then another is that the home is covered by a one-year warranty so i want to throw some of those out there just to say we are aware of all of these and by the time we're done with this class if you still feel that those are all valid objections well then i guess i wasn't able to do my job but i i do want to preface this class by saying we have the utmost respect for building officials i i'm a home inspector and that's what my company does so you know i'm i'm advocating for what we do in this class this is not a knock against building officials city inspectors anybody like that we have the utmost respect for them we cannot do the job that they do but they have to go to a lot of different homes in one day as home inspectors we will be visiting one or two homes in a day that's it we can take our sweet time with inspections so basically we're gonna i'm going to guide you through a ridiculous number of new construction defects that we found over the years and these are the things that happen over and over again on new construction homes before we get into the specifics though let's talk about what it means to pass inspection because so frequently we hear people say it's already passed inspection therefore it meets code not necessarily at the very beginning of the minnesota state building code section 1300.0210 inspection says this it says approval as a result of an inspection is not approval of a violation of the code so what does that mean i'm not going to read all the rest of the text here but this is saying that just because a building official came out and passed the inspection it doesn't meet that the mean that the work meets code it simply means they passed inspection if the work doesn't meet code and somebody passed it well then their inspection is null and void their inspection is not valid that's what this is saying so it's kind of a out it's saying that the work needs to be done to code whether it was approved or not because we're all human and people make mistakes so that's something we got to start with another is that we'll frequently bring up stuff that wasn't installed properly like a stove is missing a child safety tip bracket or a faucet is installed and it's not pitched properly things like this and we'll say hey it wasn't installed right and sometimes we'll get kickback and we'll have a builder say well there's there's nothing in the building code that says you need to install an anti-tip bracket on a stove but there actually is the building code references the manufacturer's installation instructions repeatedly it's referenced over and over again in the code and the manufacturer's installation instructions become incorporated into the building code so it means that if whatever is being installed has instructions they need to be followed that is code so had to start with that for the most logical sense in presenting this class let's start at the top we'll start with addicts now addicts are a contentious point because a lot of builders like to say that they don't want to allow the attic to be inspected they don't want anybody to pop the attic access seal seal i'm being careful on how i say this there is no such thing as an attic access seal a lot of the time addicts attic scuttle hole covers will be incidentally sprayed shut with ceiling texture sometimes they're even caulked but that does not meet building code the building code minnesota energy code section r 402.2.4 actually says attic doors from conditioned spaces to unconditioned spaces such as attics and crawl spaces shall be weather stripped that's what the building code says and you know good luck finding a new construction home today in minnesota where you have weather stripping at that intersection not to say it's never done but it's a rare bird it almost never happens and so what what does weather stripping actually mean well it's not defined in the building code but they do have a section in the code that says for terms that aren't defined you head on over to mhyphenw.com miriam webster's online dictionary and you look up the definition of terms there so let's look up weather stripping merriam-webster says it's a strip of material to cover the joint of a door or window or and the sill casing or threshold so as to exclude rain snow and cold air so it's exactly what you think weather stripping should be this is what's required on all addicts in minnesota they can't be caulked they can't be sprayed shut now a lot of building officials just let it go because they don't want to pick a fight there but this is what's actually required so if you have clients buying a home with an attic it should be accessible somebody should be able to get up there if you're using a standard purchase agreement the standard minnesota purchase agreement form which was updated just recently there's actually going to be language in there that says seller will provide access to the attics and crawl spaces so it puts the onus on the seller now if you got clients buying a new construction home you may not be using the standard purchase agreement that most agents use throughout minnesota you might end up having to use the builder's purchase agreement and it probably isn't going to give the home inspector specific permission to get in the attic but that's where you as the agent fight your clients battles hopefully so i want you to be aware first off there is no such thing as an attic insulation inspection on a new construction home and if you don't believe me just call up whatever municipality you live in and ask them about it and they'll tell you the same thing i've called up the 20 largest cities throughout the twin cities metro area and asked them what do you do for an attic insulation inspection on new construction and they all have the same answer they say that they use the insulation certificate left behind by the insulation contractor to verify how much insulation was installed i want you to think that through we're taking the word of the contractor if the contractor says i installed 16 inches and here's a form saying i did it the building official takes the form and they say ah you said you did it good you must have done it we're done here yeah that's how attic insulation inspections work in new construction homes so now that you know this you can see where i'm headed with this can you imagine what we find when we get up in attics with new construction we find insufficient insulation all the time here's an example of a sheet that's left behind this is part of the minnesota energy code they're supposed to leave this sheet saying all the different insulation levels for different portions of the home and then when you get inside the attic they're going to have some more specific information about what was actually installed in that attic it's going to list the manufacturer of the insulation and how much insulation was installed and how much is supposed to be installed and all this other fun stuff here's a chart let's let's take a closer look at this in this particular home they the insulation contractor installed 14.75 inches of insulation or at least they said they did to achieve the required r value so there's the minimum thickness now sometimes we'll have builders say well your home inspector reported insufficient insulation because the insulation settled it'll settle over time no no not the current formulations of insulation you can see there's another chart here and another column that says minimum settled thickness it's the same don't buy that if you hear that argument don't buy it throughout the attic there's supposed to be these depth markers placed to show the insulation depth i think you need one for every 300 square feet of attic space and they're supposed to face the attic access it's really unusual to find what i'm showing in this picture this is showing insufficient insulation right at the marker most insulation contractors are very good about piling up the insulation right where all the markers are but usually the insulation kind of dips away as we get out into the field of the attic space so we we never go by what it says that the markers as home inspectors we measure we use our own rulers and we go up there and a lot of the time you know i'd say maybe half the time we find insufficient insulation and i don't mean like one or two inches that'd be really nitpicky i'm talking 20 to 50 percent of what's supposed to be installed i mean you'd think that the insulation contractors you'd think this stuff was worth its weight in gold the way they short attic sometimes but it happens we've gotten so used to this i would i would take a steel ruler up there i'd look at what the insulation card says in this case it said 14 and three-quarters inches i'd mark it on my steel ruler 14 and three-quarters and then i'd go throughout the attic and i'd put it in a bunch of different places and take pictures to kind of document what it should be versus what it is and i know you're probably thinking well maybe maybe this is just a picky home inspector and he's checking the one or two areas where it's kind of minimal and the rest of the attic is fine no no that wouldn't be fair that's not what we're doing we're looking at the big c of insulation that's what you can see here here's 14.75 inches and you can see there's less than 10 inches throughout the entire attic space now if you go to the depth markers of course those are buried in insulation those have a lot so we we find this all over the place and i've got photo after photo i won't bore you with too many here but it's it happens all over so it's extremely important to get somebody in an attic on a new construction home not only that but attic air leaks are supposed to be sealed on new homes 100 you're not supposed to allow warm conditioned moist indoor air to leak up into the attic space when that happens you can get a whole host of frost problems and condensation and delaminated sheathing and stained ceilings and all kinds of stuff so it's all supposed to be sealed off when it's not you get problems this is a good example of an attic lid that wasn't properly sealed off i was fortunate enough to be able to do the pre-drywall inspection at this home so they hadn't they hadn't covered the whole attic floor with insulation yet and here's a nice big gap at the top plate of a wall this is going to allow a lot of moisture to leak up into the attic this will allow small amounts of moisture to leak up into the attic when we have smaller holes like this now this attic was insulated there was about 15 inches of insulation up here but i was still able to find this air leak can you guess how i found it i wasn't randomly digging around through insulation to find these tiny little gaps i was using an infrared camera and yes on a cold day an infrared camera will spot tiny little air leaks like this with ease that's how much warm air is leaking up into the attic space through these tiny little holes a lot of people look at this and say who cares it's nothing it adds up to a lot in reality and here's some of the effects this was an attic where the builder didn't allow us access and i ended up being able to get to the attic through a garage garage attic and i was able to climb the trusses to get to the primary attic and found a huge frost area right above a bathroom and this is where they they it was a small air leak just like those previous pictures and now this is brand new just imagine what it's going to be like after you have the homeowners living here and it's been going on for 10 years you're going to have a rotted mess in the attic and i'm sure the builder was really glad that we were able to find this they never said thank you but i'm sure they appreciated it other stuff we find in addicts roof vents not properly lined up this they kind of miss the hole here that's kind of minor we find a lot of broken trusses in new construction and this is an issue where the trusses are either overloaded or they're mishandled i won't get in all the specifics of how it happens but trust me it happens we've seen it a lot here's here's a broken truss here's another broken truss you know what this is a good time for a reminder these are all new construction homes that i'm showing you pictures of these are all homes that have passed the city inspection the city's been out the inspector looked at it signed off on it we're good we're done nobody else is going back up in the attic again that's what i'm showing you here more broken trusses more broken trusses happens a lot these these trusses were probably mishandled bath fan ducks being disconnected this happens too the and what ends up happening is you have the contractor install this duct up against the roof sheathing they use very short screws because you don't want to go all the way through the sheathing and then that gets left and they're done that's the hvac contractor then you get the roofer who comes along they put the roof on and then they put the vent cover for the bath fan exhaust on and they get these big long nails they use to shoot it in place and it knocks loose that that sheet metal and then eventually this could fall onto the attic floor and then you're pumping warm moist air into the attic for the life of the home or at least until the first person breaks the attic seal and gets up there and eventually finds this this is stuff i mean as far as i'm concerned this is worth the price of the inspection right there to identify this way early on in the process we've even found addicts where they had no insulation this was actually a 10 year old mini i won't save the city it was a 10 year old town home where there was a completely uninsulated section of attic and i had inspected this in the dead of winter and there was one town home where there was just no snow on the roof and i kind of went huh i wonder why that is found out as soon as i got up here it had two attics one attic was fully insulated you can see the insulation spilling over from one attic and it spilled over to the uninsulated portion of it so they totally missed it here's another one where they missed it this was actually a parade of homes it's it's a long story i like telling it i won't get into it for this class because i don't have time for it but it was a big section here's the outside of the house this lower attic was never insulated they completely missed it parade of homes house had energy audits and all this stuff done and they still didn't catch that and this is what this is what tipped me off it was my infrared camera it's a big section of just cold ceiling in the dead of winter and i ended up getting up in that attic i had to have somebody come out and move a boat for me and here's the attic there's nothing there no insulation at all it happens here's another version of that this was a house with a sport cord attached to it and they didn't insulate the sport court here's the sport core here's what an infrared image looked like when all the studs are the warmest part of the wall that clearly tells you that the wall itself is not indicated because wood is a horrible insulator they had insulated part of the ceiling but they didn't insulate a larger part of it and this house had one furnace four heating zones and this is actually a one-year warranty inspection i was doing and the homeowner had a really tough time keeping the house below 75 degrees all winter long her house was hot and uncomfortable because it had a furnace trying to keep the unheated sport court warm and enough heat was escaping back to the rest of the house so that uh that was a ridiculously large gas bill that she had to deal with all winter long trying to heat her unheated sport uninsulated sport cord here's a bath fan exhaust that had no duct at all here's what the infrared image looked like now you know normally your home inspector is not going to go digging through insulation and leaving footprints normally this would just not be accessible but when we see something like this in new construction we are curious we do got to get over there and figure out what it is so we'll climb on the trusses we'll get over there pulled some insulation away to find a bathroom exhaust fan buried in the insulation yeah here's another one where we've got a missing roof vent i'm glad i didn't put my foot through this hole where they they forgot to put a vent there's there's the house now you can look at this and say hmm even a five-year-old should be able to look at this picture and say something's missing here but you know maybe someone was gonna come back out and do it maybe they're just short that day yeah let's go with that let's assume let's let's give people the benefit of the doubt here's a radon fan that wasn't installed properly this builder wasn't used to installing active radon mitigation systems they're used to doing passive systems they had a kind of a they had a buyer who insisted on an active system so they put one in for him but they put the fan on its side that means that every time rain water comes down inside this pipe it's going to slosh around inside this fan it just it was not installed properly nobody ever got up there to inspect it though so that concludes our section on attics next we'll get into roof coverings if you're not having a roof inspected by somebody getting up on the roof you may not know about everything that's going wrong one of the most common defects that we find on new construction homes is over driven nails and improperly placed nails and the only way we're going to identify this is by actually getting up on the roof lifting up some shingles here and there and looking at the actual nailing these nails are overdriven they have the pressure set too high on the nailing gun and the nails have punched right through the mat of the shingle when this happens the shingles aren't going to have nearly the holding power that they should have here's another example of that yet another example so when we see all of these things what do we as the home inspector recommend it's a real simple recommendation we say either get a letter from the manufacturer telling you that this installation is acceptable and they will still honor their warranty even with all these nails punched through the shingles or have the roof covering torn off and replaced one of the two either one is fine but there really shouldn't be anything in between one of those two if if it's an acceptable installation and the builder is insisting that it's okay to do this you shouldn't have any problem getting a letter from the manufacturer we've never seen that happen we have seen many roof coverings completely torn off and redone by the builder because the roof wasn't installed properly this is this is a very big deal what does it lead to leaves the shingles blowing off that's what's happening here all these shingles were improperly fastened and now they're starting to come off that's what was happening here these nails were under driven now this isn't nearly as serious of a defect because you can quickly spot the underdriven nail someone could go through lift up the shingles pound the nails down maybe even use a little dab of sealant to stick the shingles back down this is not that big of a deal do you see what went wrong with this roof pause the video and think about it if you want to get the answer yourself the answer is there are no roof vents nothing now maybe you're thinking well maybe there's a ridge vent and it's really close to the surface nope there's no ridge vent either that there is absolutely nothing here there's a lot of condensation a lot of moisture happening inside the attic space and it was raining and it's kind of tough to tell in this photo but there were drip marks all over the insulation because there's no way for the moisture to get out these are short nails on ridge shingles ridge shingles need one and three quarter inch nails traditional shingles need one and one quarter inch nail if the roofer decides to use the same nail on the entire roof well then the ridges are not going to be nailed down properly these nails were simply going into other shingles and that leads to ridge shingles blowing off that's a common thing we find on a lot of new construction and installations this house was missing kick out flashing it's a special type of flashing that's supposed to be installed at the every roof wall intersection at this home they didn't have the flashing properly sealed down this home we had a plumbing vent with a test cap still in place when the systems are first installed you're supposed to put test caps over everything and it's going to make it so that they can pressurize the whole plumbing system and once they know that it holds pressure you can open everything back up but if you never have somebody come back out and get rid of the test plugs or test caps well then you can have test caps that stay on there and we can we found houses that are 10 years old that still have test caps in place on the plumbing vents these shingles were probably pulled down because they weren't holding a tight line and they wanted the shingles to line up nicely so they probably pulled the shingles down a little bit which ended up causing the shingles to buckle this is another improper flashing detail where you're supposed to see a bunch of metal in the wall here to direct water out so water doesn't leak in behind the stone veneer siding here's an attempt at kick out flashing where they have the metal flashing installed here but instead of bending a piece to the right shape and putting it in they cut a piece up and the problem is that water can leak right behind this so it's not going to do a lot of good flashing should never be cut here kind of a rookie mistake now this is more of a hilarious detail you don't need to even be a home inspector to know that this isn't how you're supposed to do your flashing the only place water has to go is behind the trim here there's another version of improper kickout flashing where they took the flashing they bent it at a 90 degree angle now when water comes down it's going to splash like crazy right there there's another example of a roof vent that has a cap that was not removed now to be fair to the builder maybe nobody wanted to get up in the dead of winter maybe somebody is going to get get back up there when it's safe to get on the roof this roof was completely missing shingles no just kidding all right moving on next section is the exterior there's a lot of stuff that goes wrong on the outside we'll start with decks find a lot with decks i'll try to make this short and sweet but there's a lot first off when you have a beam sitting on top of a post a nice detail to keep everything in place is a metal bracket this looks good this comes from a bracket manufacturer this is how they want you to do it of course this is not that this is where they left a little sliver of a post and then they bolted this little sliver onto the beam to hold it in place the building official passed this i don't know i mean i guess maybe it's okay sure seem cheesy to me something we used to see all the time builders are getting much better about this because of education from the hardware manufacturers but when you have a joist attaching to a deck ledger board and you use a joist hanger this metal bracket there's supposed to be nails driven in at a 45 degree angle that almost penetrate the back side of that deck ledger board it's supposed to almost go through that's a proper nail now at the stores they will sell these nails that used to be labeled joist hanger nails and it was nails that would go perpendicular to the joist it would be driven enough at a 90 degree angle to the joist and it had to be short enough so it wouldn't come out the other side of the joist so they'd call it a joist tagger nail well then everybody got the idea that these are the only nails you use for joist hangers and you'd get all these people putting these nails in at a 45 and the nail would not even begin to penetrate the ledger board this is a clear violation of the manufacturer's installation instructions and it should never be done this way here's an example of that for home inspections for us to find it we will bring along a tiny little uh pry bar just a cute little thing that fits in our tool belt and we'll just check one nail and if the nail pops right out it's the wrong one if the nail is correct there's no way we're getting it out with our cute little pry bar but this is an example of a nail that's too short there's another example too short that does not do the job sometimes we don't even need to pull the nails out sometimes we can just look underneath and we can see the tips of the nails if we can see the tips of the nails we know that it was the wrong nail it doesn't even it doesn't even touch the ledger board a lot of the time we're gonna have missing nails at that detail here we've got the wrong bracket they're supposed to use a triple bracket to hold all three of these members in place they probably didn't have the right one on the truck and somebody said good enough and they just used what they had i don't need to explain this right this is pretty blatantly obvious we we're missing brackets here we got nails just going off into space here's a stairway stringer that was cut improperly and to make up for it they didn't they didn't want to cut a new stringer so they took deck boards and they cut them into little pieces and they scabbed it on to the side of the stringer all the way going down to make it make up for the the improper height this is this is crazy times but this happened on a new construction home it was all approved by the building official too this is a metal bracket that's not meant to hold up a stairway stringer and they used it to hold up a stairway stringer well the whole stairway for that matter there are special brackets made for this this isn't it these brackets will do nothing you i don't think you need to be an engineer to understand that this isn't going to work these are the proper brackets improperly installed these are the right brackets this diagram from the manufacturer shows how they should be installed there's supposed to be a bend in there and then it the whole stringer comes up and gets fastened to the ledger board here they have it hanging i shouldn't say a legend or i should say beam here they have the whole thing hanging and the nails are going into the end grain of the lumber usually when you've got nails going into the end grain of lumber it's improper and this this is definitely not how the manufacturer says they're supposed to be done here's another example of that we've seen it many times on different decks where they didn't install the stringers properly this is even worse this is where they just took simple angle brackets and use them on stairways and there's probably about two nails in every one of these holding up the whole stairway not a safe detail for this deck there's a big space here now side note why do home inspectors talk about the spacing on stairways i used to get it in my head that you didn't want a kid to get their head stuck in there you know i thought it's a child safety issue we don't want kid getting their head stuck really the issue is that you don't want a kid to slip their body through this opening and then not have their head fit through that would be a a very scary situation so that's why you're not supposed to have openings in guards or openings at the stairs all these should be blocked so that they don't admit the passage of a four inch sphere through that opening but we're not done with this stairway we've got a lot more to talk about for this deck let's look at the back side they attach the entire stairway with a trim board a fiber trim board that's that's not a great detail you can see it's already starting to split here and then we're not done with this deck there's more check out the load path now think about where all the load is coming down you've got all the joists going this way and they all rest on this beam so this beam is carrying the load of half of the deck and then where are our posts the polish should be underneath that beam but instead the posts are underneath these so whatever is fastening this beam to this one is carrying the whole load of the deck we we have a few mechanical fasteners holding up most of the deck so completely improper load paths here but we're not done with this jack there's one more thing check this out i think they omitted a post right in front of this patio door they didn't want to obstruct their view and now the whole deck is sagging all of this was the same deck new construction home yep new construction past inspections don't know how the current standard throughout most of the country is you need a guard when you have a drop off that's over 30 inches down to the ground and you always go out 36 inches and you measure down because if you're right on the edge of a cliff and you measure down 30 inches and and it's only 29 inches but then you got a cliff here if somebody falls they're not landing on flat ground that's what the rest of the country does now here in minnesota don't ask me why but we have removed that section from our building code and all that's required in minnesota is you measure straight down to the ground so even with that in this particular case if we measure straight down it actually is more than a 30 inch fall so there should be a guard on the other hand the grading is not finished and somebody's once once the weather is nicer the builder will surely come back out and they'll finish the grading they'll bring it up a little bit and make it a nice safe 29 and 7 8 inch now i'm being a little tongue-in-cheek when i say this is nice and safe that's what it's going to be it's going to be really close to 30 inches but it'll be just under so that they won't have to put up a guard now as a home inspector your home inspector might say hey maybe you'd want to put up a guard anyway even though it still meets code or it will meet code eventually you've got small kids maybe you'd want to put up a guard for your own safety that'd be that'd be a suggestion a home inspector might make but we wouldn't say that this is an improper installation because it might technically meet code and on new construction houses your home inspector should be very familiar with what is current code now here's a good example here's where it falls off and if you fall you're not going to land right on you know 29 and 7 8 inch whatever it is it depends on which rock you measure whether this actually meets code or not it it did pass inspection but in my mind this would be a lot safer if it had a guard here's a patio where it wasn't properly sloped it actually sloped back towards the house and i wasn't quite sure couldn't quite tell so i ended up getting a garden hose and i ran a bunch of water onto here just to see what would happen and sure enough all that water went right back towards the home and the fix here was to have the patio jackhammered and redone now as it turned out the city actually didn't miss this one the building official had called this out and there was a crew who came by later on and that's exactly what they did they broke up this beautiful new stamped concrete patio and they had to redo the entire thing now talking about the slope of concrete you'd think that there'd be something in the building code that says that you can't have a garage floor that allows water to pond actually there used to be something in the building code that said that it used to be a code requirement that said the garage floor needs a slope towards the front door now i don't know why but this was removed from the minnesota state building code too there is no longer a requirement for water to drain out of a garage anymore so this meets code unfortunately but on the other hand it's not smart this was a one-year warranty inspection i was doing and you can see on my level the garage boiler actually does slope back towards the middle of the garage and the builder ended up fixing this because it was such a ridiculous nuisance here's a few more examples of improper details on the outside we've got improper flashing at this sidewall penetration for a gas fireplace improper installation of vinyl side and we got gaps in the siding missing caulk i've got so much stuff on the outside i'm not going to dig into all these details uh but we got to move on we'll talk about electrical next now i'll admit we don't find nearly as much electrical defects in new construction homes as we do a lot of other trades but we still do find stuff it's it's not immune this was one where i had found a double tap circuit breaker at an afci breaker and at the time i was wondering huh i wonder if there's some new rule for afcis where it's okay to have two wires coming into one of these i i wasn't aware but i better ask and i called up the building official who had approved this installation i said what do you know about this this is 10 years ago i said what do you know about this is there a change that i don't know about and he had me describe the situ the situation and he said well that's crazy they shouldn't have done it that way i didn't open that panel because i know this electrician really well and i know the builder and i don't always check all of their work he admitted this to me so he said yeah i'm gonna call that electrician he's gonna have to get his butt back out there and fix it but when people know that they're not being watched sometimes they'll do crazy things and people aren't always watched same thing goes for neutral wires you're never supposed to have two neutral wires under one single screw that's what we had here this was an improper installation another double tap circuit breaker a new construction here's a smoke alarm that's not properly located it's supposed to be located a little bit farther down from the ceiling just kind of a rookie mistake they didn't take into account into account the thickness of the drywall they weren't thinking about the ceiling here's one where they recessed the electrical panel too far into the wall that that metal box is supposed to be completely flush with the drywall so and you know it's not that big of a deal they had to detach the panel move it flush with the wall then reattach it i i think this one they may have got it done while it was actually at the inspection the builder was there too here's a nail that just punched through the back side of the panel it's you know knockouts out of place good thing they didn't hit the wire right here's more missing knockouts these are things it's always at the bottom of the panel there's always a missing knock out there i shouldn't say always but it happens a lot we got a lot of those pictures any unused openings in an electrical panel are supposed to be covered over so these are very simple fixes but it's nice to know about it when you're buying a home when it's when all it's all brands spanking new and supposed to be perfect here is a deck outlet where there was no deck yet it was just a walkout the plan was to build a deck someone forgot to put in a receptacle we just have live wire sticking out of here here's an electrical box cover where the cover flips down it's supposed to flip up it's just upside down not a huge deal but you know we don't want water to get in there here's a situation where they didn't properly locate the electrical outlet for the radon fan now there is no radon fan in here but the new minnesota radon code requires that you have an outlet installed in the attic so if there is going to be a fan you can just plug it right into the outlet all the electrical work is already done well if these joists or excuse me if these trusses are all spaced 24 inches on center and they are and we count we're going to have one two three four five at least five of them at two feet each so it's over ten feet between the electrical outlet and the radon pipe there's not a fan made that comes with a 10-foot cord so what i'm getting at is the outlet is in the wrong spot it needs to be moved over here's a gfci outlet in an attic now if nothing trips how are you going to reset it the electrical code doesn't allow this they need to be accessible someone hid one up there i'm i was glad i found it here's a receptacle installed behind a pull-out drawer on one of those cooktop ranges you got a cooktop and then you got pull out drawers below it that's always where we find installation errors it's the one outlet where nobody thinks anybody looks and we find a lot of these where they're either missing the covers or the box isn't properly installed you can see that there is no box really surrounding this the electrical box is way back inside the wall and there's there's a way to address that it's where you get a goof ring it's this ring that goes around there to seal up that opening it's made just for this this would be the appropriate repair same same repair in this situation here's one where the garage door opener the ceilings were so tall in this garage that you couldn't plug the cord directly into an outlet and they ended up using an extension cord that no extension cords are ever supposed to be used permanently not to my knowledge definitely not in that case not not only does the code prohibit that but the garage door opener manufacturer says it needs to be plugged directly into an outlet so we got a couple of sources there here's the garage door opener eyes these eyes need to be located much closer to the ground i believe it's within six inches of the ground okay that's that's some electrical stuff like i said i don't have a ton but let's get into basements and structure i got a lot to talk about here a lot of stuff goes wrong here is a header that was improperly notched now i say improperly i'm assuming improperly if this was part of the original design well fine no big deal odds are it wasn't here's a bunch of hangers that these are actually stairway stringer hangers that somebody bent up and they're using as a joist hanger and they didn't have skewed angers and skewed hangers tried to say angle and hanger at the same time they didn't have skewed hangers and so they used these and they just bent them up to try to get this to work and this is definitely an improper installation these floor joists are not properly supported there's another version of it same house goofy stuff here's a skewed hanger but it's not meant for this size member it's it's it doesn't fit properly here's one where it's that the bracket is just kind of hanging in the air now if there was full wood blocking behind this maybe this would be okay but we just have a handful of nails holding this in place this is not a proper installation here's an improper placement of a toilet or maybe i should say improper placement of a floor joist i mean plumbers take a lot of heat for doing stuff like this cutting a big old notch in the floor joist but on the other hand where was the plumber supposed to put that toilet i mean you're not going to push it up against the side of the wall the toilet needs to go right there in the middle of the wall and the drain is going to come down right there so the plumber just kind of did what they had to make a little room for themselves now the carpenter's got to come back and fix it and frame around this opening so i yeah this this is really not the plumber's fault this is bad planning this is trades not talking to each other same thing here we got we got a big chunk of a floor joist just cut out these need to be fixed of course these were both passed by the city these these missed these were missed on inspections this is one of the biggest clutches i've found on a change order somebody had changed where a wall was going to go and they ended up moving a bunch of framing around but to do it they just kind of chopped right into the trusses and you you're typically not allowed to do any type of field alterations to trusses the manufacturer sends it the way they want it and it's done you can't go slicing off half of it because you dramatically change the load pass on them but that's what they did here you could see all these nails sticking out in the air i'm not going to fully describe all of this stuff but you'll appreciate this photo we've got this this big beam nailed with a gazillion nails into the side of a truss no way this needs to be totally reworked here's a stairway and they didn't cut the stairway stringers right the top stair was six and a half inches high the bottom stair was nine inches high they didn't account for the thickness of the treads when they cut the stringer but it got all the way to completion and it was done and then when we went through it as a team we went oh boy someone's gonna need to fix this and unfortunately the fix was to tear out the stairway and redo it when the house was essentially completed and well yeah it's unfortunate when it gets to that point here's some other stuff we've got improper installation of insulation the mix it's it's two-part phone and the mix was not adjusted properly so it didn't cure right and we got foam just kind of running down the sides of the walls here's another example of that that's it on structure we will move along and we'll get into some hvac we've got a lot to show you here in this case the furnace vent pipes were not installed properly they weren't pitched properly this is a 90 deficiency condensing furnace well 90 plus i should say and it's going to generate a lot of condensate inside the exhaust pipe and the pipe is supposed to be pitched to allow all that condensate to drain back to the furnace it's all going to come down here and then there's going to be a drain hose and it drains to a condensate drain at the bottom but when it's not properly pitched you're going to have an area where condensate just accumulates that's what we've got here not a big deal to fix this but it's it's brand new it's supposed to be right here's a here's a little bit more dramatic of an example of that this might even get so clogged with water that you end up hearing gurgling we've heard that in a number of furnaces where you can actually hear the gurgling on the outside of the home and that's from air trying to push through a bunch of water that's sitting in the pipe there's not supposed to be any holes in the sides of some furnaces if the furnace has a gasket on on the outside cabinet and this one does the big tip off is that the furnace manufacturer sent a gasket for this pipe this opening also needs to be plugged and when it's not plugged you're going to have air passing through there and it's going to affect the pressures inside the combustion chamber as well in the basement all that's supposed to be sealed off minor deal it's easy to do but it's brand new fix it there's not supposed to be openings between the return blower cabinet and the upper cabinet of the furnace either someone drilled a gigantic hole here and it needs to be sealed otherwise every time that furnace's blower fan is running it's going to be sucking air out of the combustion area that's that's a safety issue actually it could it could be sucking that air back down into the lower compartment that needs repair now this is one we found on a pre-dry wall inspection and it's where they didn't have enough room to fit the duct through this little opening so the hvac installer transitioned from solid metal to flex and then they squished it to fit in this tiny little opening and then they transitioned back over to metal and it's this is one of those things where if i'm doing a home inspection on a finished home and i get to one of the far bedrooms and i put my hand at the register and there's hardly any airflow i can do all the troubleshooting i want i'm never going to get to the bottom of it if this is the problem this is this would explain why you know in that far remote portion of the house you already have any airflow at one of the registers it's coming because somebody did something cheesy like this i don't know how else to put it this was one of the crazier more unsafe things that we found at a new construction home this was the exhaust vent on a water heater and remember the exhaust vent is going to take exhaust gas out of the home it's going to contain carbon monoxide and it's really important that all that carbon monoxide be exhausted directly to the exterior well they forgot to glue this one particular joint and it had knocked loose and so the water heater was venting into the basement into that floor cavity and you know i i never would have gotten up in the floor cavity with my ladder and stuck my head all around there to find this but i could smell it it kind of has a distinct odor so i ended up getting my ladder and tracing this down and there's a zoomed in picture i took with my camera where the joint was just disconnected serious safety issue it had past inspection though i'll tell you that now here's a situation where the manufacturer's installation instructions weren't followed this is the exhaust and the intake on a heat recovery ventilator or an air exchanger the manufacturer says the exhaust in the intake needs to be at least six feet apart to prevent air from getting sucked into the other side they didn't have that here you can see here's three feet right there it's uh it's it's less than four feet while we're on the topic of air exchangers whenever these things are first installed someone needs to balance them they need to make sure that the air coming in is equal to the air leaving the home you don't want to pressurize the house and you don't want to depressurize the house it these need to be a total of zero on air pressure so when they first install them they take a manometer and they check the pressures and then they adjust these dampers and then they put a screw in place to lock that damper in so that the air flow is going to be equal coming in and going out well if there's no screw in place then nobody ever did the test now sometimes they'll fill out a sheet saying they balanced it but the balancing is worthless if the dampers aren't locked in place so the fix here is to get an hvac contractor to come out balance the system lock the screws in place and are we being nitpicky does this matter yes this absolutely matters we've found homes with huge frost problems on the windows and all over the home because the hrv was not properly balanced it can lead to a lot of indoor air quality issues when this isn't done so yeah it definitely matters now here i'll have to explain the picture the the label is here this is clearly supposed to be the intake for the air exchanger but i'm holding a leaf there and it's bending my leaf backwards you see where i'm going with this this is the exhaust they got the intake and the exhaust backwards now if those are the only two penetrations on the side of a house it really doesn't matter i mean who cares but what they usually end up doing is you take all of the exhausts and they bunch them together in one section of the house you take the furnace exhaust water heater exhaust dryer exhaust hrv exhaust you take all those things and you have them exhausting together but when you get one of them wrong and it turns out it's an intake now you're going to be sucking in all those contaminants in one area of the home so it definitely does matter to get this stuff right and it's not the end of the world swap the pipes around but the problem is who's gonna know this if you're not getting a home inspection done who's going to identify this and we find this all the time where you have the intakes and the exhaust swapped where people just weren't paying attention here's a intake that's located too close to the ground it's supposed to be at least a foot above the ground ideally a foot above the average snow level i still haven't figured out what our average snow level here is in minnesota i don't know of any document that defines that but it's supposed to be a foot above ground and the idea is the higher it is above the ground the less likelihood it is that it's going to get all contaminated and nasty here's a kitchen exhaust that is exhausting into a three season porch we find a lot of crazy stuff going on with ductwork in a lot of places where people probably assume nobody's looking here's a floor register we removed to find the ductwork didn't even come tight to the floor it just kind of held in place with a nail or two there's another version of that we see that happen quite frequently what we see all the time getting this detail right is the exception it is it is rarely done right is the toe kick register toe kick registers in kitchens and bathrooms are done wrong about 95 of the time in new construction homes and to do it right the metal duct work needs to come all the way flush to the face of the cabinet and then you put a cover over it what usually happens is they hold the ductwork back several inches so that a bunch of air can leak out into the cabinet space and i'll show you why that matters in a second but they got it wrong here in fact in this one you can see the opening is completely covered with insulation and you can see i got my drill here and my flashlight this is the reason we carry drills during our home inspections take that cover off and take a peek we just always assume it's wrong and we always take these covers off there's one with a duct uh you know it ran to about half of the opening this one didn't even come close to making it to the front here's one where they they stop the ductwork entirely there is no ductwork coming up they're just pressurizing the entire underside of this kitchen cabinet this would not be a toe kick this is a foot stomp register we call it haha no i made that up it's not right here's one where uh definitely don't stick your hand in there you're not getting it back there's another one and another one and another one i could go on and on with these things so why does this matter it if it's not right when you're running the air conditioner the inside of that cabinet will get really cold and then if you end up with condensation inside there you end up with a bunch of mold growth on the bottom of the cabinet this was a home that was about five years old i did the new construction inspection for my client told them hey duct work isn't right get it fixed he went back to the builder and the builder said nah that's how we do them all it's fine it meets code and then he sent me this picture the buyer sent me this picture about five years later he had never had a leak at his kitchen sink nothing had ever leaked this was all simply condensation from that the inside of that getting way too cold so i'm showing you this to tell you these details do matter it's not just nitpicky stuff when you have pipes running through an unconditioned attic space an exhaust pipe for a furnace or a water heater it's supposed to be insulated this is the manufacturer's installation instructions saying that when it passes through an uninsulated space you need insulation on there this is not an insulated pipe this needs to be fixed new construction here's a dryer duct that was disconnected took took a little effort to get back there and get a picture of it but i i knew what i was gonna find because i could smell it as soon as i turned the dryer on more little details here is the requirement for a water heater exhaust it needs to be at least three feet from the regulator on the gas meter here's the regulator you can see it's nowhere close to three feet away the manufacturers all give the installation instructions for their vent terminals you always have to have the exhaust up here and the the intake down here or the exhaust out here and the intake back here there's a bunch of different ways to get this right you see in this diagram i like this 12 inches minimum ground level or snow level what's the snow level like i said i don't know but the exhaust always needs to be above the inlet now in this case they didn't get it right they got them both just pointing down and the concern here is that the exhaust could come out and it could get sucked back into the inlet those exhaust gases are very corrosive and it gets if it gets sucked back into the furnace and re-burned you end up with premature deterioration on the inside of the furnace sometimes we'll see a bunch of severely rusted components on furnaces that are only a year or two old and when we go outside and we look at the exhaust terminals we usually end up finding stuff like this where we suspect the exhaust gas is getting sucked back into the furnace now in this case they got the inlet way too close to the ground there's a good chance that this could actually get blocked with snow and if it gets blocked with snow you know what's gonna happen right the furnace isn't gonna run it it needs to be at least a foot above the ground we'll just assume it doesn't snow here and say at least a foot because i i don't know what else it's supposed to be for air conditioners they're supposed to be sitting on a nice level pad now this one the ground had settled the pad is now settled and the air conditioner is being suspended in the air from the refrigerant lines this is not good for them this this could rupture the lines this could crack them that's bad news here's what the manufacturers installations actually say it says install on a solid level mounting pad it's not code but it's the manufacturer's installation instructions this is not a solid level mounting pad it's not level there's no pad they just installed it on the dirt that's another one clearance requirements matter sorry my picture's a little bit skewed here but you can see it's very close to the sidewall and the manufacturer wants way more clearance around all these sides there's another version of that and quick reminder this is all new construction these are not old houses where you had some hack coming through they were built this way this house was built with two air conditioners when you got two of them the manufacturer says you need to have what is it 24 inches between units 24 inches between the units we've got them right up against each other it's going to dramatically reduce the efficiency of these units having them installed this close to each other there's another version of it in this photo i'm showing a dryer exhaust terminal that's completely clogged with lint because when they first installed it they left the metal screen in place now on a dryer exhaust you're always supposed to have that screen removed you can't have a screen at a dryer exhaust it was never removed the home this is a one-year warranty inspection i was doing and the homeowner complained that their dryer would never dry the clothes the clothes got really hot but they'd never get dry and they had the manufacture out the manufacturer couldn't figure out what the issue was builder couldn't figure out what the issue was they got on the roof and well there we are there's your problem and i was i was nice enough to kindly remove the screen for them here's another fun one another hvac issue you can probably guess what's missing here it's a hole in the carpet that's that's all we're missing there's there's another duct right here you can see with the infrared image that they forgot to cut out a hole in the carpet and put a register cover on there another thing that we find occasionally is problems with airflow or potentially oversized furnaces or undersized ductwork the way we figure this out is by doing a very simple test on the ductwork we measure the air temperature going in and the air temperature coming out of the furnace and the furnace is going to say what the acceptable range is and on this one it says somewhere between a 40 and 70 degree rise is acceptable now you can assume that the air going into the furnace is going to be somewhere around 70 degrees that's usually what it's going to be inside the house so if we have a rise of 70 degrees that would get us to 140. that would be acceptable it'd be at the upper range of acceptable but 140 would still be okay here we've got 155 that's probably not acceptable for any manufacturer for this particular one it definitely wasn't and we basically end up kicking this back to the builder and saying look someone needs to do some some troubleshooting to figure out what the issue is and oversizing furnaces and undersizing ductwork is a very common issue when it comes to hvac problems and it can lead to a whole host of problems in a home that we don't have time to discuss in this class here's another example temperature rise on this one it was 178 degrees over 100 degree temperature rise and the manufacturer called for a maximum of 70 degrees we got to move on we'll talk about plumbing i'll show you a bunch of pictures of plumbing leaks and that's really going to have to wrap up this class here's a plumbing drain that's not pitched properly well i should say vent water is going to come down into this vent and it's going to sit here here's the aftermath from a dishwasher leak yeah we ran the dishwasher during the new construction inspection and water just started pouring out of the floor luckily we were able to shut it off before it got too bad here's a leak at a bathtub new construction bathtub they didn't seal it off right here's a leak that we discovered inside a wall using an infrared camera we found a cold spot at the ceiling and the builder was there working on it we told them hey you got to get to the bottom of something and they ended up busting the wall open and they found a leaking fitting there it is there was water leaking right down the pipe if we hadn't done that inspection it probably never would have been discovered a lot of these access panels on bathtubs don't really exist a lot of the time you'll just have a panel that's screwed to the wall and nobody actually made an access sometimes if they want to make an access they'll just take a hammer and pound a hole through it sometimes the accesses are comically small here's even smaller and then you know sometimes they don't even exist this is not a major deal if if somebody does need to fix it it's like all right put your foot through the wall there you've got an access that's that's more just comical stuff here was one of the nicer access panels we found where it you know it fit into place and all that and they never they never busted a hole we find gas leaks on new construction too this is a gas leak right at the right of the meter on the exterior we could smell it here's the anti-tip bracket that i mentioned at the very beginning of the class all stoves come with these they're supposed to be installed we find a lot of ranges where they just left it inside the range they never put it in the whole purpose is for child safety so the stove doesn't tip over on a kid here's a bracket where somebody made an attempt they put the screw right into the drywall and nothing else when we came out we pulled the range forward just a little bit and the bracket just came right out of the wall it needs to be screwed into something a little bit more substantial speaking of dishwashers need to be secured as well this one was not it when you push the door down the whole dishwasher tips forward here's missing caulk at the sink countertop intersection and the problem is that any water that hits that top divider between the two sink sides will leak right back underneath the sink all right that wraps up this class i hope i've made my point there is value in new construction inspections it doesn't matter how many times the city has been out to inspect it it doesn't matter that this city is really picky doesn't matter that the builder tells you they're not going to fix this stuff and it doesn't matter what happens during the home inspection i can tell you from experience it does matter when there's legitimate stuff like all of these slides that i've been showing you and you bring this up to most builders they're gonna go oh yeah we messed up we're gonna take care of this for you that's usually what ends up happening so uh that concludes the class thank you so much for watching take care

Channel: Structure Tech Home Inspections

Views: 7,410

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Id: Lu7IvCLjW2A

Length: 64min 53sec (3893 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021