Cantor Inspections

07/10/2023

01/22/2022

My article on home electrification!
Thanks to Lawrence Grown for publishing.

Electrifying Your Home ~ Responsibly & Affordably. In the U.S today, residential energy use accounts for roughly 22% of our total, nearly a quarter of all energy use and the resultant warming of the globe. How do you electrify your home when your house was built with gas equipment?

06/26/2021

A great story about how effective thorough inspections can sometimes be in negotiating a lower price.

11/17/2020

Happy Tuesday!

Did they realize what they were singing?! Gail Farrell and Dick Dale sing Brewer and Shipley's song "One T**e Over The Line," on The Lawrence Welk Show. Lawr...

12/26/2019

The rare case where tenants paid for an inspection. I don't think this landlord would ever want someone like me on the property. TMI.

11/03/2019

This is a perfectly miserable photo but it's good enough (after a lot of editing) to show you something stunning.
This is a dryer vent. If you look carefully, you can see that there is a screen welded inside this vent hood.
It's not the right kind and was obviously installed by the flippers in the very recent past. With a little time, the dryer will start taking about 3-4 hours to dry clothes. With more time, the vent fill up with lint and become really flammable. There IS a heat source at the other end that can set this all on fire. That's what dryers do. They heat stuff.
There are about 16,000 dryer vent fires in the US annually. Here's a great way to win that lottery ticket.

10/25/2019

For the wonks out there.
Tankless water heaters require flues (exhaust pipes) that keep these flue gases hot (not just warm) so that they will escape outside as quickly and efficiently as possible. These gases are extremely corrosive and require specialized stainless steel flues (we have that shown below) BUT, inserting this into a brick chimney which will immediately cool the flue gases and also may be severely damaged by these acidic gases is a serious mistake. Not sure if I've ever seen this. The manufacturer would certainly flip. Inspections do matter, whether by our cities or by folks like me. This was a bad one.

06/18/2019

My own project moves forward!

06/09/2019

I was so stunned by seeing this done correctly, that I thought I'd play turnabout with you today and show you something good. This flue needs a full inch of clearance to anything combustible (like this plywood). It's done wrong a lot. This was done perfectly, and thoughtfully, by the builder.
A very common problem in construction and repair is that plumbers don't understand the needs of framing, etc. All the trades need to know more than a little about the other ones. This is where generalists really shine.

This was a nice surprise.