Precautions Archives - Page 4 of 165 - Charles Buell Consulting LLC

May 17, 2019 by Charles Buell

The cat that wanted out!

Inspectors frequently have to deal with pets left at home at the time of inspection.

I really appreciate it when they are either gone or corralled somewhere in the house.

On a recent inspection the agent had warned me the cat would try to escape and sure enough, as soon at the door opened a crack the cat launched itself at the daylight.

I have seen lots of pets that wanted out, but this one was SERIOUS about it.

The cat was shooed away from the door and we all got inside. The inspection went without event except for one short term escape accomplished by the cat.

At the end of the inspection, the agents all left and the inspection of the exterior continued. This is not my normal protocol but this was a large apartment building and we saved the exterior for last.

The cat’s unit was on the 3rd floor, end unit. The walkway ended at the entryway door and the bedroom window was located just past the end of the walkway guard railing. As I approached the end of the walkway the cat launched itself onto the window screen and started clawing at the screen with a vengeance.

Don't leave pets at the inspection — The damaged screen

The screen came undone along the edge and was ripped open vertically.

I tried to push the cat off the screen and into the room but the cat was having none of that and just clung and scratched at the screen even harder.

Eventually I was able to reach between the cat and the screen and pull the window shut– successfully bumping kitty off the screen and into the room.

The cat was not aware of it, but I probably kept it from using up one of its nine lives by saving it from a 3 story fall to the concrete below.

I called the listing agent to let the cat’s owner know about the damaged screen and that the window was no longer adequate to prevent escape of the beast.

Sometimes cats just want out.

Please don’t leave your pets for the inspector to deal with.

Charles Buell, Real Estate Inspections in Seattle

May 5, 2019 by Charles Buell

Carbon Monoxide, and Naps

It may not be the Turkey that makes you sleepy.

Cooking the turkey for hours can introduce considerable amounts of carbon monoxide to the home during the cooking process. Turkey has a component that has been attributed to that nap after dinner. Others hypothesize it is just eating too much that leads to sleepiness. It is also possible that exposure to Carbon Monoxide is a contributor.

If carbon monoxide is a culprit, it is not only related to gas ovens.

I am not sure how much CO is given off in an electric oven during the cooking of a turkey, but certainly some amount is likely. I will have to wait until Thanksgiving to get more information on that.

Considerable is created when using the self-clean function of the oven.

My own oven gives off between 28 and 3 PPM for the first 1-1/2 hours of the 3 hour cycle. After that time, whatever was creating the CO was successfully incinerated and CO levels dropped to normal.

These amounts are perhaps not enough to kill you, but certainly enough to affect a person–especially infants that might be around.

In the first 15 minutes of operation, my own oven gave off about 28 PPM, after about half an hour it settled down to 12 PPM and after about an hour it was down to 5 PPM. At the one-hour mark, ambient CO levels in the kitchen 10 feet away from the oven hovered around 3 PPM—with the exhaust fan on and a window open.

I suspect the amount of CO will depend on what the oven is burning off in the cleaning mode, and levels likely could be considerably higher, and for longer periods of time, if the oven is not cleaned very often. I clean min probably twice a year. I may start doing it more often now.

Of course your ordinary CO alarm is “not allowed” to alarm, per its listing, at these low levels, so most of the time you will have no idea why you need a nap.

I think the lesson here is to clean your ovens regularly–don’t wait until you can see the bottom of the oven. You should also run the kitchen exhaust hood the whole cleaning cycle and keep a window open.

Perhaps I will go take a nap, while I wait for the oven to finish.

Charles Buell, real estate inspections in Seattle

January 27, 2019 by Charles Buell

Stack Effect does not need help!

Stack effect does its best to create a river of air through your house–it wants to flow in at the bottom and out the top.

Stack effect is the movement of air into and out of buildings, chimneys, flue-gas stacks, or other containers, resulting from air buoyancy. Buoyancy occurs due to a difference in indoor-to-outdoor air density resulting from temperature and moisture differences. The result is either a positive or negative buoyancy force. The greater the thermal difference and the height of the structure, the greater the buoyancy force, and thus the stack effect. The stack effect helps drive natural ventilation, air infiltration, and fires.

Our air sealing efforts can mitigate stack effect but it is always ready flow as soon as there is an opening.

While houses that have less than 1ACH-50 (air changes per hour) come close to combating stack effect, current energy code requirements of 3ACH-50, does not. (Washington State Energy Code is still stuck on 5ACH-50–likely until the 2021 Code Cycle.)

For this post we will be talking about homes that meet current energy code requirements—or are worse than current code requirements.

In modern tight construction, for exhaust fans to function and to change air in the home, we must also provide a path for fresh air to enter the home when the fans are running. Sometimes the air intake locations are with vents built into the vinyl windows themselves. I do not want to discuss all the other means of providing fresh air to the home. This post will only focus on the window air intake type vents.

There are problems with these air intakes in multi-story homes. When the vents are open, they allow that river of air to flow 24/7. In my experience, these vents are either always open or always closed because the homeowner does not know what to do with them. Just as often they do not even know they are there. The result is WAY more air changes per hour than the house was constructed to meet.

In the following pictures we can see the result of stack effect on vinyl windows with the window vents open.

The windows are covered with plastic related to painting the building. Notice how the plastic puffs out at the top and sucks in at the bottom–clearly demonstrating the power of stack effect.

Solutions to this issue are illusive, but there certainly should not be any vents up high. If there are, they should be kept closed. At 3ACH-50 there will always be enough air leakage to change the air more-or-less continually at the upper level–but obviously this is not the desired way to do it. Leaving the vents open at the bottom level to allow for fresh air intake when exhaust fans or the whole house air exchange fans are running should be sufficient.

Abandonment of window intake type vents in favor of barometric type intakes would be a far better option.

We certainly cannot allow the river of air to flow wild.

A while back I did another post about how when these vents are left open at both levels it can result in too low of an indoor humidity. The window intakes can allow us to lose control of the indoor environment when some become outlets.

Charles Buell,

Real Estate Inspections in Seattle