Bay Area Home Inspection

Today the drain/waste pipe installed under your house is mostly ABS pipe (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene). ABS piping systems is a black rigid, non-pressurized plastic pipe used to drain your sinks, tubs, showers, toilet and washing machines. It is also used to vent the drain and waste pipes.

Plastic straps with a rigid hanger are used to support the ABS pipes off the ground and carry the water weight. As the strapping material ages, it weakens. Once this occurs, it's common to find broken strapping throughout the DWV system (drain, waste, ventilation). As each section of strapping breaks, more weight is transferred to other sections, resulting in more broken straps.

An earthquake can cause drain pipe sections to fall.

Take a seed... Give it nutrients, water and sunlight... And you'll get a garden weed that will grow.

 I had a house inspection in Santa Cruz the other day and started my inspection by walking the roof first. My notes on the roof are mostly the same observations... damaged shingles, missing a spark arrestor/rain cap assembly above the chimney flue, and debris in the gutters.

The purpose of gutters and downspouts is to collect the rain water from a roof and carry it away from the house. This can be problematic, if gutter debris is blocking the downspouts.

How much water is shed from a roof, when it rains one inch?

During a Dublin house inspection, I went up into the attic to check out the heating furnace and air conditioning unit.

When an air conditioning evaporator coil unit is installed in the attic (silver box in photo), a condensate overflow pan is typically installed under the unit. The condensate overflow pan is a safety device intended to prevent unwanted condensate leakage (water) from spilling onto floors and ceilings.

As you can see, there's rust colored water (condensate) in the overflow containment pan... not a good sign.

The water in a containment pan could have come from an internal evaporator coil leakage, blockage in the primary drain line and/or blockage in the secondary drain line at the pan.

After several thousand home inspections, I'm still amazed what I sometimes discover. I was walking on an asphalt shingle roof during a Brentwood house inspection, and spotted a little irregularity in the roofing surface.

As you can see, it was a slug from a 9mm bullet. I have a set of calipers that I used to measure the slug.

Of course, I thought about whether or not a falling bullet can kill you. I goggled 'falling 9mm bullet' and came across this article: Falling Bullets Don't Kill you, Bullets Kill You...