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Beldantazar posted:Can you link to this thread? Enjoy.
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Oct 3, 2014 22:05
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Motronic posted:This is the right idea. Thanks, this is very valuable information for me. Suppose my budget today is $1500, and I live in the SF bay area. My panel is outside right below the service drop, easily accessible, and my house's exterior is stucco over wood, totally typical california 1950s construction. Is that likely to cover a new panel, main breaker, new breakers (assuming I switch off of these "Square D QD" things to something more modern?), labor & parts?
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Oct 3, 2014 22:32
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Leperflesh posted:Thanks, this is very valuable information for me. I kinda thought you might be in CA because the inside of that panel looks like it's something that outside. I don't know of any other places that commonly have that kind of weird rear end setup. Which would make me absolutely want GFCI outlets rather than breakers so I didn't have to go outside when the blender or vacuum cleaner trips one. For a straight panel swap that should be sufficient. I'm going to guess you can have it done properly for a lot less than that depending on your jurisdiction (permits can be pricy - and if the electrician doesn't talk about pulling permits don't hire them). Just be absolutely sure the panel swap will be allowed without further work. It should be, but some munis have a hard on about that kind of thing and will require you to do other things before getting a sign off. Let them know you're triaging and have every intention to continue on, but this is what you're doing first because it's the most critical need. If they don't allow that they are basically making their residents less safe by trying to force people to do all the work at once and they should be shot for hiding behind code books rather than understanding their job is to protect people. Motronic fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Oct 3, 2014 |
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Oct 3, 2014 23:06
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Awesome, yeah I didn't even consider I might need a permit for this but it makes sense. And yeah, I know there's rules in various parts of code about upgrades when you do certain kinds of work. In some cases it makes sense because it (hopefully) prevents shitheel flippers from installing new work spliced into dangerous old stuff that is hidden behind sheetrock. But yeah I figure a whole-house rewiring is gonna be $5k+ and while I do have that money, it's my emergency home repair budget, not my non-emergency home upgrade budget (which has a lot of pending items on it). I am handy and good with tools. My dad was a pipefitter for 30 years, and I have blacksmithing experience, and I can fix things on my car, so I'd be comfortable doing a certain amount of sheetrock and stuff like that, but when it comes to having all the wiring replaced, or doing a new panel, that's too far beyond my comfort level. I just realized this is a bit of a derail and probably goes in the electricity & wiring thread so I'll shut up about my dumb house wiring now.
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Oct 3, 2014 23:18
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Collateral Damage posted:What's the most common? I'm going to guess either smoking in bed or forgetting things on the stove. Forgetting things on the stove, by an obscene margin. The 1-2% I mentioned earlier was out of the ~350,000 fires/year that US fire departments respond to. There are an estimated 4.7 million cooking fires a year that the fire department doesn't get called to. Of the ones the fire department does get called to, it's still unattended cooking fires, at about 15%, but surprisingly that's only about 40% of all cooking fires(the remaining are things like combustibles near burners, dirty equipment, or forgetting to turn things off after use). Smoking in bed causes relatively few serious fires, about 4% of the total. But it's the deadliest, causing 22% of deaths. Other random interesting facts: Men are more likely to die in cooking fires even though on average they spend 1/3rd of the time cooking that women do. NFPA Fire Analysis posted:Three-quarters (76%) of all households had fire extinguishers. Extinguishers were used in 5% of the fires. (People actually do a little better than that statistic implies - 23% smothered cooking range fires, presumably by putting a lid on the pan, which is usually a safer choice than a fire extinguisher) DNova posted:Well I meant arcing wiring in general, not specifically bedrooms. I'd like to have everything on arc fault interrupters, and I will when it's more reasonable to do so. That brings it up to about 5% of fires (7% if you could put all of your appliances on them too). Fun fact: in addition to causing over 1,000 house fires a year, extension cords send around 3,000 people to the emergency room (presumably from tripping). Zhentar fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Oct 3, 2014 |
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Oct 3, 2014 23:22
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What's the rate for fires originating from fireplaces? Like sparks, or burning pieces of wood rolling out of the fireplace, or chimney fires, or sparks from the chimney setting the roof on fire.
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Oct 3, 2014 23:27
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Zhentar posted:That brings it up to about 5% of fires (7% if you could put all of your appliances on them too). I am not sure if that makes me feel better or worse. On one hand, I honestly thought electrical fires were more common and the thought makes me nervous. On the other hand, I thought I had an easy way to help reduce the possibility 
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Oct 3, 2014 23:38
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Yeah, that's my Zhentar posted:Other random interesting facts: You know why muffin fans are called that, right? Because engineers can't cook  Apparently men suck at not setting dinner on fire too.
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Oct 4, 2014 00:13
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Antifreeze Head posted:There are also AFCI plugs that you can get, which are about half the price. Those are better than nothing, but a non-trivial portion of fires start between the breaker box and power cords, so if you have a choice, the breakers are a better choice. Leperflesh posted:What's the rate for fires originating from fireplaces? Like sparks, or burning pieces of wood rolling out of the fireplace, or chimney fires, or sparks from the chimney setting the roof on fire. The coding for fireplace fires isn't as good, so I can't give quite as many details here. Overall, they aren't particularly dangerous. Fireplace and chimney fires account for 7% of fires, but they are overrepresented because people are apparently more willing to call the fire department for small chimney fires. 85% of the fires were confined to the chimney and/or flue, and caused on average a whopping $270 of property damage, with injury or deaths rare. Fires that aren't contained to the chimney are about 1% of fires, and about 1% of fire deaths, though a more impressive 3% of fire damage (averaging $55,000 property damage per incident). Unfortunately, there aren't good breakouts of the statistics for just those fires. But the factors associated with deaths are "heat source too close to combustibles", "misuse of material or product", and "leak or break". We can infer the cause to some extent from 'item first ignited' information. 13% of them are "Structural member or framing" or "unclassified structural component", which makes up over two thirds of the property damage from fireplace fires, and almost half of the deaths (oddly, at least some of that 13% must also have considered confined to the chimney and/or flue). I'm guessing most of those were caused by problems in the chimney. 1% started with "ceiling covering", and caused about 40% of the deaths. I'm not sure how you light the ceiling on fire with a fireplace, just by leaving the flue closed?. The remaining 10% of deaths started with clothing. About 0.5% of the fires were from setting the roof on fire, and didn't cause all that much damage. Fun fact: 4% of gas fueled fireplace fires are caused by "Animal".
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Oct 4, 2014 00:31
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Zhentar posted:Fun fact: 4% of gas fueled fireplace fires are caused by "Animal". Poor animal 
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Oct 4, 2014 00:57
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I'd be fascinated to read whatever source you're working with.
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Oct 4, 2014 01:38
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http://www.nfpa.org/research/reports-and-statistics/fires-by-property-type/residential There's a shitfuckton of information between the many long, detailed reports there.
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Oct 4, 2014 02:01
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Pile of Kittens posted:I'd be fascinated to read whatever source you're working with. This one obviously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8aGlOj2VFo
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Oct 4, 2014 02:01
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:This one obviously: blech. That is an audio track from a metallica drum solo, spliced to another solo I don't recognize, and badly applied to a video track of Animal playing, with a bad cutoff. this is better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56sZOUPegUw and this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UycCK4arxaE Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Oct 4, 2014 |
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Oct 4, 2014 02:11
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Leperflesh posted:blech. That is an audio track from a metallica drum solo, spliced to another solo I don't recognize, and badly applied to a video track of Animal playing, with a bad cutoff. Sorry, I was on mute and just grabbed the first one i saw that had the fire clip 
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Oct 4, 2014 02:19
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Leperflesh posted:blech. That is an audio track from a metallica drum solo, spliced to another solo I don't recognize, and badly applied to a video track of Animal playing, with a bad cutoff. That is clearly Painkiller by Judas Priest. For shame. 
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Oct 4, 2014 02:32
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Fucknag posted:That is clearly Painkiller by Judas Priest. For shame. Oh christ. That's actually the first one, which I misattributed to metallica. Not sure what the second part is. It's especially bad because Painkiller was one of the very first cassettes I ever owned (along with Master of Puppets, and... ok, don't crucify me here... Don Henley: Building the Perfect Beast. What! It was a gift!) Gonna go hide my head in shame now.
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Oct 4, 2014 02:58
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Leperflesh posted:blech. That is an audio track from a metallica drum solo, spliced to another solo I don't recognize, and badly applied to a video track of Animal playing, with a bad cutoff. Yeah. It's Ernie who's a loving fiend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InZNBcJTmWs
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Oct 4, 2014 03:10
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Leperflesh posted:What's the rate for fires originating from fireplaces? Like sparks, or burning pieces of wood rolling out of the fireplace, or chimney fires, or sparks from the chimney setting the roof on fire. The issue is with worn, non-maintained, or poorly-installed chimneys/liners.They'll light up the framing in the wall, and those fuckers are a bitch to put out before the house is fully involved. Dryer fires are another I see a lot. You'd be amazed at how much flammable crap & lint escapes into the innards of a dryer. The worst house fire I did involving a dryer, though, was one where someone vented it inside the wall between the kitchen & the family room. It was like that for years, and chose to light up the house 15-minutes before the family sat down to Thanksgiving dinner. That black-burnt turkey sitting amongst the devastation was the saddest thing I saw that weekend.
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Oct 4, 2014 04:12
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PainterofCrap posted:You'd be amazed at how much flammable crap & lint escapes into the innards of a dryer. I recently replaced somebody's 20 foot long plastic dryer vent pipe that was draped randomly over poo poo in the basement rather than run in a straight line. It was about 7/8 blocked with wonderfully dry and fuzzy lint. That'll put the fear of god in a fella for sure. "Oh yeah! Peter did me a favor and fixed that up a few years back!" jesus
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Oct 4, 2014 04:15
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No seriously guys, I actually want to read about fire statistics and google is full of crap 
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Oct 4, 2014 05:31
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Pile of Kittens posted:No seriously guys, I actually want to read about fire statistics and google is full of crap Zhentar posted:http://www.nfpa.org/research/reports-and-statistics/fires-by-property-type/residential
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Oct 4, 2014 17:02
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Holmes Inspection is on Netflix now.
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Oct 4, 2014 21:15
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Neo Duckberg posted:Holmes Inspection is on Netflix now. Of course it's not on Netflix in Canada, where it was filmed. Thank goodness for Hola!
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Oct 4, 2014 22:08
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Dillbag posted:Of course it's not on Netflix in Canada, where it was filmed. Thank goodness for Hola! Sorry.
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Oct 4, 2014 23:13
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Neo Duckberg posted:Sorry. 
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Oct 5, 2014 02:32
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So, who wants to inspect my deck? *rimshot* This is the deck that was built onto my house before I moved it. It's made of treated pine. The deck boards were all butt jointed over the joists and were nailed down with a nail gun, so the nail heads were about 1/4" below the surface of the deck boards. This has caused nearly all the boards to split at the ends, and there are a ton of cracks throughout the boards were water has seeped down into the wood through the holes left by the nail heads. I've pulled and replaced a few boards that warped over the past few years and have shot some deck screws into some boards to keep them held down. There have been a lot of deck DIYs on reddit/diy this summer, so I was inspired to get mine looking not as much like poo poo. They're very heavy on code on the reddit sub, so I've been reading a lot about building decks to code and have identified several issues that I believe are not up to code on my deck as I've been pulling deck boards. 1. Stairs  Issues that I know about
2. Ledger board  (Sorry for the blurry image)
3. Girder butt joists 
My concern is that I am likely going to be selling or renting this house next year. I'm assuming that I'll be held responsible for these likely code violations if I sell, and if I rent, I'd be liable if there was injury due to failure from these issues. The stairs I'm planning on rebuilding (new stringers, new posts with footings, new boards, use of joist hangers to hang boards, railing up to code), but the ledger and girders have me more concerned. Is is possible to repair these appropriately without completely tearing the deck apart? I'm planning on removing all the deck boards in order to get them down in a better manner and replace bad boards, so I'll have the joists and girders more exposed and open to repair if need be...
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Oct 5, 2014 21:42
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Laminator posted:I'm assuming that I'll be held responsible for these likely code violations if I sell If that were the case why aren't you going back after whoever sold you that shitstorm? (hint: because you know that will go nowhere)
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Oct 5, 2014 23:05
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Laminator posted:So, who wants to inspect my deck? If you don't have it, download a copy of the AWC Prescriptive Residential Deck Construction Guide. I think you can grab it at their website. It'll tell you what things are supposed to look like.
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Oct 6, 2014 00:05
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Quick anecdote my brother shared with me this weekend. I take everything I hear from him (especially during his college days) with a large grain of salt, but I thought it was funny. He belonged to a fraternity in college, and as I understand it, they had been somehow cheated out of their proper fraternity house (someone sold it and kept the money, and the fraternity had to buy the cheapest thing possible or the fraternity would have been disbanded .. honestly this does sound an awful lot like a load of baloney) so they were living in a helldump. He tells me that one day they were cleaning some of the stuff that had collected through the years out of the basement, and removed an old soda machine. When they did, they found no basement wall behind it; just crumbling dirt that started falling loose now that the soda machine wasn't holding it up. They assumed this wasn't good, and found someone to come take a look at the house. That person told them that they were not to touch or move anything else in the house, as it shouldn't be standing, and no one should even be living there. They held a donation drive to get the foundation fixed and moved on. The running theory is the soda machine was "load bearing." Aoi-chan fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 00:06
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Motronic posted:If that were the case why aren't you going back after whoever sold you that shitstorm? Yup. This is what I get for being a first time home buyer and using the inspector the realtor recommended... Rookie mistake
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Oct 6, 2014 00:08
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Aoi-chan posted:
If it was primarily holding back lateral earth pressures, it was in fact a retaining soda machine! 
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Oct 6, 2014 00:11
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Load bearing Sunkist machine.
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Oct 6, 2014 01:08
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Reading more about my deck, I'm really concerned about the ledger board. Think it would be possible to convert to a free-standing structure? Maybe I should make a separate thread about it?
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Oct 6, 2014 03:25
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Laminator posted:So, who wants to inspect my deck? Motronic (or any of you other code savvy people), maybe you can set me straight, but I thought if it was less than 30" from the ground you didn't need a railing, therefore the railing along the deck is just fine and dandy, it's only the stair railing that isn't good. Also since it's pressure treated wood it's fine with being on the ground, other than sinking down when you step on it. Of course local building codes, yadda yadda...
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Oct 6, 2014 04:09
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So I've been enjoying Holmes Inspection on Netflix, and something caught my eye just now: This is the same panel as virtually every house featured has had so far, probably half of which were installed without a permit. Interestingly, at no point have they mentioned the danger of these panels, despite the fact that they always replace it for "future capacity" or some other reason.
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Oct 6, 2014 19:04
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If Stab-Lok is still in business or if the trademark is owned by any company, perhaps Holmes does not want to be sued for stating on the air that their products are too dangerous to be used?
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Oct 6, 2014 19:11
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I used to have a gig inspecting houses for insurance companies, and "there is a stab-lok panel in the house" was one of the few things that was a nope gently caress you that got a letter of policy cancellation from the insurer. They would literally rather you have multiple holes in the roof, lead paint, and broken or missing blocks in the foundation.
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Oct 6, 2014 22:34
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All this electrical chat has me paranoid, now.  What's the expected lifespan for something wired in the 70s with aluminum? Also, how does one discover arcing preventively? Years ago when I was sleeping in a spare downstairs room at my parents', I remember waking up a couple times hearing a snapping noise. Now that I'm renting the whole house with the thought of potentially inheriting it, I'd love it if it didn't spontaneously combust. None of the outlets in the room show oxidation on the outside. I haven't opened anything up yet. All that wiring should be copper installed in the 80s.
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Oct 6, 2014 23:08
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Aoi-chan posted:All this electrical chat has me paranoid, now. Well my paranoia is apparently slightly misplaced, according to the stats Zhentar posted. I don't know how you'd discover arcing other than to replace all your breakers with arc fault interrupters. That can be a pretty significant amount of money, although not when you compare it to a house fire.
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Oct 6, 2014 23:12
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