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Dolphin posted:Totally hidden problems like plumbing in a wall being replaced with garden hose won't be found, but things like bad framing, failing foundations, unsafe clearances for furnaces and water heaters, bad electrical loads etc can be found. Pretty useful actually. Our inspectors were complete poo poo, they basically pointed out incredibly obvious stuff that anyone with a brain would notice (e.g. our backyard fence which would sway in the slightest breeze needed to be replaced) while missing stuff that any city inspector or AHJ would notice in an instant. We had 3 different inspection companies review our property prior to purchase and not a single one pointed out that the obviously new electrical service had no green tag. If I wasn't an EE myself that would've been a few grand down the toilet.
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Sep 26, 2011 19:16
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Really guys, no one thought to maybe send me an RFI?
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Oct 26, 2011 00:28
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Baronjutter posted:maybe it's for tiny kids? In a school? Haha, it is for tiny kids. What happened is they swapped the sink and urinal positions so now the counter height GFCI is next to the urinal.
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Oct 26, 2011 00:38
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I can't stop laughing at this. This is in one of my wife's K-8 schools. Go California public education:
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Apr 12, 2012 05:51
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Blistex posted:Ancient Audio setup? Yeah it looks like the main telephone terminal board for the school, some of that equipment has probably been there for 40 years. This is another good one from work. They must have convinced the architect that floods were really common in the area: 
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May 7, 2012 23:49
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JustAwful posted:Unless the company does commissioning of systems (none of them do, because there is no money in it), you're at the mercy of whatever tech(s) they send you. I've seen guys rip apart a phone demarc looking for a line to hook their security panel into, not reconnect anything, and take off before the customer realizes they have no phone, internet or fax connection anymore. I think part of the reason it can be so bad is that it is very common to have the security system as part of a separate contract from the rest of the building work, so it's not under the supervision of a general contractor or engineer. Administrative people do this to save money (or to transfer the cost, for example from a bond measure that has a strict upper limit over to a general facilities budget), but it means the security system gets half-assed into the building after the fact.
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Jan 21, 2013 18:11
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Dalrain posted:Man, this thread makes me feel so much better about mine. The previous owner just direct buried SE cable....under the driveway. At 12 inches. And then drove over it with their truck daily. I'm not sure if I'm more upset at them, or at the home inspector who didn't find anything wrong with the place. No offense to any inspectors we have around here, but in my experience general inspectors are absolute poo poo when it comes to electrical work. I bought my place after someone else had already been in escrow and backed out; that person had 4 inspections done and NONE of them picked up on the fact that the meter for the house had no green tag. When I was in escrow, we had another inspection done and this guy also missed this. Even without the missing tag, just looking at the meters and panels it was obvious they were installed above allowed working height. In addition to this, the weatherhead on the service drop outside was installed upside down, so that it was literally like a little catchbasin for water. If I was an ordinary buyer I wouldn't have known any of this and the inspectors wouldn't have done jack to bring it to my attention. The green tag thing is just crazy. Like literally the first thing a building inspector is going to do when they come to the building is check that it's there, because if it's not then there's no reason to go an inch further.
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Apr 4, 2013 21:58
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:But this thread has also established that a lot of inspectors miss things all the time too. I'm now terrified of buying a house thanks to the Internet Home inspectors are generally poo poo (in my experience). Building inspectors, as in the guys in charge of making sure permitted work follows code, generally know their stuff. A referral from someone you trust is definitely the best way to find a contractor, but aside from that you can generally get a good idea of who knows what they're doing by getting a few quotes. The guys who quote super low probably don't know what they're doing, and you'll probably be able to recognize when someone is throwing tons of extra stuff in their (and if you suspect they are, ask one of the other outfits that you're getting quotes from).
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Apr 7, 2013 02:02
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AlternateAccount posted:OK, as someone who's wondered for decades but has no idea, what is the green tag for? It's just an indication that the incoming electrical service (including meter box and the main disconnect) has passed inspection. Most (all?) local utilities won't actually connect conductors to your building without it.
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Apr 22, 2013 18:29
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MrYenko posted:South America has that beat: Haha yeah, I was waiting until I got home to get access to my Nicaragua pictures, the nice hotel we stayed in had that same setup with the water heater on the shower head and wire-nutted wiring right there in the shower with you.
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Apr 30, 2013 00:27
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Haha I just got an RFI from someone purportedly named Dan McGoon, which of you pranksters is that?
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Jul 30, 2013 21:34
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Devor posted:Engineering sometimes means that the alternative methods were carefully compared, and the most cost-effective option that meets the requirements was selected. And sometimes engineering means someone designed a system that they consider safe/appropriate, the client sent it to the contractor, and the contractor turned around and told the client, "what the hell are you doing all that for? I can do it this way, meet code, and save you all this money". Then everyone crosses their fingers and hopes the building doesn't fall down.
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Aug 9, 2013 22:24
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Dillbag posted:Mexico City was interesting. Many of the buildings under 3 or 4 stories still had rebar sticking out of the roof or ground because apparently there's a property tax that only gets applied to "finished" buildings. People never cut off/clean up the rebar and claim their building is unfinished for the life of the structure. You see this everywhere in Peru as well, for the same reason.
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Oct 28, 2013 20:45
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My main question is why that driveway appears to be about 3 car-widths wide.
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Nov 13, 2013 20:21
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Bad Munki posted:Assuming people wanted to go crazy and lawyer up, wouldn't the smaller lot owner have some legal recourse for such an obvious attempt to devalue his property? Only if there are local regulations governing lake views, building heights, etc (which do exist in a lot of lake communities). There's certainly no general legal protection he could fall back on.
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Nov 14, 2013 19:07
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My Lovely Horse posted:Man in my apartment all the outlets are at one end of it where I can't actually put any electronics. I had to buy some power strips with ridiculously long cables. Whatever his other faults are, I can get behind the outlets everywhere. You never realize all the places you need them unless there isn't one. I think there's a happy middle ground between having like one outlet per room and having an outlet every 6 feet on every surface of the house including ceiling and floor. That picture is insane. He loves to tell people in the wiring thread that the NEC has no limit for the number of outlets per breaker in residential construction, so it's probably safe to assume that the 4 dozen outlets in that picture are on way fewer circuits than they should be. FogHelmut posted:The ultimate schadenfreude for me was discovering that he had been made a licensed inspector, and suddenly the crappy constructions in this thread made sense. He didn't become an inspector, he got his engineering license which lets him approve construction drawings and take on some of the criminal/civil responsibility that Motronic mentioned.
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Jan 16, 2014 16:13
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Baronjutter posted:It's absolutely amazing how expensive cheap housing is. We gently caress our selves over driving the upkeep costs of buildings up just to save a few thousand on purchase cost. Yet we keep rewarding the industry because people are so dumb they rather save 10k off their purchase price even if it means spending 20k more on upkeep. Even just simple poo poo like upgraded insulation pays for its self in just a few years. poo poo like that really should be mandated in building codes because otherwise builders just have a race to the bottom to keep initial prices low. When it is mandated in building codes, everyone throws a fit over the draconian regulations and how impossible they are to implement. See: California. Related, the new CA Title 24 is insanely ambitious, surprisingly so. It presents absolutely massive changes to building energy use, and was so aggressive that they had to delay implementation for 6 months because no one was prepared for all of the design implications. I don't do residential so I don't know what all of the implications are there, but for commercial it has stuff like requiring that most outlets be controlled by the room's lighting controls (so auto shut-off from occ. sensors; you can have uncontrolled outlets but only if they're w/in 6 feet of a controlled outlet), basically requiring auto daylight dimming in most spaces, and much more aggressive triggers for when a renovation will force compliance (it used to be if you replaced fewer than 50% of lamps/ballasts in a space, you didn't have to do lighting T24; the new requirement is that if you touch any of the wiring between power source and ballast, you have to bring the entire space up to T24).
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Jan 28, 2014 23:51
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Devor posted:California is going to ban oscillating fans, aren't they Their intention is in the right place, right? They're trying to combat the energy vampire phenomenon, get people to shutdown their computers when not at work and all that. But in practice I think you'll just end up with twice as many outlets, or in every duplex one outlet will be controlled and the other will be uncontrolled (guess which one people will actually use?). They're butting up against major sociological/behavioral impediments here.
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Jan 29, 2014 01:29
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kid sinister posted:You'd be surprised how common this is. It was common enough that they had to specifically add a section to the NEC to say "stop putting panels in bathrooms you idiots" (NEC 240.24(E)).
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Mar 4, 2014 19:28
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Phanatic posted:The contract seems like a mess: This is all boilerplate contract language. It does not require the architect to be on-site daily inspecting every aspect of the work, that would be insane. There is no way he can inspect every nail and anchor on the job. He performs periodic inspections of the work to make sure it generally appears to be in compliance with the drawings and specs, and if there are obvious violations then he calls them out. Literally every project in the US includes language like this, and I'm sure in his reviews he had language like "this appears to be in compliance although it is not possible to inspect every element of a project". This is 100% the liability of the builders for not following the plans. ptier posted:You mean like having liability in your designs? I know that this is a case where the builder didn't follow the plans and is a little off. But if you pay an architect extra cash to ensure that they follow your plans, he should be kinda culpable. It is the liability of the builders to follow the plans, yes. E: Also, you may be surprised about who is making the big bucks if you look up incomes of architects vs general contractors. Papercut fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Mar 20, 2014 |
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Mar 20, 2014 17:59
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36" long power bus with #16 wire  
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Apr 30, 2014 18:23
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Nutsngum posted:Where the hell do you guys live that dont have proper tenant laws and a proper ombudsman service to deal with issues without racking up legal costs? All of these posts just made me so happy to have always lived in places with proper tenants' rights. I've rented 7 different places over the past 15+ years and never lost a single dollar of deposit. General wear and tear, including the need to re-paint, is not a valid reason to lose deposit where I've lived. loving light bulbs?!? You gotta be kidding me.
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May 29, 2014 00:39
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:It seems like it ought to be possible to detect this kind of thing somehow. The only solution I can think of is to have some kind of meta-meter that tracks power consumption for a group of houses, and which would be in a physically protected location (like, up a pole, in a lockbox) which gets inspected on a periodic basis. If power consumption for that meter spikes drastically, then you've greatly narrowed down your search area (from "the entire city" to "just this block/subdivision/whatever") and can start doing more manual investigation. I was involved in a case recently where PG&E discovered there were multiple huge buildings (I'm talking 20+ unit apartment buildings) where previous owners had just spliced ahead of the meter to feed all of the apartments. Like literally 99% of building power was being stolen for years and PG&E had no idea. The only reason it was discovered is because the buildings were sold during the mortgage crisis and the new owners had to come in and deal with it. SkunkDuster posted:How would A/C help? The heat still has to exit somewhere. I've been trying to convince my (totally legal, permitted) grower friends for years to go to LED for exactly these reasons. Even when we were kids doing this stuff, we knew that blue light was best for the growth stage and red was best for flowering, and a MASSIVE amount of labor and equipment was devoted to dealing with heat/ventilation issues in the room. I'm sure a large part of it is just inertia and lack of flexibility for experimentation. I would also be concerned about LEDs having too narrow of a spectrum; even if the plants do better with slightly tilted color balances, they're still getting a really broad range from the sun.
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Jun 21, 2014 00:21
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Motronic posted:That's not a normal thing in my area. I'm sure some power companies use it somewhere, but every 3-phase I've deal with in NYC, eastern PA, eastern NC and northern CA were all wye. Where I usually see it is in very old services to non-residential buildings in mostly-residential neighborhoods. Like for example, I was doing some work on the main admin campus for West Contra Costa Unified School District recently, which was in a solidly residential neighborhood. They have a high-leg delta overhead service that was installed at least a few decades ago that just serves some small office modular buildings.
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Jul 7, 2014 17:43
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Digital War posted:
Triples as a death trap.
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Jul 10, 2014 23:01
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