I am a home inspector in Salem Oregon. People have been paying me to crawl under and over homes since 2004. Before I was an independent home consultant I worked construction.
When I bought my first home, I was still in construction, and I hired a local Salem, Oregon home inspector. He spent about 45 minutes in my 1950s home and said about a dozen words to me. He handed me a mess of check boxes and hard to read hand writing. I go back to his report and even today it makes very little sense to me (and I am now a home inspector!!). At the time I had no idea what was even going on. We moved in a few weeks later in November and the furnace wouldn’t work. It had been rigged with plumbers tape and a water heater therm-couple!! My home inspector had not mentioned the “custom,” furnace. The evening of the first night in our new home was spent tearing the shower stall apart because the fixture and valve was so deteriorated it was impossible to take a shower. My home inspector didn’t mention the un-usable shower. Add those issues to some other pretty serious issues discovered in our first few days and you can imagine that I was not very impressed with home inspections as an industry. Then about a year later I heard about thermal cameras and how they were being used by inspectors.
I did some research and discovered that Infrared/thermography was a fantastic tool that was really not being used to a great extent. So I took some training, on home inspections and thermography and took some tests and I got myself certified to do home inspections in the state of Oregon. Three years later I started my own business and I am loving what I do and the people with which I get to work.
