Kitchener Waterloo Home maintenance inspection.

A home maintenance inspection.

A home maintenance inspection is something worthy of consideration.  Let me give an example of the benefits; I am going to take you to the very top of the house.  If your home has a brick chimney, occasional maintenance may be required.  Many people think that bricks are not affected by water.  “Bricks don’t rot do they?”  It is true, bricks don’t rot but they are affected by water.  When it rains, most of the water will run down the wall but a little bit will absorb into the bricks and mortar.  The moisture content of the bricks will fluctuate as the weather changes.  This is not a problem.  The problems happen when the bricks get wet to the point of getting water logged.   

Water expands when it freezes.  Think about what happens to a full pop bottle when the pop freezes.  The bottle splits to make room for the expanding pop.  Why doesn’t the bottle break when there is only an inch of pop in it?  Because there is lots of room for the pop to expand into the empty part of the bottle. 

The same thing holds true for brick and mortar.  A bit of moisture has room to expand into the pores of the brick.  If the pores are filled with water the expansion will cause tiny cracks to form in the brick.  The next time these tiny cracks will get bigger and eventually pieces of the brick will fall right off.  

Back to the chimney.  At the top of a brick chimney there should be something called a chimney cap.  The chimney cap is designed to let the water run off instead of get into the top of the bricks or between the bricks and the clay flue.  This is what prevents the bricks from doing the same thing what the pop bottle did in my example.  At an inspection I found a chimney cap that was in need of some repair.  It looked fine from the ground but a closer inspection showed that the top had deteriorated to the point that water would stay on top and actually direct the water down to the bricks and the flue.  (See the yellow arrows.)

The house was about 60 years old.  The bricks on the house were in good shape but the bricks on the chimney?  Not so good.   As you can see, some of the bricks have the front face split right off.  The white stains are also a result of the water problem.  The stain itself is not serious but it is a side effect of a serious problem.) At this point the chimney will need more than maintenance; it needs repair

.   Maintenance of the chimney cap could have prevented this.  Hiring a home inspector when buying or selling a home is great idea but also consider hiring a Home Inspector to do an annual maintenance inspection.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure (or for the younger generation, a gram of prevention is worth a kilogram of cure.)

Submitted by Bert, for Benchmark Home Inspection Services.  Your Kitchener, Waterloo, Guelph and Orangeville area home inspector.