Kansas City home inspection - Customer Comments 15

A couple of days after my inspection, I returned to the house to pick up the radon test. A chimney inspector was packing up his tools to leave the house as I arrived. He said, "Oh, you're the one. They told me that 'their inspector' had said something about the water heater vent. I wondered who caught this anomaly."

During my inspection, I was told that the fireplace and chimney didn't need to be inspected because the sellers had excluded them and my clients said that they weren't going to use the fireplace, anyway. Regardless, I shined my flashlight up the chimney, just to be safe, and saw that the water heater was vented improperly. Not only was it, essentially, a big, open hole in the side of the chimney, but it was also mixing two types of gases in the same chimney. That's not safe at all. The water heater will be need to be replaced with an electric one or a high-efficiency gas model that doesn't use the chimney. So the certified chimney sweep was impressed.