Home inspector challenged by flood disclosures

Q: I inspect homes in Ontario, Canada. Our area has had a few floods in recent years. Because of this, many insurance companies here have canceled homeowners flood insurance policies. After the last flood, many residents had to pay for their own repairs. The homebuyers who hire me want to know which homes were flooded, and the quality of the repairs that were done. To make matters worse, the city will not provide addresses or maps to show which properties were affected by the floods. As a home inspector, I often find evidence of water-damage repairs to interior walls and flooring. This has become a new focus of my inspections. Do you have any suggestions?

A: You’ve got your work cut out for you. Homebuyers want to know, bureaucrats don’t want to cooperate, and there you are, standing in the gap. Basically, you have two issues: how to determine if a house was affected by the floods, and how to disclose what you cannot see, such as mold inside of walls.

Apparently, you can identify evidence of some types of repairs, such as visible drywall seams, new baseboards, and new floor coverings. In homes with raised foundations, it is often easy to tell if the crawlspace has been flooded.

Whether or not you find these kinds of evidence, a well-worded paragraph should be included in each report, informing buyers that the area has a history of flooding, is subject to potential flooding in the future, and that you don’t know whether mold or other defects are still present within the structure.

And by the way, municipal administrators have no business withholding flood information from the public. They need to be pressed on this point and somehow embarrassed into doing the right thing.

Q: We have a problem heating our master bedroom. The thermostat is in the hallway, just outside the bedroom door. We like to sleep with the door closed, and this causes the problem. When the hall becomes warm, the thermostat turns the furnace off before the bedroom is adequately heated. How can we solve this?

A: There are three practical remedies. You can install a second thermostat in the bedroom. When you want the bedroom to be warmer, the added thermostat can override the one in the hallway, allowing the furnace to remain on until the bedroom is warm. The downside to this approach is that the rest of the house may become too hot, raising your heating bill and wasting energy.

Another approach is to have automatic dampers installed in the heating ducts. In that case, the new thermostat in the bedroom would close the warm airflow to other rooms in the home, allowing only the bedroom and other selected areas to be heated.

Another popular solution is to have a mini-split heating and cooling system installed in the bedroom. You should discuss these options with a local heating company so see what solutions they would advise and which would be the most cost effective.

• Distributed by Action Coast Publishing. Questions to Barry Stone can be emailed to barry@housedetective.com.