This home had some Posts in the crawlspace area. Two of them were these square style posts which I don’t think I’ve ever seen. The other one behind was a steel post, looked to be 3" and was NOT telescoping so I wasn’t too worried about that one. I’ve just never seen this style before. Does it appear to be temporary or permanent to anybody? No labels to verify usage. Pretty wet crawlspace so going to mention that they should be painted regularly. I did browse previous posts to try and prevent redundancy but felt like I needed to post. The posts here are not anchored at top or bottom and concrete piers are behind them so it looks like these were probably added for additional support on older home. Sorry for blurry pic didn’t realize it at the time.
The reason for looking at the welds is they rust first on home made stuff. Commercial stuff has a better finish/protection of the welds due to their paint process. Your photos tend to show rust at the welds.
So a “Jack of All Trades” installed a “Jack of Many functions” and you (we) don’t know “Jack” about it!
With these things it kind of falls into two categories:
Questionable and not performing normally - sagging, sloping floor, skewed door frames or other problems - recommend “further evaluation” or your favorite similar comment.
Questionable and IS performing properly (an engineer once told me this is “performing but not conforming” which is a great/funny little saying) - NO sagging or other problems to note. I personally explain that it’s “unorthodox”, “not a standard installation”, “not recognized building practices”, or how ever else you want to say it’s not right but is working. The recommendation (and this is the tough part with something that IS working) is usually to verify proper design/permitting or something along those lings. “Wrong but working” is one of the tough things in this biz. I can argue either side of that all day long.
Per the NACHI SOP, you’re done right there. If you think about it, we really complicate things for ourselves but I could not image not reporting on that Jack in some fashion.
Yeah this is really the core of this business - at face value it’s easy (is is performing?) but we’d all be sued out of business if we really only held things to that standard. LOL… with electrical the standard would basically be, “Is the house currently on fire?”
