John Martino's (looksmart) Blog

It is standard practice to have a New Jersey home inspection when you are considering purchasing a home. It is becoming much more common for sellers to have a pre-purchase home inspection. In a slow real estate market as we are in now it may be worthwhile for a seller to have a home inspection. O...

Wood stoves are getting more and more popular and I see then quite frequently while performing home inspections in New Jersey. Most of these types of wood stoves are safe but I do see quite a lot of improperly installed wood stoves while doing NJ home inspections. Problems can come about when the...

While performing home inspections in New Jersey, I find that many of the older homes have an electric service size that is too small for the size of the home. A home with an electrical service which is too small is not a safety concern but it is a concern of convenience. A small electric service ...

While performing home inspections in New Jersey I do come across my fair share of slate roof coverings. Slate roofing is a highly specialized roofing system that dates back hundreds of years. A slate roof is rather simple in design. It consists of thin layers of slates overlapped so they create a...

An interesting method of producing hot water in a residential home is to install a thankless water heater. Tankless water heaters are becoming more and more commonplace. I have been seeing more and more of these tankless heaters while inspecting homes. They have some advantages over traditional w...

 I was at a radon re-certification class yesterday attended by roughly sixty NJ home inspectors. There was a speaker from a radon lab in New Jersey called Radiation Data. It is the NJ lab where I also send my radon kits to be analyzed. The topic of radon in granite counter tops in homes was discu...

Almost every discussion that I have with fellow home inspectors in my area is never complete with out talking about the problems that we find with non professional electrical wiring. New Jersey home owners for some reason love to do there own wiring. They will use all kinds of conductors includin...

It never fails that probably the single most prevalent issue on home inspections is the lack of grading away from the home. I can pull up to ten houses and I guarantee eight out of the ten will have grading issues. Homeowners spend a fortune each year on basement water proofing remedies when the ...

One thing that I have found while inspecting buildings and homes with almost flat roofing systems is the lack of adequate roof drainage. Particularly in homes that were constructed before nineteen twenty. Most of the homes that I inspect with these older flat roofs are in the urban areas of Berge...

The vast majority of roof coverings that are installed on northern New Jersey homes are asphalt  shingle. This type of roof covering is both durable, easy to install and has a reasonably long life expectancy.  An important  area for a home inspector to view is the roof covering on the subject hom...