You’re gearing up for a major remodel on your home. While you’re at it, why not have an infrared inspection done to see what other preexisting fixes your home may need? Here’s why you should have an infrared home inspection done on your home before starting a major renovation project.
What’s Most Important to Check in Your House?
The most important things to have checked in your home before a major remodel are your electrical, heating and cooling systems, and water heater. These are all things that infrared imaging can detect problems with easily. If you are working on your kitchen or a bathroom, these are all things that you need to check.
Is Your Electrical Working Fine?
Checking your electrical panel, outlets, and wiring is easy to do with an infrared camera. It can see right through the walls and find overloaded circuits or bad connections. If you’re planning on needing more power in your remodeled space, which is common, it’s very important to be sure that there aren’t preexisting issues. Even if the inspection doesn’t show anything alarming, you need to be careful before you add anything to your home’s existing power load. Check with a licensed electrician to see if prep work may need to be done.
Inspect Your Heating and Cooling Systems
No matter what kind of heating and cooling system you have, an infrared inspection can ensure it’s up to par. Whether it’s an old fashioned boiler with radiant heaters or a high tech smart HVAC system, it doesn’t matter. In case the heating oil levels are low, contact your emergency home heating oil delivery supplier and get it refilled, before going in for inspection. Make sue that everything looks good, unless you’re making a sizable addition to your home.
Checking for Potential Water and Moisture Problems
Lastly, hot water is important if you’re doing a kitchen or bathroom. Even if you’re not, you still want the infrared inspector to take a look while he or she is there. What the inspection would look for is moisture leaks. It’s also a good thing that the inspector will already be checking for other potential water leaks in your existing kitchens and bathrooms. You want your existing plumbing to be in top shape elsewhere in your house before undergoing a major remodel.
Other things that will be checked during an infrared inspection will be your roofing system, building envelope, windows and doors, and other areas that could potentially cause air or moisture leakage.
Inspections Show What Work Needs to Be Done
So why do all this before a major remodel? There are a couple of reasons. First of all, if you find problems that will already be able to be included within the scope of your existing remodeling plans, you’ll be sure to include them in the work to be done. Also, if they aren’t related, but could be done at the same time and fit in your budget, having the additional work done then will save you time and money later.
Of course, the inspection could also find problems that you never could have anticipated. If these problems would make your remodeling project unrealistic at the moment, at least you’ll know before you get started. Most likely, though, any problems you find will have fairly simple solutions that you can deal with over time.
By having your house checked out before diving into a major remodeling project, you’ll prevent having to find unpleasant surprises later. Peace of mind is extremely important when you’re about to spend big in remodeling dollars. You want to be sure that your house is healthy as it can be before spending big bucks on turning it into the house of your dreams.