Renovation & Design
Renovation & Design
MIKE HOLMES: Your kitchen can't take the heat
Your stove -- whether it's gas or electric -- needs to have an operating hood and extraction fan over it. These hoods aren't just decorative -- they are essential to help control excess moisture in your home, as well as to help remove cooking odours.
These ventilation systems have a decorative exterior hood that hides the works and an exhaust fan and ductwork to extract the air, smoke and moisture. Obviously they need to be over the cooking area -- ideally they should extend over the stove's surface area. They need to be close enough to the stove to extract air, but not so close you can't comfortably cook. If they are too high, like many 'designer' hoods, they aren't doing an effective job.
It's ideal if your kitchen exhaust fan discharges to the outdoors. Never exhaust into the attic or soffits or crawl space. I've come across situations where the kitchen fans vent into the attic space; this is a really bad idea, for many reasons. First, the last thing you want to do is allow hot, moist air up into your attic space, especially in winter. It will lead to ice dams, mould, rot and a world of trouble caused by condensation. Second, if you ever had a fire on the stove, the exhaust fan could pull the fire into the attic, and allow it to quickly spread throughout the house.
The ducting should be smooth, with a short, straight run to the outside, with as few bends and angles as possible. This will help with your fan's efficiency in moving the air out. If the run is very long, you might need a bigger fan, so check with a pro. The joints need to be sealed, and if the duct runs through an unheated space, they should be insulated. If they aren't, condensation might form on the duct.
Kitchen exhaust fans come in different sizes and need to be appropriate for the size of your stove and house. It's very important that you get the correct size of ventilation fan. It's not as simple as 'bigger is better.'
Not only will your utility bills be higher because you are running an oversized fan, you are also exhausting larger amounts of heated or cooled (depending on the season) air from your home. And that's air you've paid to condition, which will affect the energy efficiency of your home. A fan that's too large will create air infiltration and compromise the building envelope.
If you have installed an exhaust fan that's too big, you can cause depressurization, which will lead to backdrafting. Backdrafting happens when exhaust fans pull the gases from combustion back into the house. These gases are the byproduct of fireplaces, hot water heaters, furnaces -- any combustion appliance that is vented to the outside -- and these gases are dangerous. They can kill you.
Most new homes are pretty airtight -- that's one of the reasons we have few problems with indoor air quality and mould growth. Airtight homes have mechanical ventilation systems such as heat recovery ventilators, to provide a fresh air supply. If you don't have replacement air coming in, you'll risk creating negative pressure (backdrafting), but also your fan will be starved for air and won't work properly.
You often see recirculating kitchen exhaust fans that don't expel air to the outside. They pull steam and smoke from the stovetop, filter it and recirculate it through vents at head level. These fans might remove odours, since they usually have a charcoal filter but they don't remove steam.
Don't forget that boiling water and steaming vegetables create a lot of moisture that needs to be discharged. These recirculating fans don't cause depressurization since they aren't vented externally.
They don't remove much odour or grease, and they blow into your face when you're at the stove. Replacing the filters can be expensive so people don't do it as often as they should, which means they don't work well.
I really believe you need to have your kitchen fan exhaust outside.
Catch Mike in his new series, Holmes Inspection airing Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on HGTV. For more information visit www.hgtv.ca
-- Canwest News Service
Renovation & Design
ASK THE INSPECTOR: Adjusting teleposts a skill best left to pros
QUESTION: We are in a six-year-old home in Richmond West. This house has two beams and is a cab-over design, so telepost adjustment may present problems. The doorway leading to the master bedroom in the cab-over has been sticking in the winter. I have recently replaced this door with a solid-core door for a few reasons -- sound being one, and the ability to shave off and trim the door if needed.
Our basement is completely finished, and my concern is that as soon as a contractor sees this, assuming I can find one, he will only want to do the adjustment once, and I won't do it that way. Of course, we now have some drywall cracking as well.
I wonder if you had any feedback from customers or contractors who have dealt with this problem in the correct way by doing a slow adjustment. The average homeowner doesn't even know what kind of contractor to hire, and I am certainly one of them.
Susan Maxwell, email
I read an article you wrote in the Free Press on how to adjust teleposts. We live in River Heights and we have a bungalow that has two teleposts. When we moved in back in 1995, the house had already shifted and is lower on the right-hand side. We never had the teleposts adjusted. It did not really bother me, but now I feel that I should look at adjusting the teleposts as it bothers me when we open our cabinet doors and they stay open. Our basement is undergoing renovations and is not yet finished. I was thinking this would be a good time to revisit the teleposts.
When is the best time to adjust the posts and how many times during the year? What would happen to the base where the concrete and the frame of the house meet when I adjust the teleposts?
John Ticzon, email
I bought a 28-year-old house in Winnipeg and recently moved in. I did a pre-purchase home inspection. There are two doors that cannot be properly closed and the home inspector told me I probably have to adjust the teleposts.
I am new to Canada and I wanted to know whether this is big job and who can do this for me.
Mahinda Jayaratne
ANSWER: All of your questions pertain to the normal, yet frequently misunderstood, need for telepost adjustment in your homes. The common thread in all three inquiries is the difficulty finding proper contractors to do the job. I will address that pressing question and the others, as well.
As pointed out in the first question, it can be difficult to find contractors willing to do multiple, slow adjustments of teleposts to minimize cracking and structural movement in the home. The more gradual the adjustment, the less the chance of major cracking in the walls and increased squeakiness in the floors.
If adjustments are done no more than a quarter to half a revolution at a time, several days or weeks apart, the house will be more prone to slowly adapt to the movement. If posts are lowered even fractions of an inch or more in one fell swoop, cracking walls are a certainty. As to the second inquiry, there should be no damage or negative effect of lowering teleposts on the floor structure over top of the perimeter foundation, as long as one thing is taken into consideration. The interior partition walls must not be installed tight between the concrete floor slab and the underside of the floor framing prior to adjustments. A slip joint or substantial space must exist between these two components, or damage may occur to the floor structure during telepost adjustments.
This can occur because most teleposts require lowering, which may allow the partition walls to improperly assume the support of these posts if they don't have enough space at the top or bottom. In that case, new floor bumps may occur, teleposts may become loose and, in rare cases, differential movement and damage can occur over top of the foundation walls. If your basement walls are not currently "floating," this can be easily remedied by cutting the existing framing to allow for future telepost adjustments.
These repairs and adjustments can be done at any time of the year, but should be avoided in the early spring or late fall if possible. At those two times of the year, the freezing and thawing of the soil and daily temperature fluctuations above and below the freezing point may cause the basement floor slab and footings to move, making telepost adjustments more difficult.
The final and most important part of all your inquiries is finding the best person to hire for this important maintenance issue. If your basement is mostly unfinished, or you are certain that all basement walls are sufficiently floating to allow adjustments, you may want to call a reputable foundation contractor for the repairs. Some of these foundation repair experts will come in several times to do periodic adjustment, but don't hire a contractor that tells you the adjustments can all be done in a matter of hours, rather than months.
If there are walls that need to be cut down, or the telepost adjustment areas are covered, enlisting the services of a good general contractor will be your best bet. An experienced contractor should have sufficient knowledge of the proper amount and rate of telepost adjustments necessary to achieve a relatively straight floor system without major damage to the walls or floorboards.
Ari Marantz is the owner of Trained Eye Home Inspection Ltd. and the President of the Canadian Association of Home & Property Inspectors - Manitoba (www.cahpi.mb.ca). Questions can be emailed or sent to: Ask The Inspector, P. O. Box 69021, #110-2025 Corydon Ave., Winnipeg, MB. R3P 2G9. Ari can be reached at (204) 291-5358 or check out his website at www.trainedeye.ca.
trainedeye@iname.com
