This post is about a lot of things—and about way more serious issues than my last Satire.
It is about luck.
It is about ladder safety.
It is about electrical safety.
It is about how sometimes if one can’t be “smart” enough—it is nice to know that sometimes one can be “lucky” enough.
It is also about how important it is to get to a point in one’s life where one is smart enough to have put enough things in place to increase the odds of one being lucky.
I inspected a house recently that we shall euphemistically call a “little rough around the edges.” It had an interlocking shingle-type metal roof. This type of roof is a good roof generally. The problem at this home was that one of the overhead electrical service wire support posts had pulled out of the roof resulting in all of the weight of the service wire hanging on just one wire. In this picture you can see that wire highlighted in red and stretched very tight.
What is a little more difficult to see is that this tight wire is bare right where it is in contact with the roof near the pulled out post.
You cannot see from the picture—but I am not on a sky-hook taking the picture. I am on my ladder leaning against the gutter to take the picture.
There is an important lesson here—NEVER use aluminum ladders against the house gutters!
All of this metal roof, the gutter and the downspout are all energized.
One would not want to have an aluminum ladder become part of this energized system, creating a path to ground through you.
It is also why the dog does not want to mark their territory today. Peeing on this particular downspout might be the last downspout the dog ever marked.
I for one, hate when that happens.
Charles Buell, Real Estate Inspections in Seattle
