In this episode of the Structure Talk podcast, Reuben and Tessa discuss gas leaks and how to detect and document them during home inspections. They talk about the different tools and methods used to find gas leaks, including electronic gas detectors and liquid soap. They emphasize the importance of only reporting gas leaks when there is definitive proof, such as the presence of bubbles. The conversation also touches on the challenges and frustrations home inspectors face when dealing with gas leaks. The conversation discusses the issue of gas leaks and the differing perspectives between home inspectors and gas companies. The hosts share their experiences with finding gas leaks during inspections and the challenges of getting them addressed. They highlight the importance of distinguishing between minor leaks and emergencies. The hosts also discuss the frustration of inconsistent responses from gas company technicians and the need for better communication and understanding between home inspectors and gas companies. They express hope for improved procedures and increased safety for homeowners.
Here is the link to the product that we talk about:
https://structuretech.com/toptes-pt205/
Takeaways
Gas leaks can be detected using electronic gas detectors or by using liquid soap and looking for bubbles.
Only report gas leaks when there is definitive proof, such as the presence of bubbles.
Gas leaks are relatively rare during home inspections, but it is important to be thorough in checking for them.
Home inspectors may face challenges and frustrations when dealing with gas leaks, including skepticism from gas companies and irate sellers. Gas leaks found during home inspections are often minor and do not pose an immediate threat.
Calling the gas company is necessary for emergency situations, but for minor leaks, hiring a plumber is sufficient.
There is a lack of consistency in how gas leaks are assessed and addressed by gas company technicians.
Better communication and understanding between home inspectors and gas companies is needed to ensure the safety of homeowners.
The issue of gas leaks requires ongoing attention and efforts to improve procedures and increase awareness.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Catching Up
04:55 Discussion on Fluoride and Cavities
05:02 Detecting and Documenting Gas Leaks in Home Inspections
09:14 Tools and Methods for Finding Gas Leaks
13:56 The Importance of Definitive Proof in Reporting Gas Leaks
15:48 Challenges and Frustrations of Dealing with Gas Leaks
16:15 Understanding the Severity of Gas Leaks
21:23 Inconsistent Responses from Gas Company Technicians
23:37 The Need for Better Communication and Understanding
29:37 Working Towards Improved Procedures and Safety
TRANSCRIPTION
The following is a transcription from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be slightly incomplete or contain minor inaccuracies due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Reuben Saltzman: Welcome to my house. Welcome to the Structure Talk podcast, a production of Structure Tech Home inspections. My name is Reuben Saltzman. I’m your host alongside building science geek, Tessa Murry. We help home inspectors up their game through education, and we help homeowners to be better stewards of their houses. We’ve been keeping it real on this podcast since 2019, and we are also the number one home inspection podcast in the world, according to my mom.
[music]
RS: Welcome back to the Structure Talk podcast. Tessa, as always, great to see you. We are coming off a long show talking about all different kinds of failures I’ve done and some fun projects we talked about that last week.
Tessa Murry: And wins.
RS: Yeah. And some wins.
TM: Educational moments.
RS: What’s new in your world, Tess?
TM: Hey, you know, I’m actually gonna be taking a trip to Ohio next week for the solar eclipse. I’m going through Indiana.
RS: Oh, really?
TM: Yeah. So I’m kind of, I’m excited about that.
RS: Okay. All right. And how are you getting there? Are you flying or you’re driving?
TM: Driving.
RS: Okay. And did you find somewhere to stay?
TM: Yes. [laughter] That was the challenging part, but yes. All the Airbnbs are completely booked up in that swatch, you know, that goes kind of from the southwest to the northeast, all the way up through like Cleveland and stuff. So that was, that was not easy, but luckily got on top of that early enough that we do have a hotel, so it should be an interesting trip. We’ll see. Hopefully we have good weather, cross our fingers. It’s not cloudy.
RS: Hopefully so. And by the time this episode airs, I think it will have already happened.
TM: Yes. It will.
RS: But we’ll talk about it on the next time you’re on.
TM: Yeah.
RS: Okay. All right. That sounds like fun.
TM: Yeah. How about you, Reuben? Anything new going on in your world?
RS: What’s new? No, nothing too new. Nothing too exciting. I need to put in a reverse osmosis system in my kitchen. I was listening to…
TM: Really?
RS: A Joe Rogan podcast. Somebody is like, you gotta listen to this one. And he had this guy Dave Brecka on, and he was talking about all this stuff with health and stuff that’s gonna kill you. And one of the things they talked about is that there’s an inverse relationship between the level of fluoride in city water and people’s IQ for the city.
TM: Oh. [laughter] Huh. Okay.
RS: And I was like, you know what, I’ve been kicking around the idea of an RO system for a long time. And now just, this is pushing me over the edge. I need to get fluoride outta my water.
TM: I gotta tell you something though. This is interesting and we’re taking a complete tangent, but I have had reverse osmosis water for the last two years now where I live. And it is the best water I’ve ever had. And I love it. I love it so much and I’m spoiled by it. Now anywhere else I go, the water just doesn’t taste good to me. That being said, I also got the first pre-cavity I’ve ever had in my life last year.
RS: Ooh.
TM: So I have no idea if that is just because… I mean, obviously there’s a lot of other variables, but I would say I’m a pretty good toothbrusher, I brush my teeth. I always brush my teeth twice a day, morning, evening. I never used to floss until recently, but now I’m flossing. I go for regular cleanings and I have never had a cavity in my life until last fall. I went in and they’re like, yep, you’ve got the beginning of a cavity. And I was like, what? So they recommended using a fluoride rinse, like a fluoride mouthwash.
RS: Yeah.
TM: So I’ve started doing that now ’cause I don’t want cavities. But does that have anything to do with maybe the removal of fluoride from my diet when I switched over to this RO system? I have no idea.
RS: I’m gonna say absolutely, because everything I’ve read about it, fluoride really does… I mean, it’s like a miracle at preventing cavities. I mean, it is extremely good for your teeth. It’s bad for everything else, but…
TM: Everything else. [laughter]
RS: It Is very effective at preventing cavities. So that’s very interesting, Tess.
TM: Yeah. I am not a scientist and I’m not telling anyone that they should or should not use fluoride, but it’s just my own personal experience.
RS: Huh. And then, well, and then of course the question is, does a fluoride rinse cause any problems? I mean, even if you rinse and you spit it out…
TM: Your body’s still absorbing it though, I would think. You know.
RS: That’s what I’m wondering.
TM: Somewhat.
RS: Is that safe?
TM: I have no clue.
RS: Okay. Yeah. Me neither.
TM: No clue. [laughter]
RS: All right.
TM: This is outside our area of expertise, that’s for sure. [laughter]
RS: All right. Total tangent. We’ll come back to this in five years and I’ll let you know if I have any cavities. I have not had a cavity for a very long time. If something changes, it was the fluoride.
TM: There we go. [laughter]
RS: All right.
TM: Okay, perfect. All right, so what’s the topic for today, Reuben?
RS: All right, Tess, today we’re talking about gas leaks, natural gas leaks. Okay. We got a lot to talk about.
TM: I can tell you’re fired up about this.
RS: Oh, Tessa.
TM: Has there been something that’s happened recently that’s brought this to the forefront of your attention?
RS: Well, if by recently, you mean like continuously as long as I’ve been inspecting. Excuse me, for as long as I’ve inspecting, yes, absolutely.
TM: What do you mean?
RS: I’m whipped up about gas leaks. Here’s what happens. We do a home inspection, we find a gas leak and we tell someone there’s a gas leak. There’s two ways this ends up going and it ends up being so black and white. Either number one, somebody calls the gas company, the gas company comes out and they say there’s no leak. And then we look stupid because they’re the gas company and they’re the experts and they know more than we do. And they are more than, we’re less than, we’re just the petty little home inspector. So we look stupid. And then people don’t trust us. They don’t trust our report. It’s embarrassing. It sucks. So that’s one outcome of us finding a gas leak. The other outcome is we don’t notify the seller about it. We just tell the buyer, hey, you got a minor gas leak here, you should fix it. It’s probably something that’s been leaking for like five years. It’s tiny. And then it gets back to the seller that there was a gas leak. And then the seller is irate that we didn’t tell them they had a gas leak. It’s one of the two. And we’ve gotten flack on both sides for so many years, Tessa. And it is…
TM: You just can’t win.
RS: So frustrating. And we’re still dealing with it. So we’ll come back to that. But first, I wanna talk about what we do to find gas leaks and document them. So you went through all of this. You taught home inspectors how to do this. What do we do at Structure Tech?
TM: Now you’re quizzing me, Reuben, ’cause it’s been a few years. [laughter] But I’ll do my best. So Structure Tech uses a tool, called it… What is it? The technical term? The a gas sniffer. That’s what we call it.
RS: Yeah. I call them gas sniffers. You could call it a combustible gas detector. In fact, there’s a couple of them out there. Let me wax on this. Okay. We’re going down another path. All right. Reset. Few different electronic devices. And we don’t all use them. There are home inspectors on our team who don’t even want to use them. They don’t trust them. And that’s fine. Your nose is very good at finding gas leaks. And our…
TM: Means you have a good sense of smell.
RS: Yeah. Yeah. You’re right. If you don’t have a bad cold.
TM: Right. And if you don’t trust your nose, then you can use one of these devices.
RS: That’s right. That’s right. But you know what? I’ve got a good nose. If there’s a gas leak, I’m gonna smell it. I don’t take an electronic gas detector and go over every fitting and every pipe at every house. I’m not hunting for these tiny minuscule things, but if there’s a gas leak enough for me to smell it, and I’ll tell you what, Tess, you can smell gas leaks, even tiny ones. And of course, going back to last week’s podcast, of course, I have tested this many times, making gas leaks in my own house, making the smallest gas leak I can possibly create just to see how far away do I need to get before I smell it. And even making the smallest thing I can possibly do, I can smell it when I’m a few feet away. I mean, the stuff that the gas company adds is called Mercaptan. It’s extremely stinky. It’s there to let you know there’s a leak so you can smell it.
TM: Can I just say, I’m really glad that none of those experiments made it into our last podcast episode where we talked about failures. If you’re still here today, that’s good.
RS: That could have been a nasty failure.
TM: Playing around with gas leaks. Oh my gosh. [laughter]
RS: Yeah. And I haven’t published most of that testing because I don’t know, people just get whipped up.
TM: It’s not safe to replicate. [laughter]
RS: Probably not. We’ve got a couple of different devices. The one that all of our inspectors used when you were on the team, Tess, was a combustible gas detector. And it’s a fairly expensive device. It costs a couple of hundred bucks and it’ll detect gas leaks. It’ll also detect exhaust gas. It’ll detect a wide range of products, but there’s a newer product out there. Well, I shouldn’t say newer. There’s a different product that I think might be a little bit more handy for home inspectors to use, which is just a gas leak detector. And you can buy ’em about the same size as an electrical sniffer or a voltage detector. It’s basically the same shape, same size, takes a couple of AAA batteries, and you can run this around all the fittings and it works just about as well as the combustible gas detector.
TM: Really? Okay.
RS: I mean, it might have just a split second delay compared to the other more expensive device, but for all intents and purposes, it’s just as good at finding gas leaks.
TM: So a couple of questions. One, is it a lot cheaper than the gas detector? Okay. And do you have to let it, when you turn it on, let it warm up and calibrate it and do all of that like you did with the older tools?
RS: Great question. Okay. Number one, they cost about a 10th of a combustible gas detector.
TM: Really?
RS: Yeah.
TM: How much are they?
RS: Like 20 bucks.
TM: Wow. Okay.
RS: They’re very inexpensive. And as far as the warmup, the one that I’m thinking of, and I can’t speak for all of them, there’s just one that Eric had told me about, so I tested it out. And with this one, you turn the power button on and it’s got a 30 second countdown where it auto calibrates itself. And then it’s good to go. So you don’t need to mess around with calibrating it like the ones that we were used to. Someone’s gonna ask, I’ll tell you which one it was that I tested. There’s tons of ’em out there, but this one was called the TopTes, it’s T-O-P-T-E-S as in Tessa. TopTes PT205. And they’ve got different models, there’s probably a 210 with different features and what not. I happened to check out the PT205 and I was delighted with it. Great little gas leak detector, I should call it.
TM: Okay, very interesting. I like the fact it’s compact, it’s small, it’s affordable, a couple of batteries and easy to use to win.
RS: Oh, and the batteries, Tess, that was always a complaint that we had with the combustible gas detectors is that batteries wouldn’t be charged, they were nickel cadmium batteries and once they went bad, you had to replace some of the batteries were like, it was like 80 bucks for a pair or something like that, and they were proprietary. You could not go to Batteries Plus or AAA batteries or whatever and get new ones, you had to order ’em online, it was just, it was always frustrating.
TM: Yeah. And the way that the door would fit was always kind of finicky, and if it didn’t fit perfectly, they wouldn’t charge. Yeah, I’m glad to know that there’s something, a newer product out there that you trust and it seems to work just as well, and it’s easier and more affordable.
RS: Yeah, so I like those devices, but like I said, we don’t necessarily even need to use those electronic devices, it’s kind of nice if your client is there, you look a little bit more professional using this, and if it’s something up above your head where you can’t put your nose right on the fitting, you can reach your arm up, but for all intents and purposes, if you can get your nose there, it’s just as reliable, you can put your nose right up to a fitting, you know what’s leaking there. The goal is if you find gas, figure out… If you smell gas, try to figure out where it’s coming from, and once you got that done, the way that we would prove there’s a gas leak… All right, Tess, what would we do?
TM: Well, we have this other very expensive tool we use, liquid soap.
RS: Yes, thank you.
TM: Basically, liquid soap, and you just kind of smear some on around the fitting or wherever you think that gas leak is coming from, and watch for bubbles. And if you start seeing bubbles coming out, then you know, you’ve verified that it is a gas leak, and you wanna mark it somehow.
RS: Yeah, and our rule is, you don’t ever report anything that you smell and you don’t ever report anything that you find with your electronic gas leak detector. Those are nice tools for narrowing down where to check, but the only leak you ever report is a leak where you get bubbles. You can see the bubbles, you can take a picture of it or a video of it, you have absolute definitive proof that you have a gas leak here. No bubbles equals no leak. You’re talking about liquid soap, there’s basically three different versions of it that I know of. One, is you just take a little jar of water, you add some dish soap to it, shake it up, apply some of that. That’s one way to do it. Another would be to buy a gas leak detection solution, cost about five bucks for a little jar, it’ll last a home inspector probably a couple of years.
TM: The entire time I was inspecting, I had the same solution.
RS: Yeah, yeah, it’s not like it’s a lot of money. Or Joel on our team, he tells me his preferred liquid of choice is bubble solution that kids use like for blowing bubbles.
TM: Oh really? Yeah, I can see that. Cool.
RS: He said that works really well too. This is not an expensive product and it gives you definitive proof that you got a gas leak.
TM: Very interesting. And just to go back to what you said, I’d say most of the time during inspections, what is it? Maybe one out of every 200 houses you go into, maybe you smell gas or you find a gas leak. Well, I should clarify that. It’s been very rarely that I’ve found gas leaks that are significant enough to hit you when you walk in, that’s pretty rare. And then you wanna either get out if it’s bad enough or try and figure out where it’s coming from, to notify the sellers.
RS: Yeah, I think I had one of those in my entire inspection career.
TM: Did you?
RS: Where I walked in and I was like, I gotta call somebody. This is an emergency.
TM: Yeah, I had one of those too. But most of the time, like you said, it’s like once you’re down in the mechanical room and you’re testing the furnace and you’re spending a lot of time and your face is right next to these gas lines, then you kind of get a little whiff of or something. Usually that’s what’s going on. You get a little whiff and then you just start sniffing all the gas lines you can get to, and usually you’ll kind of find a little something, but it’s because you’re literally, your face is down there and you’re tuned into it, whereas most homeowners, that leak’s been going on for years and they’ve never noticed it, they’ve never smelled it before. And that’s not the type of gas leak that warrants a lot of fear, in my opinion. It’s not going to blow up a house.
RS: Tessa, you’re 100% right. Yes.
TM: Just a tiny little leak that’s been going on for a long time, unnoticed.
RS: Okay, shouldn’t say this, but I’ve done testing. How much gas do you need to actually create a flame and I’ve held the lighter up there and I’ve made a leak just to see how much will actually create a flame. And you gotta have a really significant leak. I mean, something where you’re gonna smell it from across the room to create a flame. And I’m talking…
TM: You mean you held a lighter up to a little tiny gas leak to see if the gas would light up?
RS: That’s exactly right. Yes.
TM: Wow. Okay. That’s scary.
RS: Don’t try this at home, of course.
TM: No.
RS: It’s a flame the size of what you’d have on a cigarette lighter. It’s very tiny. But even that is gonna be what I would consider a significant gas leak. And most of the gas leaks that we would find as a home inspector, there’s no way it would actually create a flame if you held a lighter to it. Think of it like a dripping faucet. Nobody’s gonna drown. You’re not gonna flood the house, but it’s still dripping. It should still be addressed. And that’s the seriousness of these gas leaks and my gosh, Tess, good luck trying to convince people that there is any type of gray area. It’s black or white in everybody’s mind. The gas companies have these billboards. If you smell gas, what do you do?
TM: Yeah. You call ’em.
RS: Get out, is what all the billboards say.
TM: Get out, call them.
RS: The house must be evacuated.
TM: Yeah. Yeah. They’ll shut off the gas to your house. It’s a whole thing.
RS: Yep. So good luck trying to convince people, but there really is a difference. And so often we would report these gas leaks and… Okay, let’s go back to our procedure. So we take a picture of the bubbles, we put that in our report. We take yellow electrical tape, we wrap it around the location of the leak. We write “leak” and then you put an arrow on there to point at it to make it really easy for the next person to find. You have a picture of that in your report and you tell people exactly where the gas leak is. Despite all that, so often the gas company will come out and they’ll say there’s no leak. Tessa, I am personally… Okay, a couple of stories. Number one, Milind… Or no, I won’t say who it is. We’ll just say one of the inspectors of your team… [laughter]
TM: We’re not editing that out either.
RS: We’re not editing that out. He was buying a house. This was way back in the day. I don’t remember how long ago it was. It was probably 2009, 2010, something like that. And we found a gas leak at the house he was buying. They ended up bringing it up to the seller, told him there’s a gas leak. They had the gas company come out. Gas company says there’s no leak. Well, there was big bubbles, there was clearly a leak.
TM: Wow.
RS: We ended up going back to the house after he bought it, we checked it again, put the soap bubbles on there and I mean, just… Or put the leak detection solution on there, there’s big bubbles. We took a lighter. Took a video of it. Like it, it’s clearly a leak, but we told the gas company exactly where to look and they said there’s no leak. So I’m not saying that the people coming out there are incompetent, but they’re using a different scale to find these gas leaks or they’re using different tools. And Tessa, they have different grades for gas leaks. And what brings this up is that I’ve had a couple of home inspectors on my team complain recently about the gas company saying… Throwing Structure Tech under the bus, calling out our company by name and saying, Structure Tech is notorious for making a big deal out of nothing and making up gas leaks.
TM: Oh, man.
RS: Or when we’ve basically held their nose right to the leak and showed ’em where it is, they say, well, that’s the size of a mouse fart and it’s not gonna make any difference.
TM: Okay.
RS: And then when we shared this amongst our team, like a bunch of inspectors on our team said, “Yep, I’ve had techs say the same thing, the size of a mouse fart.” They’re going around, the gas companies using this language, and like all the techs at the gas company are calling it the size of a mouse fart and saying it’s inconsequential. So of course now I’m whipped up ’cause what is it? Either it’s you smell gas, get out, or it’s the size of a mouse fart and it doesn’t matter. But you can’t have the same company saying both things. Which one is it?
TM: That is tough.
RS: I need to go get a drink of water. I’m whipped up.
TM: Take a breath. What are these different categories of these gas leaks that the gas company has? Are there two or three or four?
RS: There’s three of them.
TM: Three. Okay.
RS: And I used to have a link to a page that was well hidden on the gas company’s website, categorizing these three levels of leaks and they’ve since taken the page down. And if I knew then what I know now, I would’ve taken a screenshot and I would’ve saved it for myself. But what… Okay.
TM: Level one, mouse fart. Level two, nobody understands and level three is get out.
RS: Level three is get out. Yes. But the general public is not intelligent enough to understand the difference. And if you can smell anything, you just need to assume it’s always level three and you need to get out of the house and then let the gas company come out there and tell you that it doesn’t exist and Structure Tech is crazy.
TM: Okay, so a question for you then, is there another option besides calling the gas company that you’d put in your report or tell the sellers, if you’ve got an inspector who finds a gas leak, does that inspector then tell the buyer and tell the seller and then what do they tell the seller to do about that gas leak?
RS: I’ll tell you what, Tess, like we talked about earlier, you and I have both been in like one house where there was a major gas leak. In that case I said, “Call the gas company, have it addressed.” In all of the other places where I found gas leaks, probably hundreds of houses, my advice has been get a plumber out to repair the gas leak. I have never told people to call the gas company. The only time I tell people that, is if I think it’s an emergency and it’s very rare that you’re gonna find an emergency. It’s almost always the size of a mouse fart. [chuckle] And I’ve never had a problem with a plumber coming out and not finding our clearly marked gas leak. When we take that electrical tape, we got the pictures, whatever, the plumbers find it and they fix it. It’s done. They don’t come back and say, “Oh this is no big deal.” So that’s how I advice.
RS: You got a small gas leak that the home inspector found, just hire a plumber because… Here’s the other part of it, Tess, the gas company is not in the business of repairing gas leaks, they’re in the business of making the house safe. If they actually do find a significant leak, and here’s why they have different standards. If they find a significant leak, their job is to make it safe and how do they make it safe? They turn the gas off. And they don’t want to have to turn the gas off to a house when it’s the size of a mouse fart. Okay, now you got no heat, your house is uninhabitable. They don’t wanna do that. They’re in a tough position too. It’s unfortunate that the only solution anybody seems to have is call the gas company. I don’t think they’re the best person for addressing small gas leaks, which is 99% of what we find during home inspections.
TM: I’m sorry that Structure Tech has been caught in the crossfire of this conundrum, but it really… It’s another example of how it’s tough to just put something like that into a black and white category, and that applies to everything else in life. It’s not always that simple and you hear me say a lot of the times when we’re talking about building science stuff is like, it depends. It’s like, with a gas leak, it does depend. It could be life-threatening. In that situation, call the gas company, but if it’s not, then get a plumber and that’s 99% of the time.
RS: Yes.
TM: But for the masses to understand and to try and keep people safe, I think they’ve pushed that message out there and that’s been the marketing that they’ve used but it is so frustrating when you’re on the other end of that and you’re getting thrown under the bus For doing what you’re supposed to be doing.
RS: So frustrating. So recently I said, “You guys, I gotta put an end to this. We need to get Structure Tech and the gas company on the same page.” And so I called up the gas company and I got transferred to this person, that person, finally talked to a very helpful person who was like…
TM: Did you say, “You don’t know who I am?” [laughter] “I’m Reuben Saltzman.”
RS: Yeah, right.
TM: “Of Structure Tech.”
RS: Stop it. But I ended up talking to someone and she was very helpful but she was aghast that any of their techs would ever say something like that. She’s like, “No, there is… It’s black and white.”
TM: Did you say aghast?
RS: I said aghast. Yeah, I said that on purpose. You caught it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Tess.
[laughter]
TM: Good one.
RS: Felt I chose the right word. And she said…
TM: She had no idea.
RS: I’m gonna have… I’m gonna have my supervisor call you. Well, two weeks later nobody called. I called again, talked to her, this time she wasn’t so nice and she was kind of annoyed and she’s like, “Well, I told him to call you,” blah blah blah. I said, “Okay. Well, thank you. So you think he might?” “Yep. Yep. He’ll call.” Two weeks later, no call. I called again. Could not get through to her. Somebody else is like, no.
TM: Of course.
RS: She said she’s busy, blah blah blah, but you could send an email to this person. So I ended up sending an email to this person, gave him the lowdown. I was really nice about it. I’m not being accusatory. I’m just saying, “Look, you guys and us, we have the same goal here. We’re just trying to make houses safe. I’m not trying to make you look stupid. I’m sure your techs aren’t trying to make us look stupid, but we need to have the same procedure here, so the public has a little bit more trust in both of us and I’d like to talk about what you guys’s procedure is. And if we need to change ours, we’ll change it. And if you need to change yours and what you say to people, maybe you could change it. Let’s just talk.” And the guy called me back in like within five minutes of me sending the email.
TM: Really?
RS: I was shocked. Yeah. It was a long email.
TM: Wow.
RS: And we had a very productive conversation. And he was quite frustrated at some of the stories I was telling him about the techs. He’s like, “That should not be happening,” and he wanted specific addresses. I didn’t have a single address to give him and he said, “Well the next time it does happen, please let me know,” and Tessa, this was just a couple weeks ago. The next time this happens, I am going to be so on this. I’m looking forward to it happening. I can’t wait for the next time a technician from the gas company says, “There’s no gas leak,” when we’ve got proof that there is, ’cause I’m surely gonna be meeting somebody at the property and I’ll have a follow-up story to share with you about it, but it hasn’t happened yet.
TM: To be continued.
RS: To be continued.
TM: To be continued.
RS: Yeah.
TM: Wow. Well, you know what that is… We’re ending the show on a hopeful note, I think. I’m glad you got through to talk to someone, it sounds like that they are… It’s on their radar and they’re taking action and hopefully we can kinda shift this issue into being a better understood, better communicated and nobody loses, everybody will win, hopefully. People will stay safe, Structure Tech will not have a ruined reputation and the gas company will be doing what they need to be doing and not wasting their time.
RS: Amen sister. Well put. That’s a nice bow you put on the episode. That’s good.
[laughter]
TM: Wow. Well, thanks for doing that though, Reuben. I’m sure there’s other home inspectors that have run into that issue too, but when they’re just a smaller company or a one-man run business, that’s tough.
RS: If you’re a one-person shop and you deal with an issue like this once every one to two years, it’s not that big of a deal to make you crazy, but when you got…
TM: You’re not gonna battle it.
RS: A team of our size and you deal with it every couple of months, it starts to get really annoying.
TM: Wow. Well, thanks for bringing that to our attention and I’m sure… Have you wrote a blog about this too?
RS: I have, although…
TM: Perfect.
RS: You know what? The one where I’m really complaining about the gas company, I have not published it and I’m not trying to make anybody look bad. I’m gonna wait to publish that until we have resolution. That one’s sitting in the hopper. It’s all written out. It’s fairly angrily written and I’m surely gonna rewrite it so there’s not so much emotion in it. But I was angry when I wrote it.
TM: You gotta get it out somehow.
RS: Yep. All right. Well, thanks for listening, Tess. Thanks for going down this journey with me.
TM: Thanks for sharing, Reuben, from the heart as always, and I sympathize and appreciate your efforts in trying to make a change in this industry.
RS: I appreciate it. Well, if anybody’s got any experiences to share, any thoughts on anything related to this, gas leaks, if you’re a homeowner, home inspector, whatever, you got your own perspective, I’d love to hear it. Please write in to us, podcast@structuretech.com. We definitely read all your emails. All right.
TM: Thanks for listening, everybody.
RS: Thanks for listening. I’m Reuben, for Tessa, signing off. Have a good week. Take care.