hey what’s up you guys it’s scott with GoTech home Inspection and i want to do a little show and tell today of the top five things i look at when purchasing an older home now this is going to be using a 102 year old single family 1100 square foot two bedroom one bath property that i’m looking to purchase now there can be a lot of great parts to owning an old home everything from the unique charm to the woodwork mature trees great neighborhoods and solid built construction but on the other hand there are some challenges so let’s go through those five let’s jump up in the attic get down in the crawl space and show you a few tangible examples to look out for when you’re looking to purchase an older home so first thing we want to look out for is electrical now here is the panel for the home this is the main electrical panel and it’s obviously been at least updated over the years now i’m not saying it’s up to code but it is an updated panel because it has circuit breakers now if you look at your top main breaker you’ll see that it either has 100 or 200 see there it says 100 so it’s a 100 amp service and you do have some extra spaces here if you wanted to add additional circuits later on which is a good thing if this whole thing was filled up then you would have some challenges maybe expanding out adding new outlets or just updating for new modern devices in your home so even though this has been updated let me show you a common issue that you’ll see in old homes so many of these items will be covered by your inspector but this is an upper updated tamper resistant duplex outlet and it has the three prongs so it looks like it’s been updated should be good to go the problem is when you test it with an outlet tester you have one single light which means you have an open ground what that means is this was an old two prong outlet at one time and somebody just replaced with the three prong but does not have a ground coming to this box so it’s actually incorrectly wired you would either need to run a ground to this outlet which can cost significant money or you and depending on your area you might be able to put a gfci outlet in its place and then that will meet your code now if you need a video showing swapping out a two-prong outlet to a gfci i do have one in the link is right here so now let’s jump up into the attic and i’ll show you one other thing to look out for when it comes to electrical so the last thing depending on the age of your home you might have knob and tube wiring so depending on your region homes built in 1950s still might have knob and two so knob and tube has one neutral so this is the neutral line and then one hotline so this is the hotline so by most people knob and tube is not preferred and you can see some updated romex which is coming through so this home has a mix and it’s something that you might want to consider getting swapped out and updated or at least something you’re considering when you’re looking at older homes so that’s it for electrical at least now you have an idea of some of those things you want to look out for another tip if you’re going to be doing the crawl around in the attic or crawl space having a respirator is a very smart move so the second item that i want to address and things you need to look out for is plumbing now on the exterior of the house you’ll want to understand when was the water the main water line put in so coming from the city curb shutoff valve to your house when was that installed is it new or is it very old and then also your main drain going out to the city going to the sewer if that is old clay pipe or old pipe that’s having issues that can cause you a lot of problems and multiple thousands of dollars to fix often what happens is a small crack forms and then tree roots start to get that moisture and then it will expand the tree roots within the pipe because it is a constant source of water and then all sudden you get a clog you call somebody out they clean out or chop out the tree roots well guess what they come right back so you really have to replace that whole line if you have an older drain line that has cracks or issues so those are two things that you want to understand then inside the house you’ll understand when was the last time the plumbing was updated your preference in many areas is usually copper or pecs now copper and pex could be installed incorrectly but it’s something you just want to look for in your inspection report to start to see any red flags that maybe there was a rehab not long ago where they kind of scabbed in some of the different plumbing fixtures and let me show you some examples of that so one thing you might want to look in is some of your vanity bases or sink bases and if you see a combination of pecs here at the bottom coming into press fittings on off so this one’s going to the dishwasher this on off valve would go to an ice maker then you have a combination of copper pipe and fittings https://gotechhomeinspections.com/ one going out to an outdoor spigot and then the other finishing off up top with your on off valve that goes to the sink faucet sometimes these are not necessarily against code but it is just something