Gary Swart
In the Trades
Well, this was fun!
Tom Sawyer,
It's funny you mentioned Einstein, because he also said this: “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.â€
Original Poster, you're obviously doing commercial work without a license. If you have any decency, stop now. A plumbing error in a restaurant could potentially poison thousands of people. If that happened, you would rightly deserve a decade long stay in substandard state housing, with very substandard neighbors, and all the unpleasant things they'd do to you day and night.
That said, the general holier-than-thou attitude is a legitimate gripe. Even in this excessively liberal state, I can pay double the license fee for extra scrutiny and do my own electrical work, including main panels. There's no good reason that shouldn't apply to plumbing, even gas fitting, although I'd feel better with triple fees and scrutiny in that case. Up to code is up to code, it doesn't start producing magical protective fairy farts just because the work was performed by an Anointed Hand.
I'm a 16 year I.T. professional. You don't hear us bitching about stolen work when someone botches their own upgrade, we just collect our hourly fee for straightening it out and laugh all the way to the bank. If computer techs did business the way some plumbers seem to, we'd throw a hissy fit every time someone wiped off their own monitor.
I'm talking about owner-occupied residences, which IMO includes the situation when one unlicensed neighbor asks another for help without pay. Commercial work is a whole different ball of wax, and an amateur simply shouldn't be screwing with it. In any field.
Modern meters have backflow preventers. I would consider that, or a detailed picture of the new work filed with the permit application, a perfectly sensible prerequisite to letting a homeowner mess with their internal plumbing.[/B]
back flow and cross connection.
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Lets not forget what happens when you go to sell your home and the inspector finds all the sub-standard work you did on the cheap.
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Fixing computers and plumbing are about as far apart as you can get.
As for doing IT work at home, I see your point but I haven't heard of anyone's health being affected by doing their own upgrades.
Point is, the hazards are understood and could so easily be written down into a small pamphlet, but plumbers don't want that
d) Fill sewer lines with grease.
Most IT people I know have been to college and have a degree for that. My brother Clare did.
So what you are saying is there needs to be education? I agree with that
What I'm saying is; to do things really right, it takes years before you even know the question to ask.
You haven't learned the questions yet.
And I don't know the right questions to ask about software.