Originally Posted by
Brandon Chew
Let's not make up fancy definitions of "visual" to suit ourselves. The term "visual inspection" in plain English (the language our clients use and understand) simply means to examine something closely using your eyes.
Which is why I've been saying, for the last 18 years or so, that home inspectors do not do "visual inspections".
IMO, the appropriate technical term for what we do is a nondestructive inspection. Visual is a misnomer. Noninvasive is closer to what we do but still not accurate. Some of our tools and techniques involve poking, probing, and minor disassembly, which are invasive techniques, but I think everything we do is with the objective of it being nondestructive.
While we do not do "destructive testing" in the engineering sense of the word, we do sometimes do "destructive things" in order to determine whether or not we are on the right track in our thinking. This includes probing things, and, in the process, we are doing something destructive.
It is not "destructive" in the sense that probing "destroyed" the wood, but in the sense that it now looks destroyed.
That is but one example of what I am referring to.
Thus, to me, saying the home inspection is nondestructive could come back to hurt us, and it is not technically correct either.
I would go with noninvasive before nondestructive, acknowledging that neither is technically correct.
That said, saying that home inspectors only do a visual inspection is being outright untruthful.
It may sound good when one gets into court and tries to convince the judge that 'I only did a visual inspection' when refuting that it did not leak at the time you were there because you used a moisture meter ...