Pillar To Post The Home Of Home Inspection

On a friend’s recommendation, we employed Pillar-to-Post for our home inspection. On the positive side, the inspector arrived on time and was friendly and receptive to our questions throughout. He did advise us about some basic home maintenance tips which, as first-time homebuyers, we appreciated. But where the company lost major points was in the months following. Once we took possession of the house, we had someone come in to do some routine work on our furnace; the moment he looked at the furnace, he noticed that the vent had been installed incorrectly. He warned us that we could have a carbon monoxide problem, and that the fix (given the dimensions of our basement and the position of our home) could be complicated. He was incredulous that a home inspector could miss something like this – and when I looked for information about this online (thinking that perhaps the furnace guy was hoping to profit off our ignorance), the vent issue really seems to be part of homebuilding 101. I understand that the inspector can’t see behind walls, etc., but there were actually TWO photos of the faulty vent in his inspection report, so it was clearly in view during (and after) the inspection. I’ve several times now contacted the local owner, as well as their company's national training specialist, and have gotten nowhere. While the latter has even been quoted in magazine articles saying that their inspectors have Errors-and-Omissions Insurance, as I found, this means nothing. The owner, in his response, even argued that because the original installer of the vent thought that his work was satisfactory, the home inspector couldn’t be expected to correct the original judgment of an expert. How does that make sense? So if an incompetent worker installs the windows backwards, you just assume he knew what he was doing? I understand that everyone can make a mistake, miss a detail, etc., and so while I wish the inspector had noticed this during the inspection, it was the correspondence afterwards that disappointed me the most. They had a chance to make right by refunding the inspection fee (a fraction only of what the repair was going to cost us), or even a conciliatory couple hundred dollars, but all I got were lots of excuses and bad feelings about the whole experience.