Can a home inspection engineer go beyond the requirements of the standard?
In construction, and in home inspection (bedek bayit) specifically, plenty of execution details count as good practice even though they are never written into any code.
Sometimes these details do not appear in the standard, or even in the Ministry of Defense's interministerial specification, which otherwise serves as the benchmark for proper execution. So when that gap exists, can an expert engineer still call it a construction defect, or must he stick strictly to what the codes say? Experts wrestle with this question often, and it has come up in court many times.
Answering it means asking whether the codes actually do, or even can, provide a complete answer on their own. A few extreme examples make the point that a missing standard is not rare, and it never stops a product from being installed anyway.
The classic case is Pal-Kal, a product with no standard behind it at all, yet it was installed regardless. Adhered stone cladding is another: there is still no Israeli standard for that installation method, and it is nonetheless used on plenty of new buildings. In both cases, the standard simply does not exist, yet the work goes ahead, and sometimes those very products fail.
The Standards Institution, for its part, frequently updates existing codes based on accumulated experience at home and abroad, proof that standards keep improving and expanding but will never offer a complete, final answer.
That gap has to be filled by the field experience of home inspection engineers. It is also worth noting that execution quality varies from company to company, based on its own and its workers' experience: contractors sometimes carry out details that appear nowhere in any code, simply because their experience tells them to.
The upshot: when a home inspection engineer finds something missing, even if no standard covers it, he is entitled, as an expert, to call it a construction defect based on his own experience. He owes the resident that judgment, rather than hiding behind the codes alone.
The engineers of Arad Bedek Bayit, led by building engineer Ron Arad, whom courts appoint as their own expert on construction defects. The company has been inspecting apartments and buildings since 2001. Engineer Ron Arad · More about the company