Gentlemen;
Thank you for all the replies.
The basic question was what did you think of the heating contractors answer to the problem; "add a louvered door to the bedroom".
I can only guess his thought process is now you are pulling air from the basement area along with the bedroom.
My first thought was to replace the mech room louvered doors with solid, gasket doors with self closers and run high/low ducts from the basement area. That was shot down when I read the code about obtaining outside air.
This is a townhouse so penetrating the exterior walls may be problematic due to the HOA approval.
By the way; I am a licensed HI as well as a licensed building inspector in NJ. I have no problem at all inserting code sections in my HI reports. My opinion is simple; the code is there to protect the public. If a 20 year old house was built according to the code 20 years ago but the code has changed, I tell my clients what today's code is so they have the option of what I call 'updating' their new home.
For instance, the most common code problem I find is the bedroom windows are too small for EE&R. hhere's what i say about that:
[0002]The bedroom windows are NOT large enough for today's fire emergency escape & rescue standards (At least 1 window per bedroom must have a minimum opening that is 24" high and 20" wide with a net opening of at least 5.7 square feet, or 5.0 Square feet if on 1st floor level). This means if a window opening is 24 inches high, it must be 34 1/2 inches wide to meet the 5.7 sq ft. While they probably met standards when the house was constructed, you should consider upgrading to meet today's safety requirements. Now, to make things more confusing, the NJ Re-hab code allows you to replace these windows with the same exact size windows; however, you cannot make them any smaller, and if you make them larger then the existing size, they then must meet the above mentioned requirements.
