What to Expect from a Mold Inspection

Discovering you have mold in your home can be a nightmare and may be the cause for a few health complications you’ve been having lately. These little fungi can enter your home through open doorways, windows, vents, and heating and air conditioning units; they can even travel on your clothing.

There are thousands of different species of mold, but they all have one thing in common: they love moisture. They will grow in places such as around leaks in roofs, windows, pipes, or wherever there has been recent flooding.

What to do if you have mold:
If you suspect you have mold somewhere in your house (normally found in basements or attics) or you can see extensive mold damage, you should call a professional mold removal company so they can perform a mold inspection.

Mold inspection: This inspection is used to help you and the mold remediation company determine what species of mold you have in your home. For example, do you have life-threatening toxic mold in your home, or is it just a large colony of harmless mold? The inspection will also be able to determine the amount of mold in a certain area or room by calculating mold spores per square foot.

Mold inspection process:

1. Call a mold removal company and schedule a mutually convenient time for the inspection.
2. Once inspection day rolls around, make sure all of the windows, doors, vents, and heating and air conditioning systems have been turned OFF. You don’t want to disturb the mold spores during this time so the mold inspectors can determine how much mold is in your home.
3. Depending on how big your house is or what kind of mold inspection you’ve asked for, the process could take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours.
4. The inspectors will be looking for signs of mold damage or colony growth. Depending on how bad the infestation is, they could end up tearing down parts of your dry wall to see if mold has made its way into your home’s pipes.
5. The inspector will take samples of the mold spores and will either send it to a lab for testing or they will conduct their own on-the-go test. Or they will recommend DIY remediation steps.
6. After the lab tests return with details, the mold inspector will give you a final mold inspection report to review. Depending on what the report says, you can either accept or decline the offer to remediate the mold.

Be wary of a “free mold inspection” from some mold companies; they may end up costing you more than you think by convincing you that you need to have the mold removed immediately when the problem may not be as extensive as it sounds.

However, mold can cause health problems ranging from itchy eyes, sneezing, coughing, serious allergic reactions, to asthma and permanent lung damage, so consider remediation when recommended. Find out more at this site.