The four-letter word MOLD, elicits emotional responses from people for different reasons depending on how and where mold is found. If someone is having health concerns mold will be a target source of the problems and these people will want it investigated professionally. If you are buying a home finding suspect mold or obvious mold, will require further professional evaluation as to the extent and cause. Lastly, if you are selling a home and the buyer finds suspect mold, you need professional representation to manage the issue.
Bottom line if you think you have mold or find mold you need a professional to assess the mold. Unless of course, you started the project with one.
If there is one thing, I know about mold it is that it is an indoor, biological air contaminant, and anyone associated with it wants it addressed (quantified) or for it to disappear.
If you are living with health issues your mold consultant needs to inspect and test your environment, to determine if mold is a factor in your health issues. This inspection encompasses interviewing the individual having the health concerns, inspection of living spaces, target sampling of complaint rooms and a summary report of findings. These three tasks which are more extensive than they sound are rarely completed, because the industry lacks environmental professionals qualified in mold evaluation.
Case in point, a couple is buying a home, and their due diligence entails a title search and a home inspection. The home inspector notes mold-like growth on the basement foundation wall and adjacent sheetrock wall. The buyers obtain a free mold inspection, which provides costs to remediate and does not diagnose the cause of the mold growth. Now professionals are not free and the buyers got what they paid for, which was a free estimate to remediate which they gave to the seller. The cause of the growth was not diagnosed.
The seller being presented with a mold issue wanted their representation, so they are in control of the process. As you might imagine, Curren was the paid environmental consultant. Our evaluation included inspecting and determining what was causing the mold growth as a foundation wall is made of concrete, which is not organic and is naturally resistant to mold. Mold was confirmed as mold was growing on the painted concrete foundation (paint is organic) and it was a small area of the basement wall, perhaps 4% of the entire basement wall area. This wall was found to have been painted multiple times, likely to address the mold growth. The walls were evaluated with a moisture sensing infrared camera, which found high moisture levels across the wall where mold was present and normal moisture levels on walls that had no growth, so the fuel for the mold was the water, which was determined to not be indoor plumbing but exterior moisture. The outside area had multiple issues that allowed water to migrate and sit by the foundation where the wall was found to have mold.
Appropriate remediation would be to address the mold and the water issue outside, and to be fair the exterior water controls would cost more than the inside mold remediation. The seller asks the buyer what they want to do (the buyer does not have a professional opinion, but rather a free quote to remediate). The buyer wants the free remediation quote completed, which the seller pays to complete.
Mold comes back and the new owners are perplexed why they still have a mold problem.
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