Mold Inspections

When buying a new home, you should consider getting a mold inspection. Mold
inspection is a different process from typical housing inspections. The cost will vary
depending on the size of the house. There are a few different situations in which you might want a mold inspection. 

When to inspect for mold

One good thing about mold- if you can see it, you have mold in your house. Seeing
mold in the cracks and corners of your walls definitely means it is growing and
spreading more spores. Keep in mind that mold may also grow in places you cannot
see, such as in your ducts or between your walls. It may also form colonies so tiny they
escape the eye. A few situations should make you look for any mold problems in your
house.

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•  Water damage. If your basement flooded, roof leaked, or a broken pipe sprayed water all over the kitchen, you need to inspect for mold. Any place that got wet and was not quickly dried (within 24 to 48 hours) could become contaminated by mold.

•  Purchasing a new home. There is no way to know what kind of water damage may have happened in the house you are planning to buy. The only way to find out if mold is present is to do a mold inspection.

•  After a house has been unoccupied. If a house has been closed up and unoccupied for months or years, humidity could have built up inside and caused mold to grow. This is especially a problem in warmer areas with high humidity.

•  After mold remediation. If you have gone through the often expensive and difficult steps to deal with a mold problem, regular mold inspections are a good idea to make sure you really got rid of it all.

•  You see some mold. If you notice some green, blue, black or white stuff growing in your house, do a mold inspection to make sure you find it all. It might not be restricted to one location.

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Mold Inspection vs Mold Testing

If you are researching mold, you might come across different services and costs that list
both mold inspection and mold testing. Mold inspection simply identifies the presence of
mold and generally defines the size of the problem, usually in square footage.
Mold testing attempts to identify what specific type of mold is in your home and how
many mold spores are in the air. However keep in mind the following:

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1. The carefully controlled conditions required to conduct a proper scientific test of mold are extremely difficult to achieve in a home, so results will often vary from test to test, regardless of remediation efforts.

2. Second, all indoor spaces have mold spores that drift in from outdoors, so mold tests will generally provide a long list of species, most of which are not actually growing in your home.

3. Third, the EPA has set no guidelines for an acceptable amount of mold or mold spores in a house.

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How much does a mold inspection cost?

The cost of mold inspection can vary slightly from region to region, but the difference is
generally pretty small. In fact, you are just as likely to find wider variations from one
contractor to another in the same region.

As a rough guideline, a mold inspection costs about the same as a regular home
inspection, the kind that is done when you purchase a new home. On average, mold
inspection costs $300 to $400 for small to medium-sized houses (below 4,000 square
feet). Above 4,000 square feet, the cost increases to the $700 to $900 range. Keep in
mind that these costs are for inspection only and do not necessarily include testing.