Silent Dangers in Your Home: Mold, Radon, and More

Jamie: 00:00:01

Welcome to Thoughts from the Crawl Space, a podcast where our goal as home inspection experts is to support and serve our community.

Whether you're a homeowner, home buyer, real estate agent or investor, we believe everyone deserves solutions to their homeownership challenges and inspiration along the way. Your path to success starts here. Welcome back, everybody. Today we're going to talk about environmental hazards in the home.

What are environmental hazards and why should you be concerned about them as a homeowner? So what are some of the long term effects of exposure to certain hazards and the importance of early detection and mitigation?

First of all, we're going to go through some of the typical hazards that we see, most common ones, and then we will dive in a little more detail, how to detect them, how to avoid them, how to get rid of them, how to test for them, and so forth. So first of all, let's jump into mold and mildew. First of all, mold grows on everything else. Mildew grows on living plants.

That's just a good way to distinguish between the two. But mold is a obviously a hazard and it can grow literally anywhere in your house and obviously something you do not want.

So that's one of the most common environmental hazards found in home. Another one is radon gas. We've had specific episodes on mold and radon.

This one is just going to touch on it a little bit, but it's a radioactive gas that seeps into the foundation through cracks in the foundation and it causes lung cancer. Another one is asbestos. Asbestos is probably one of the more misunderstood ones.

Asbestos was in a lot of materials that were used for fireproofing or insulation. It's still in a ton of commercial structures and a lot of homes. Where you typically find asbestos is on the wraparound pipes.

If you have an old boiler system, it can be used on the joints or the whole ductwork. You'll see it like a white tape on H Vac systems. You can see it in the, I mean, chimney liners. You can see it on 9 by 9 inch floor tile.

You can see it in ceiling tiles. It's just in a variety of locations. And if it's insulation, then think of that one right offhand.

Vermiculite insulation in an attic is a very common area for, for asbestos to be. So we'll talk a little bit about how to identify that in a little bit.

Another potential hazard in your home is lead paint, especially if it gets airborne or has the capability of being ingested like small kids like to do when they like to eat everything in sight Carbon monoxide, We've talked about this on a number of episodes, but carbon monoxide is a danger. It's kind of a silent danger. You can't smell it, but it could be there. Pesticides and chemicals.

And we'll talk about some of the things that you get these from. And formaldehyde, where's formaldehyde come from? What do you do about it, if you have it?

All right, so how do environmental, environmental hazards affect your health? Well, the short term and the long term effects are a little bit different.

So vulnerable groups for environmental hazards or health concerns are the same ones that are vulnerable in other situations. Children, the elderly, pregnant women, and people with respiratory or weakened immune systems.

And this is, is the case for mold, it's the case for carbon monoxide, it's the case for formaldeh. All these things affect these groups more just simply because their immune response is not as strong.

So how do you identify environmental hazards in your home? So let's go back to mold. Well, mold is identifiable usually because of the way it grows, the color of it.

You'll see black, you can see blue, green, you can see yellow. If you're in a, like, in a, an unfinished area, like a basement, crawl space or attic, you may even might be white.

All right, so it's something you see and it has kind of a specific growth pattern. And you know, if you can't identify it, but you think you might have it, call a professional, call us.

We can come out and tell you if you have it or not. Right, but the first thing you want to do with mold is identify.

Maybe you had a leak in your house and a toilet leak through the ceiling and you got stains on the ceiling below. What is that mold? Well, stains by themselves are not mold, but what's on the top side of that drywall. Did it happen over a long period of time?

Was it a one time event? Has it been able to be dried out?

All those things go a long way to determine if the mold is able to reproduce, if it's ongoing or if it needs addressed. How do you identify radon gas? There's only one way and that's testing.

All right, a typical radon test is probably going to cost $150 for a short term test. If you want to go out and buy your own long term Test for a 90 day test, that's probably the best way to do it.

If you own your own home and it's not in a real estate transaction, so you can go online, you can buy. It's called a Long term radon test, probably 40 bucks. And that'll help you to know what level you have.

You can't see it, you can't smell it, you can't sense it. It only affects your lungs. Asbestos. We touched on this earlier look in your attic.

If you have a house building up until the 50s and 60s, they used vermiculite insulation. It's usually not very deep, maybe three inches.

But it's a little granular type, lightweight miniature rock looking material and that's a dead giveaway. That likely contains asbestos. Not always, but likely. Also the wrap on boiler lines and ductwork.

It's usually white and it was used for insulating purposes down there. And that can definitely have asbestos. Another common area is floor tile. The 9 by 9 inch floor tile, 12 by 12s mostly don't have it.

9 by nines mostly do. In fact, it's mostly from the adhesive on those floor tiles. Lead paint. One way to identify lead paint is looking at it.

Latex paint will dry out and peel in strips. Lead paint will, because it's thicker and the nature of it, it basically dries and and chips in rectangles, squares and rectangles.

And you can privilegely see it normally on outdoor trim around windows inside. Pretty easy to tell.

If you can't tell that way, then you test it, you take some samples, you send them to a lab, they'll say yes, this has lead paint in or no, it does not have lead paint in it. Carbon monoxide. How do you identify if you have carbon monoxide?

Well, one of the easy ways is to put a carbon monoxide detector in the rooms in the house. At least one per level, ideally one in each sleeping room.

Not a bad idea to put one in a kitchen because that's where you would tend to have a buildup first because you're cooking. The byproducts of combustion through the burners will create carbon monoxide.

They're engineered to be low, but if they get dirty, if the gas oxygen ratio is off, then you can get more carbon monoxide than you're supposed to get. So really the best way is to put a detector in. You can also bring testers in that will test for that. What about pesticides and chemicals?

Well, there's really not a lot, a lot way to test for this other than VOC testing. VOC testing can provide a baseline for what you have. That stands for volatile organic compounds.

And there are some companies out there that test for that and can give you a baseline on what's going on. And then the same with formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is typically. And VOCs come from off gassing of manufactured laminate type materials.

For example, furniture that you may buy and put together, bed frames that you put together, laminate wood that you just put on your flooring. All those add up and they can have off gassing. They come from the factory new. You get them in the house, they smell new and beautiful. Right?

Well, that smell is off gassing of the chemicals they used in making that product. So that's a way to identify if you have anything like that. Now, one of the things to think about is those plugins.

And we're going to have a whole episode on this. So look for this episode. But plug ins in your house can be extremely toxic.

They can cause reproductive harm, they can cause headaches, they can cause a variety of illnesses that you may not recognize as being associated with those plug ins. A lot of chemicals in those that are constantly putting in the air.

As inspectors, sometimes we go into a house and we are just overwhelmed with the amount of plug ins they have. They may have a dozen of them in there and one in every room and you can barely breathe in there. And so that's not something we recommend.

I recommend you take those out of your house. I recommend you use more natural ways of filtering air and cleaning your air.

But look for that podcast coming up pretty soon that will give you much more detail on that, on how to purify your home and get the toxins out of it. Now, we talked about testing, we talked about how to identify it, but how do you test? How much does it cost?

Well, if we talk about mold, the best way to test for mold in your home is through air quality tests.

And this involves a pump and canisters that will cycle air through it that will read the spore count in the air to see what kind of percentage you have in your home. A typical mold testing, a thorough test throughout the entire house is probably going to run you between four and six hundred dollars.

So it's not cheap, but it does give you peace of mind and let you know what kind of mold you have out there. Radon gas, that's a 48 hour test. The mold testing will probably take up to an hour. Radon testing takes at least 48 hours.

It's going to roughly be $150 to $200, depending on who's doing it.

Asbestos testing, we take samples and we send them to a laboratory and that's again going to probably run you in a three to four hundred dollar range. Depending on how many samples we send in. But it's a pretty simple test.

We just take samples of what we have, send them to a lab, and they'll tell us if that contains asbestos or not. Really, it's the same for lead paint. Lead paint is not real difficult to take samples of and you can just bag some up sending it to a lab.

Lead paint testing is not extremely expensive. A couple hundred dollars should get you the answers you need for, for that carbon monoxide testing that involves a specialized tester.

And then of course, you want to kind of identify where the source of the carbon monoxide is coming from. So whatever somebody charges, I think sometimes fire departments will come out and do that for free. Free.

So if it's something you want to save money on, you can call them pesticides and chemicals. We talked about formaldehyde and chemicals and really the best way to do this is get VOC testing. It's not going to tell you a whole lot.

It's going to tell you more what you got. And you probably already knew that.

But VOC testing is Fairly expensive, probably 3 to $500, and will take definitely several minutes, if not a couple hours to get that done. So I just wanted to jump on here today and give you a quick rundown on environmental hazards on your house, be able to identify them.

We want you to know whether it's an area that should be lived in, whether you need to make improvements, if you need to remove certain materials, how that's done. Sometimes removing these materials, it does more harm than good. For example, asbestos.

If there's material with asbestos in it, it's best left not disturbed. That's according to the EPA's website. If you do disturb it, it gets airborne. It's called friable, then you can breathe it in.

And so if it's already damaged and kids are running around it, or it gets airflow quite a bit through there, it is something you'd want to remove. But in that case, you need to get a professional company to do it the right way so it isn't spread through your whole house.

If there's anything we can help you with, with testing with mold, asbestos, radon, lead, anything like that, give us a call. We want to make sure your home is safe.

We want you to go to bed at night knowing that things are good in that house and you don't have anything to worry about with regard to your family. So give us a call. We'd love to help you out. Thanks for listening today. Please share this episode with all your friends.

Enemies, anybody you know, and we'd appreciate it. Give us a message, tell us that you listened, ask us questions, go to our website and we'd be glad to answer that on a future episode.

Take care everybody. Thank you for listening.

This week you can catch up on the latest episode of the Thoughts from the Crawl Space podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. For more information about Gold Key and inspection services, go to goldkeyinspect.com.