how to keep your home smelling fresh with pets

Mold growth happens through various problems that can occur in your home and the outside environment. A leaky pipe or roof, high relative humidity outside, or a vacant closed up vacation home can all be reasons you may suspect mold growth inside your living space. Here are some recommendations to help you deal with and manage mold growth through professional testing, inspection, and remediation.

Take Safety Measures

When you have arranged for a professional mold inspection, prepare your home or the indoor space where the test will be completed by taking a few precautions. It is important that the mold inspector can get a good measurement of your home's interior air and any mold present on surfaces, so don't clean off any mold growth before the test. You don't want to remove any visible mold that your testing professional can take a sample and test it. Without the full mold evidence available, you may not have good true and conclusive results. 

You also want to leave any existing mold alone because you don't want to risk cross-contaminating any other surfaces in your home. For example, if there is mold growth on the cracks around the shower and you wipe them off but get the mold on another surface in your kitchen, your test results could come back showing you have mold in the kitchen but not in the bathroom. As a safety precaution, don't disturb any mold growth so that you don't disrupt the spores and put them into the air, which can cause adverse health effects.

Prepare For The Inspection

In addition to taking the right precautions before the test, you also want to ensure your test is successful with fair measurements inside your home. For example, you don't want to fully ventilate your home by opening windows right before the test because any mold spores present in the air will blow right out the windows. 

Close up your home's doors and windows at least a couple hours before the test is completed. If you are running the air conditioner or furnace through a central HVAC system, be sure it is turned off a couple of hours before the test to prevent any indoor air circulation to the outside and vice versa. If you are using a home air purifier, you should switch it off the day before the test so mold spores will not be cleaned from your home's air. 

Once you have completed the mold inspection and test and have determined there is a mold problem, be sure to hire professional mold remediation to remove the areas of mold growth. For more information, contact a company that can provide a residential mold inspection.