Will banks start requiring this inspection before approving a home loan?
Mold grows everywhere on earth. As long as it does test negative for black mold it is not a problem.
Ping!................
Do you have a garden at your house? Do you turn over the soil in the spring prior to planting? Congratulations youve just been exposed to mold. Maybe you think it’s okay because you’re outside and theres lots of fresh air. Sorry but there are mold spores in the air too.
Our species has been on the planet for maybe 200 thousand years and we lived in caves and damp hovels for much of that time right along side mold. Yes, it’s certainly true that some people are allergic to mold but this whole panic about mold is irrational. But, Theres a way to make money off of unreasonable so…
Something plumbers watched happen was the sudden appearance of an incredibly lucrative business of water damage restoration, before you would get a wet vac and dry things out the best you could if a pipe burst and your house got wet, now companies charge 10s of thousands of dollars and it is an industry, with fans and low paid, low skilled guys to bring in and plug in the fans and heaters.
The field is so lucrative that a plumber turning the address over to the business gets 10% off the top just for the phone call, the companies fight to get the plumbers to to make the call to them and when they do a check arrives in the mail, $800, $1500, $2000, not bad for a single phone call after you finished your plumbing repair.
We had to do mold mitigation on two properties we have sold. I don’t really mind. We didn’t involve dogs either time. The first one was about 12 years ago and we could even smell it. The second one was about ten years ago and the buyers had a baby and I think it was appropriate.
NOTHING is a bigger scam than radon testing and remediation.
When the dog is able talk and to identify the mold species and concentration levels, let me know. There used to be a pest control guy in Houston that had a dog trained to find termites, and I think it was pretty successful in doing that, but of course nothing is foolproof.
When the dog is able talk and to identify the mold species and concentration levels, let me know. There used to be a pest control guy in Houston that had a dog trained to find termites, and I think it was pretty successful in doing that, but of course nothing is foolproof.
I foresee the “No dogs allowed” clause in home purchase contracts.
Get an ozone machine and run it for 48 hours with no one in the house. Then let the dog go in :-)
If there’s water damage anywhere, be very cautious.
Try to get stats on the accuracy rate of “drug sniffing” dogs that police use. It is clear from the overwhelming number of false positives that the dogs are just alerting for the reward. I would suspect the same here.
When exercising my dog at a local dog park, I met a gentleman exercising his beagle. He told me it was the dog’s day off from work. Intrigued I asked what did the dog do for work. He replied that the beagle was a bedbug sniffing dog and was hired by hotels and other places like colleges to sniff out bedbug infestations. Alas my Black Lab was only good for sniffing out anything remotely edible on kitchen counters.
Just like the radon scam. An entire industry built around a perceived risk and nothing but a drain on the economy.
This is a real thing in Florida, I was the Administrator of the Estate of one of my Aunts, she lived in a house her and her late husband purchased in 1962 for $11,000.
When she agreed to move to assisted living, I proceeded to sell the house.
Before we could sell the house we had to do a mold inspection.
The State of Florida has some very strict requirements to alleviate mold before a house can be sold.
You have to hire a mold removal expert to do a mold survey to detect where the mold is located, how extensive it was and what type of mold it was.
In my case, the mold removal expert found some extensive mold.
We then had to hire a mold removal company, drywall had to be removed, carpeting had to be removed, then we had to rebuild the walls and flooring in the house.
Finally, we had to rehire the original mold expert to certify the mold was gone and we followed approved guidelines in the removal of the mold.
Once the house was listed for sale, we had to disclose the removal of the mold to any potential buyer.
Total cost to my aunt’s estate, a little over $30,000
where anxious home buyers are increasingly hiring “mold-sniffing dogs”. I bet my lab Henry would be good at it, but wouldn’t want to get him sick.
“…the dog suddenly sits or paws at a baseboard.”
Scam right there. Given the incredible sensitivity of a dogs nose the animal would only have to enter the home and he’d alert right there. Hell in many cases he’d probably alert on the way to the front door from the car.
“Mold” scam, the new Asbestos scam.
Ithaca, NY
“Homeowner Exemption: Under NYS DOL rules, asbestos abatement requirements (e.g., hiring licensed contractors, full containment, air monitoring) do not apply to owner-occupied single-family homes when the owner performs the work themselves”
So much for it being as deadly as they make it out to be.
I have personally removed tons (not literally) of asbestos pipe insulation. I have rolled in it in crawl spaces. It has a metallic taste. (not that I ate any), but it does get into your mouth while breathing it.
I smoked cigarettes for 30 years.
Still here at 76.