You can see the mold. Do you still need to pay a lab to test it?
Usually, paying for a mold test is not worth it. If you can see the mold and you know where the water came from, a lab result will not change what has to happen next: fix the water, take out what is ruined, clean the rest. A test in a Long Beach house earns its cost in only three situations.
What does a mold test tell you?
A mold test tells you what was floating in one room for a few minutes. A pump pulls air across a sticky slide, a lab counts what stuck, and the total comes back as your spore count. It cannot tell you where the water came in, how long the wall has been wet, or whether anyone in the house is getting sick from it.
You would expect the health agencies to be the ones pushing hardest for that number. They are not. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend mold testing, and says you do not need to know which type of mold you have. The state health department, CDPH, arrives from the other direction: a spore count should not be what decides how hazardous a house is, or how fast the mold has to come out.
The Environmental Protection Agency puts it shortest. If you can see mold growing, sampling is unnecessary.
There is also nothing to hold the result up against. No safe level for mold in indoor air has ever been set, federally or in California, so no lab report can say your house passed or failed anything. The World Health Organization went looking for that line and published its refusal to draw one.
If the CDC and CDPH say testing is unnecessary, why is everybody selling mold tests?
Because a test is easy to sell to a frightened person. It costs a fraction of the removal it ends up recommending, it comes back full of Latin names and bar charts, and buying it feels like doing something responsible on a day when there is nothing responsible you can do.
The report goes back to the same office that will quote you the removal. Nobody has to be acting in bad faith for that to matter. The person who reads your spore count is the person who writes your number, and a high count writes a bigger one.
Then there is the multiple. The lab holds what it found indoors against a sample taken out in your own front yard and hands the answer back as a ratio: three times outdoor, five times outdoor, whatever the pump caught that morning. That comparison is a convention the industry wrote for itself. Nobody has ever published the point where three times becomes dangerous, so nobody can tell you what your own number means.
When is a mold test worth paying for?
A mold test is worth paying for in three situations: you can smell mold but cannot find it, somebody else needs the result on paper, or the removal is finished and you want to know the cleaning held. None of the three is about deciding whether the mold is bad for you.
You can smell it and you cannot find it
You walk into the back bedroom and it smells wet, and there is nothing on any wall to explain it. That is the one case where the federal guidance stops saying save your money and says go find somebody experienced. What you are paying for then is a search, not a sample. The person who shows up should have a moisture meter, the handheld tool with two pins that reads how much water is still sitting inside the wood, and a borescope, a camera on a wire thin enough to feed through a drilled hole. He should also be willing to put that hole in your closet wall. If what comes back is an air sample instead of a location, you paid for the wrong thing.
A buyer, a landlord or an insurer wants it on paper
Sometimes the person who needs convincing is not you. A buyer wants something in the file before closing. A landlord says the stain has been there for years. Then the test is worth the money, because what you are buying is paperwork, and paperwork is a perfectly reasonable thing to buy. It just should not be sold to you as a health measurement. If you are in the middle of a sale, the buying-and-selling version of this question has its own answer.
The work is finished and you want to know the cleaning held
The crew is gone, the wall is closed back up, and you would like more than their word for it. This is the one kind of testing the federal guidance actually backs: a swab of the cleaned surface, to see whether it came clean. A surface. Not a house, and not a pair of lungs. And whoever did the removal should not be the one grading it.
Are the mold test kits from the hardware store any good?
No. A petri dish left open on the kitchen counter grows something in every house, dry ones included, because mold spores drift through ordinary indoor and outdoor air everywhere. A dish that grows something has told you that you live on Earth.
The kind that mails a sample off to a lab inherits every problem the professional sample has and adds an amateur’s technique on top. Doing it properly is expensive, and there is still no accepted number for how much mold belongs in a house. You pay less and still have nothing to measure against.
What should I do instead of testing for mold?
Hunt the water, not the spores. The order does not change from house to house:
- Find where the water is getting in, and stop it.
- Dry what got wet, or take it out, and do it fast.
- Clean or throw away the moldy material, as quickly and as safely as it can be handled.
That is the state health department’s own order of operations. A lab appears nowhere in it.
The instrument that earns its money is the moisture meter. A reading from the wet area, held against a reading from a dry room down the hall, tells you whether there is still water inside the wall, and that is a number that changes what you do tomorrow morning.
It matters more here than it would inland. Open the windows on a gray Long Beach morning and the air you are letting in is often no drier than the air already in the room, so a wall can sit damp for weeks with the whole house open and never look any worse than it did on day one. A spore count will not catch that. The meter will. If the fans have been running for days and the wall still reads wet, the house is still wet behind the drywall, and the problem is still water. How long it takes to pull that water out is a Long Beach drying question, not a lab question.
What should I ask before I hire a mold inspector?
Ask whether they are looking for the water or only for the mold, and whether the same office sells the removal. Those two answers tell you more than the report will. Ask all five out loud, in this order, and listen for the pause more than the answer.
- Are you looking for the water, or only for the mold?
- Do you also sell the removal, and if so, who reads your report?
- What will the report tell me that looking at the wall does not already tell me?
- Are you going to open anything up, or is this a walk-through and a sample?
- If the result comes back low, what does that prove?
The fifth one separates the two kinds of inspector. One will tell you it proves the pump found very little that morning in that room, and nothing past that, because there is no published level to be under. The other will tell you the house is clear.
If it turns out a wall has been wet for a month, the next thing to read is what mold removal in Long Beach actually involves, or the rest of the Long Beach water and mold guides if you are still working out which question is really yours.
Does homeowners insurance cover mold?
Water From the Unit Upstairs: Who Pays?
Three Days of Fans and It Is Still Wet
Most people who pay for a spore count did not need a lab. They needed somebody to find the water, and if that is where you are, (657) 660-4185 is answered in Long Beach at whatever hour you are reading this.