Mold inspection

A mold inspection looks for two things: mold you can see, and the water that caused it. A trained inspector checks walls, ceilings, basements, crawl spaces and HVAC areas, and may use a moisture meter to find damp spots behind surfaces.

CDC's NIOSH says thorough visual inspections, or detecting problems by musty odors, are more reliable than air sampling. It also says there are no health-based standards for mold in indoor air and that short-term spore counts cannot be tied to health risks.

That does not make samples useless. They can help document a condition for a report. But the visual and moisture findings should lead the plan.

A strong report names the affected materials, estimates the size of each area, and points to the water source. It gives your contractor a scope to price and gives you a baseline to compare against later.

Use the findings to plan mold remediation. If you see dark growth, the entry on black mold explains why color is not the test.