You’ve been feeling tired; you’re sneezing, itching a lot, and have been getting headaches since moving into a new apartment. Nut when you go outside for a few minutes, the symptoms seem to disappear. What could be the cause? Many of the symptoms mentioned above are typically associated with mold. However, when you look around your house, you don’t see any visible mold.
Just because you don’t see visible mold, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. Mold can be hiding behind walls, ceilings, and underneath the floor. When old dries up, it becomes unviable. However, if the non-viable spores are toxigenic, they will have mycotoxins, invisible to the naked eye. If inhaled and deposited deep into the lungs, they will prevent oxygen from transporting proteins to the rest of your body.
Mold air quality test
There are many ways to test the air for mold—Petri Dish, electric pump, and mechanical pump are the most common. When using a Petri Dish, you set it out for some time in an area of your home. The collecting plate will collect mold spores that settle on the agar inside of it. After a while, mold will start to grow in the dish. The agar plate is then sent to a mold testing lab for analysis. The great thing about the Petri Dish is that it is very inexpensive to buy and easy to use. The drawbacks of the Petri Dish are that it can only collect viable spores, the agar could be expired, giving inaccurate results, and it can get damaged during shipment and be exposed to varying temperatures.
You can also collect a sample with an electric pump. Some of these pumps are both powered by an AC adaptor and a rechargeable battery. A cassette media also called a mold trap, is attached to a port at the top of the pump. There is an LCD screen to display the timing of the sample and includes a menu that lets you adjust the duration, automatic shut off, set the calibration, and more. The cassette media is sealed until the lab technician is ready to examine the specimen in the cassette. The downside of the air pump is that it is expensive to purchase. You can rent one, however. Still, it is a costlier option than a Petri Dish. The advantage of using an electric air pump is that you can capture viable and non-viable mold spores. An electric pump will also trap most of the colonies of mold spores in a room due to the ability to calibrate the pump’s flow rate, and results can be available much faster.
A mechanical pump mainly works the same way as an electric pump. It uses a dial valve to adjust the flow rate and can be calibrated for high volumes, also called a high volume pump. It also uses cassette media attached to a clear, flexible plastic tube, with the other end attached to the pump. It does not have an LCD screen and does not come with a preset timer to turn itself off after sampling.
Air quality testing near me
If you are suspicious of the air quality in your home, let the industrial hygienists at 5 Microns Inc. assist you. They have the expertise and all the tools necessary to perform the work. They are open Monday to Friday from 9 am to 5 pm, and Saturday from 9 am to 3:30 pm. Call 425-440-8787 Now!
