Toronto Mold Inspection Service

Home maintenance and care can seem like an endless task for even the most devoted of homeowners. Making sure your home is safe and healthy for you and your family means that certain problems need to be prioritized above others - and mold growth is one of those problems. If you have concerns about mold growing in your home, having mold testing in Toronto performed on your home can be one of the best ways to protect your living environment. At MoldTech, our specialty is mold removal and remediation, with certified technicians trained to perform mold testing in Toronto to detect even the smallest amounts of mold in your indoor environment.

What is it, and how do I detect mold in my home?

Mold is a naturally occurring type of fungus. While there’s nothing wrong with enjoying mold when it comes to our favorite kind of stinky cheese, the kind of mold you generally find in your home may not be quite so enjoyable. Mold can cause property damage, structural problems, as well as serious health problems for your family. Removing the source of the mold as well as the mold itself is an imperative step in protecting your health and investment, and making sure your home is safe.

At MoldTech, we have over a decade of specialized experience performing mold testing in Toronto. While some household mold contamination is easily recognizable by sight or smell, some require professional tools and techniques to locate growth colonies. Mold can be very easily visually identified - it often looks like a stain or a fuzz growing on a surface, and rooms with mold growth may smell musty or cause an allergic reaction. Hidden mold growth may be behind drywall or underneath furniture or appliances, and can be a lot harder to locate. The trouble with mold is that, like any organism, it needs to spread to survive, and it can quickly begin moving through your home, bringing with it a host of problems.

The Causes of Mold

There are a number of different places that mold can affect in your home, but its cause is always the same - moisture or water infiltration. Water is the single most important ingredient when it comes to mold growth in a residential building. Unwanted water can come from a variety of sources other than a leak or water event. Increased humidity, a lack of ventilation, and improperly sealed or installed vents all increase your likelihood of mold growth. Preventing unwanted water (and drying it up if an accident happens) is the best way to prevent the cause of mold growth in your home.

Mold and Your Health

Things that are affected by mold growth, like drywall or furniture, can be thrown out, but your health isn’t so easy to renew. Mold spreads through your home by spores, which travel through the air to land on new surfaces and create fresh colonies. When breathed in, these spores can cause serious allergic reactions, and over time can cause illnesses and aggravate existing conditions. Common symptoms related to mold contamination include an itchy, runny nose, watery eyes, and headache - symptoms may lessen or even disappear when you leave the room contaminated with mold. Some types of mold, like the infamous Stachybotrys Chartarum, have even been linked to serious, life-threatening health problems. Regardless of the type, having mold testing in Toronto done in your home can ensure that any mold growth is caught and dealt with promptly.

Where Does Mold Usually Grow?

At MoldTech, we’ve seen mold growing just about everywhere, but we’ve found that our clients experience mold growth most frequently in the basement and in the attic. This is because both these spaces generally experience less frequent traffic, which allows leaks or other moisture to build-up undetected. There is also less air flow, and a regular temperature without frequent spikes or fluctuations allows mold to flourish. When performing mold testing in Toronto, we most frequently start with the attic and finish in the basement because we know these three key elements for mold growth - moisture, temperature, and food - are readily available in these locations.

Mold Removal 101

If you’re concerned about that musty corner of the basement, it might be time to have some mold testing in Toronto done. At MoldTech, our trained technicians know where to look for even the most hidden mold colonies, and perform removal and remediations in a timely, clean, and safe manner.

After we’ve located the site of mold growth, mold removal at MoldTech always starts with safety. Isolating our workplace using barriers, negative pressure, and high-powered industrial filtration means that once we start bagging and removing contaminated material, anything that gets released into the air is kept within the work site.

Once everything has been safely removed, we begin the process of cleaning. At MoldTech, we take cleaning seriously. Our thorough approach, which involves the best and newest products on the market (and some old-fashioned elbow grease), often doubles our workload, but this key step ensures that we catch every last mold spore so that you don’t have to worry about it again. While some companies leave this step for the homeowner to complete, we take pride in making sure we leave your home looking, feeling and smelling better than when we arrived.

Mold In Your Attic

One of the top places that mold testing is performed in is the attic - and for good reason. The attic is one of the least travelled spaces in most homes, making it the perfect place for mold to grow. It often lacks sufficient ventilation, has plenty of organic materials present, and may have high humidity or an undetected leak that contribute to ideal growth conditions. A regular visual inspection of your attic can help you spot problems before they arise, but some common sense renovations and retrofits, like better ventilation, following building code, and ensuring nothing is vented into your attic, can make a big difference too. Mold can grow all year round, even in the colder months, and isn’t killed off by low temperatures, so the attic may be vulnerable at any time of the year.

Mold in Your Basement

Another place that the MoldTech team regularly performs mold tests is in basements. The basement is another common place in your home that mold may grow in for a number of reasons. One, there’s usually a source of water, like a tap, washing machine, or drain that can introduce small amounts of water into the atmosphere. Two, reduced ventilation, especially in older homes with fewer basement windows, can prevent humid air from moving on. Basements are naturally humid places because they’re usually either partially or fully underground, and the contact between your foundation walls and the damp exterior ground can cause wicking or condensation due to temperature differences.

Basements (again, especially in the older homes!) may also lack insulation, which can help keep temperatures level and reduce condensation. Monitoring your basement’s humidity and temperature levels can give you a good indication of whether or not you’re at risk of developing mold problems. There are other things you can also do to prevent mold growth, such as:

• Insulate hot or cold piping and water tanks
• Increase ventilation, especially in and around the furnace
• Use a dehumidifier in the warm summer months

Finished basements tend to be at an increased risk for mold damage because it will grow underneath carpets or behind drywall where it can’t be seen by the naked eye. When mold is hidden like this, the only signs you may have a problem could be health related, so paying attention to any unusual reactions to specific rooms or places may help you identify a problem.

Mold in your Bathroom

Since we’ve already told you that water is the primary cause behind mold growth in your home, the bathroom can often be the first part of your home in which you notice visible mold growth. The frequent usage of hot and cold water, standing water, and the potential for leaks, drips, and dribbles increases the likelihood that mold will start to grow. Humidity (think of those steamed up windows or mirrors!) is also a big part of the likelihood of mold growth in bathrooms.

Some common places we notice bathroom mold are:

• On shower curtains
• Underneath the sink
• Around faucets and fixtures
• In tiling grout
• Along the edge of a shower stall or bathtub

With all this water, drying out the bathroom promptly is an important part of any mold prevention strategy. Installing an exhaust fan that you can run during showering is one of the best options, but cracking the window can also make a big difference. Unsurprisingly, cleaning is also a big help when it comes to reducing bathroom mold. The bathroom is full of organic materials, oils, and dirt that mold can thrive on, so a regular deep cleaning can help remove mold spores before they have a chance to take hold.

Mold may not always appear as a big, obvious patch - it can also look like small dots or a slight discolouration, so pay special attention to areas below or beside the sink, toilet, baseboards and along the tub or shower stall.

Mold in your Bedroom

While mold growth in the bedroom isn’t as common as it is in other areas of your house, it’s probably one of the most important places to monitor and remove mold growth as soon as possible. The health effects caused by mold growth are exacerbated by prolonged contact - and if you’re spending 8 hours a day sleeping in your mold infested bedroom, that’s a lot of time and contact with spores that may be having a big impact on your day.

At first glance, the bedroom may not seem like an obvious place for mold to grow. Ensuite bathrooms can certainly add water or humidity to the room, but why else would they be problem areas when it comes to mold growth?

For starters, the bedroom is usually located in the upper levels of your home, which is prone to humidity problems and can be at risk from water leakage. Access to the attic is also usually located in an upper floor closet or hallway, and mold growth problems in the attic can easily transfer to your second or third floor via the hatch.

Bedrooms also have lots and lots of food for mold growth. Textiles, carpets, and upholstery are favoured sites for mold, especially when they are difficult to clean or move around. Mattresses too, can be problematic especially because they can soak up and retain water for a long period of time (don’t even get us started on water beds!). Regular monitoring of the bedroom can help catch any of these problems before they begin and an air quality test can help determine even low levels of mold growth.

Leave Mold Testing to Professionals

While there are many things the savvy homeowner can do themselves, having a professional perform your mold testing in Toronto isn’t one of them. At MoldTech, our professional mold testing in Toronto means that your technician will be adhering to Health Canada’s standard practices and testing protocols, as well as understanding local and industry standards. Using state of the art tools and equipment, our technicians can pinpoint the exact source of mold growth using special tools such as fiber options, thermal infrared charting, as well as non-invasive radiofrequency gauges so that there is no need to open walls and disturb rooms

Our complete visual inspection also comes with our insights and recommendations that come from years of experience. At MoldTech, we know that the true key to preventing mold growth is to prevent it from happening in the first place, and that even the best cleanup is useless if the source of the mold growth isn’t tackled first.

The Benefits of Choosing MoldTech

At MoldTech, we often receive calls from homeowners who had tried to remove mold on their own and have, in the process, spread it through their home. While many sources suggest it’s perfectly doable on your own, our professional experience has proven that it’s not - with MoldTech, you can be certain that once we’ve removed the mold it won’t be coming back. By choosing to work with a specialist company like us, you also gain from our years of focus on this single problem - after over a decade of performing mold testing in Toronto,  our teams have experience in buildings big and small, and can work with insurance companies, realtors, engineers and other contractors to find the right solution for any problem.

It is our mission to provide you with friendly, helpful service, and all of our staff at MoldTech have experience and knowledge about mold testing in Toronto so that you can be sure your questions are going to be answered with a deep comprehension of the various aspects of the mold testing and removal process.

Our mission at MoldTech is to provide you with a cleaner, healthier home through testing and mold removal. If you are looking for mold testing in Toronto, please get in touch with us at 1-866-684-7684.

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