Jun 7, 2012

Mold Detective At Your Service

I have one more post to share from my sister's home but I also wanted to post about detecting mold.  I just couldn't end the week talking about mold so I am covering that today.  Beautiful living room pictures coming tomorrow!

Our son, Reed, has been wheezy and congested since January.  We thought it was a cold that turned into RSV but a couple of things made us think it might be allergies.  For starters when we went to Utah his symptoms completely went away.  And he was not getting better after a month of nebulizer treatments.  So off to the allergist we went.  I was so sure it was going to be our dogs or dust mites.

Turns out our little guy has a mold allergy.  Eeek!  Visions of gross mold making our boy sick made Rudy and I so worried!  Not to mention to bucks we would need to shell out to remedy a problem. 

So we called a mold detection service to come out to to the house.  They did not see anything suspicicious (he even put on a full white suit and crawled around in our crawl space) and our moisture levels were good.  But I was still not sure because he had the allergy and was better in Utah.  Maybe it is just Charlotte, maybe our house, maybe the daycare?

So the next thing I did was purchase these handy kits:


You have to buy at least two to get a reading of the suspicious area and one of the outside to be your control.  In a nutshell, if there is more mold growing in the inside petri dish than the outside, you have a problem.  I did an air quality test in his room and then in our back yard. 


As you can see we have much more on the outside than the inside so it confirms that we are in the clear.  In hindsight, I wish we would have done this first prior to paying $100 for the service to come but odds are I would have done both anyway. 

Next step is to do the same at the daycare.  Yes, I could just put Reed on allergy medicines and keep him on the steriod nebulizer treatments but the thing is that he is restless at night and now waking up at midnight to eat...we want our happy sleeper back!

2 comments:

  1. Since your house doesn’t seem to have a mold problem, perhaps the allergy was from the other locations where your child usually goes to. Have you tried using the mold kit on those places? Here’s a piece of advice: lower down the moisture inside your house. You can do that by improving your ventilation. You can also install a quick water removal system, in case of floods.

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    1. Thanks so much Phoebe for stopping by! We just actually started the test at his daycare yesterday. Fingers crossed that we are okay there. According to our pediatrician and allergist, Charlotte is a very "wet" city and many people have allergies here that they never had before. So it could just be where we are. Those are great suggestions on lowering the moisture in our house. I am going to have Mr. Exceptional look into these tonight! Take care and I hope you drop by again!

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