LESLIE: Dan in Illinois on the line and you’ve got an unwanted visitor in the house; possibly mold. How can we help you source it out?
DAN: How do you know if you have mold in the house?
TOM: Well, if it’s in the refrigerator it’s generally easy.
DAN: Yep, I know that one. (chuckling)
TOM: Well, why do you suspect that you have mold? Is there anything going on, Dan?
DAN: No, not really.
TOM: Well …
DAN: Just that it’s an old house.
LESLIE: Just precautionary?
DAN: Yeah, it’s an older house and we just wanted to know if it had mold. My daughter has asthma.
TOM: OK. Well, first of all, I can absolutely, positively guarantee you that you have mold in your house.
DAN: OK.
TOM: Because we all do. Mold is very prevalent in homes. But the thing is you want to take steps to reduce the chance that it could grow into something that’s very unhealthy. There’s a couple of strains of mold that are getting, you know, fairly famous for the respiratory issues they cause. One is stachybotrys; another is penicillium; another is aspergillus. Those are really kind of the top three that impact our health in the home. And generally they’re detectable at some stage in their – in their sort of metamorphosis. And if you see, for example with drywall, and you see that it has like sort of dark greenish growth on it, that’s probably stachybotrys.
But if you’re not seeing any evidence of mold, I wouldn’t tell you to go on a witch hunt for it. There are some things that you can do to avoid mold in the house. If you log onto MoneyPit.com, click on the AOL button. There’s a link there to my blog on AOL and one of the stories that’s getting a lot of traffic this month is ten tips for a mold-free house. You can check it out there and go to that by logging onto MoneyPit.com.
Dan, thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.
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