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How Do You Know If Your House Has A Mold Problem?

1,236 views · Published 27 August 2018 · 3:45 · Indexed 8 November 2026

Channel: CanXida · 2018 · Education

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Hi, there, Eric Bakker, naturopath. Thanks for coming back. We're talking about mold. We're going to talk about how do you know if mold is in your house. How can you detect it? How can you uncover it? It may not be a problem.

Well, the first thing you've got to do is look for visual signs, obviously, especially if there's more than one person in the house and one or more are suffering from the symptoms I just mentioned in the previous video; crazy symptoms like sinus and itchy skin, blurry vision, crazy kind of symptoms. Especially symptoms that happen to develop in this person when they moved to that house.

One thing you could do, for example: Does the person feel better when they're on vacation or away from that house, or they're staying at a relation's house? If you suspect mold, try and take that person out of that home environment, into another home environment, just for a week or so and see what happens, see if symptoms diminish, see if they increase when the person comes back. That's withdraw and challenge; that may work.

If you can see visual signs of mold, you've got to look for bubbling, peeling, blistering, you're going to look for wood damage or water leakage. Often times, you can spot it, but sometimes you can't.

Sometimes it's actually in the drywall or it could be in some fabric. I've even heard of cases where it was in the furniture, where a whole sofa was wet all down one side, and mold spores went in the air from that. The person got very sick and didn't even know about it. So you need to do a bit of investigating work. 

If you're really at a loss, you're best to find a building person who's a professional and who understands mold, who can get up on the roof, check out the ceiling or go under the house and have a really good look and poke around to see if he or she can find the penetration into the house where the damage has occurred. Generally, there will be some damage.

Remember, up to one in four homes could potentially have this leaky building kind of a problem, and the other thing which isn't really nice to explain is most insurance companies, in fact, won't even provide cover for mold. They'll provide cover for water damage, but they won't provide cover for the actual mold that ensues post water damage. 

That's pretty terrible, isn't it? So you may want to check with your insurance company, even now, if you haven't got mold, to be sure you're covered, because I think there are some companies that do cover the mold damage or any health effects ensuing from molds. So make sure you get that checked out.

As I said, you'll often find visual ... Visually, you'll find something, but if you don't, get it professionally checked out or move out of that house temporarily to see if signs and symptoms improve. This is a big problem, folks, and many people have a mold problem and don't even know about it. Many people I've seen even develop symptoms, low-grade symptoms, and don't even know they've actually got a mold problem. 

Especially relevant if you live in an area with high rainfall, or it's damp, it's wet there quite a lot. A lot of my clients in Sweden, and in fact, in Norway, have mentioned to me that mold used to be a big problem there, but the building standards have changed so it's not so much of an issue. We had the same here in New Zealand, in Auckland, between 2004 and 2014; a lot of homes were built by people, cowboys, these were people that weren't really properly suited qualified to understand how to build to prevent things like water penetration into a house, but of course, now, building codes change and it's much, much tougher, now, for a person to become a qualified or registered builder, to make sure that they put their standards into place.

There you have it. Thanks for watching the video.

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