When your entire home is affected by a mold infestation, mold remediation is an expensive but necessary process if you wish to save your home. The need for a whole house mold remediation is often the result of either a flooding event or a water leak that went undetected for a significant amount of time.
The amount of out-of-pocket expense is largely dependent upon the cause of the leak and the type of insurance you carry on your home. Sudden events, such as a burst pipe, are the most likely cause to be covered by your home insurance, though many insurance companies require an active flood policy to be in place to cover water damage issues.
Undetectable leaks, such as a slow leak in your crawl space, are also covered in most homeowner insurance policies.
However, a moisture problem that should have been contained but was not addressed quickly will almost always be denied coverage. The feeling is that if you had acted to resolve the issue, the mold wouldn’t have had a chance to take hold.
Actual flood events caused by natural bodies of water will only be covered if your home has a flood policy.
To be certain that your home is covered for water-related mold issues, you need to do the following:
Just remember that, to insurance companies, a flood is any water event that causes damage to your home. That can include something as simple as an overflowing washing machine. Flood insurance is not expensive and could save you tens of thousands of dollars in repair costs.
Mold spores are everywhere. Every breath you take, indoors or out, has mold spores in it. Mold doesn’t become a health risk until the spores become concentrated in the air you breathe.
When you have a mold colony in your home, the concentration of mold spores in your air can reach unsafe levels and cause symptoms such as:
Those with asthma or COPD can have severe reactions to excess mold in the air, even to the point of needing hospitalization.
Though often thought of as a plant, mold is actually a lifeform and needs moisture and food to survive. We all understand where the water comes from – slow leaks, floods, and so on. But few consider the food source.
What does mold eat? Your house. Whatever surface it is growing on is its food. Mold can damage your structural wood as thoroughly as termites do, though more slowly. So mold is more than just a danger to your family’s health, but to the physical stability of your home, too.
We use a machine called an InstaScope (one of 70 in the world!) to test the air in a room for dangerous mold spore levels. The test takes about 10 minutes per room, and the report is produced in seconds. Every other company without an InstaScope must send their air samples to a lab and wait weeks for the results.
With our room-by-room instant and 99% accurate reporting, we can quickly locate the mold colony in your home as we don’t have to waste time searching the whole house. We just search the rooms that our test equipment tells us has increased mold activity.
Once the colony has been located, we get started removing the colony from your home. We first create plastic barriers to isolate the colony from the rest of your home and use machines to create negative air pressure to prevent the spores from traveling into other areas of your home.
Next, we remove the damaged material in the area, leaving as much of the structure in place as possible while eliminating the entire colony. Our technicians wear full protective gear during this process, and we limit foot traffic in that area as well. Once we are certain that we have removed every bit of the mold colony, we take the time to dry out the affected areas completely, and then we clean up any debris the process created.
The final step is to verify our work. We test the areas, just as we did at the beginning of the process, to verify that we have successfully returned your indoor air quality to normal levels. We print out the report right then and there and hand it to you for your approval.
Whole house remediation can cost anywhere from $2800 up to $30,000. The wide range is due to the cost of repairing structural damage, which can vary wildly from case to case. On average, not considering potential structural rebuilding, mold remediation for a whole house falls in the $2800 to $6000 range, depending on the size of the areas that need treatment.
You can find lower quotes on the web, but they are lower for a reason. Their tests take weeks to come back and still may not be accurate, and they spend less time while taking fewer precautions against colony migration during the removal process.
If you have a mold problem in the greater DC area, contact us at Valor Mold Removal. We’ll be happy to answer all your questions, and you can rest assured that we will solve your problem completely.
We remove mold the right way… and it would be an honor to hear from you.
Your home is in the best hands—our chemical-free remediation has the highest success rate in the industry.
You get the answers you need—our special mold testing provides 99% accurate results on the spot.
You can trust our process—we’ve performed over 300 successful projects since we opened in 2006.
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Valor Mold Removal is a certified and experienced mold testing and remediation company. We are fully insured and fully licensed. We also provide crawl space encapsulation, soda blasting, humidity control, and air quality cleaning.
