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kits don't work

Why Mold Test Kits Don’t Work

Mold Petri Dish

Mold kits don’t work. Mold needs food and water to grow.

The home kits start out with food and water, but then they sit on store shelves, hot loading docs, warehouse inventory with no expiration dates. You get the idea.

And those kits usually require you to pay an extra fee to send the Petrie dish to a lab.

Even after paying a lab you still don’t know if you have a mold problem. You need to compare the outside airborne level of spores with inside levels.

And some spores fall faster than others. So, do you have an overgrowth?

Then some spores eat other spores. Those kits are a waste of your energy, time, and money.

You Still Need to Mail the Sample to a Lab

Well, HOPEFULLY, you do. I have seen kits that think mold can be identified using the eyes only of an untrained person. Not even a mycologist that looks at mold tests as a job can’t successfully do that.

Certified, experienced environmental labs usually don’t accept these samples for these reasons:

  • Uncontrollability of Shipping and Handling.
    Your sample could sit on a loading platform where the temperature is 105 degrees.  That will definitely affect the accuracy even for the best labs.
  • No Air Flow to Measure Mold In Cubic Units
    You need to know how many mold spores are in the breathing zone or, simply put, how many spores are going up your nose. You need a controlled way to take a sample – not how many spores may float into a Petri dish.
  • No Control Sample
    To determine if there is a harmful level of toxic mold in the air you need to take a controlled measurement of the outside air.  Interior levels of toxic molds must be equal to or less than outside.
  • Questionable Marketing Ethics
    Consumers often think these home kits will quantify and qualify the types of mold they have, but this is not the case. For an additional cost, the Petri dishes must be sent out to the lab for analysis.There are several toxic molds that don’t grow well in Petri dishes or require special growing media. Some of these molds are Stachybotrys (black mold), Chaetomium, and Ulocladium.

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