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So attic mold, this is a huge, huge question I get as a home inspector about, first of all is there mold in my attic, you know, that’s probably the number one question when we do a home inspection and we go up to the attic and the two questions I get are is there mice in the attic and is there mold in the attic. Those are the two scary sort of unknowns when you go up to an attic and if you think about an attic and you look at the sort of design of it they’re very, very prone to moisture and humidity problems because they are basically a sealed wood box sitting on top of your house so if you don’t have proper ventilation and a waterproof roof membrane above you that’s keeping the water out and you aren't adding unnecessary moisture into the attic, then you’ll have a dry attic. If you’re ventilating it properly, you’re not adding moisture and your roof doesn’t leak you will generally have a dry attic. But if you miss any of those points generally you’ll get mold growth or some sort of growth up there that has to be dealt with so, what I like to do is show you some visuals. I’m just going to do a screen share so let me know when that pops up for you, if you don’t see it let me know, you should see it come up pretty quick.
Mark: You got it.
David: Alright, so what I wanted to do was give you a case study of the house that we inspected; this property in Vancouver and they had a considerable problem with moisture and condensation in the attic. Now this is a concrete tile roof which is very popular in East Vancouver and they generally breathe pretty well but you have to be careful with them because in this case you’ll see why. So we’re looking at the soffits here, this is the underside of the eave’s and it doesn’t come out really that clearly in the picture here but what we have is there is a lot of staining around the actual soffit vents and these soffits are perforated so the air will rise up and travel through the attic and carry all the moisture out but in this case there was a lot of staining and rust around the soffits so that’s, when we are doing a home inspection and we come up to this property for a mold inspection, that’s the first thing we look at, what’s the condition of our soffits and generally you can tell if you have an issue right off the bat before you even go into the attic; if you see this, this is a big red flag.
So, I labelled it heavy growth; this is the inside of the attic, it was quite bad, it was a cold day and there was literally water dripping off the ceiling and we’ve got what looks like some black mold growth growing in the attic here.
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