Independent Mold Documentation for Insurance Adjusters

You are looking at a remediation scope, a mitigation invoice, or a claimant's assertion, and you need someone with instruments and no stake in the outcome to document what is actually there. That is what we do and it is the only thing we do.

We test only. We do not perform remediation, we do not perform mitigation, we do not sell drying equipment, and we take no referral fees from the companies that do. That means our documentation of a scope is not a competing bid, and our clearance result is not a business development call.

Base inspection is $425 including one indoor air sample and an outdoor control. Post remediation verification is $375 flat for up to three samples.

What you can use us for

Independent condition documentation. Moisture mapping with pin and pinless meters, thermal imaging, psychrometric readings, photographs keyed to locations, and air or surface sampling analyzed by an accredited laboratory. A dated record of what the building was actually doing on a specific day.

Scope validation. A remediation scope is a claim about how far the affected material extends. That claim is testable. We map where materials are actually wet and where the boundary of elevated moisture sits, and document it independently of the contractor who wrote the scope. Over-scoped and under-scoped both cost money, and under-scoped costs more in the long run because it comes back as a supplement or a reopened claim.

Post remediation verification. A visual check of the remediated area and containment, air samples inside containment plus an outdoor control, evaluated against IICRC S520, the industry standard for professional mold remediation. Forty-five to sixty minutes on site, and it should be scheduled while containment is still standing.

Reinspection on a disputed file. When a claimant and a contractor describe two different buildings, an independent set of readings usually settles which one exists.

The scale of what you are working with here

Triple-I and ISO five-year averages put water damage and freezing claims at 1.61 per 100 insured homes per year with an average severity of $13,954. That is roughly one in sixty insured homes filing a water claim annually. Across Spokane County's 241,434 housing units and Kootenai County's 86,151, that works out to somewhere in the range of 3,100 to 4,500 water damage claims a year in this two-county area.

The regional loss drivers are specific and they are not humidity:

• Freeze and burst. Spokane averages 43.9 inches of snow, Coeur d'Alene 42.4. Nationally, frozen pipes and cold weather damage make up about 7% of all US insurance claims, and burst pipes are the third most costly loss event in the country behind hurricanes and tornadoes at roughly $1.4 billion a year.
• Ice dams driving meltwater into attics and wall cavities, where the interior symptom often appears months after the event.
• Spring melt into basements and crawlspaces.
• Old plumbing. In the City of Spokane, roughly 27% of housing was built before 1950 and single-family detached homes average around 70 years old.
• Appliance failures, which are climate-independent and constant.

Also relevant to reserve setting: the American Housing Survey finds 8 to 10% of homes have leak-related water damage in a given year, five to six times the insurance claim rate. Most water damage is never claimed at all, which means a lot of what shows up in a mold investigation is historic and predates the loss you are looking at. Distinguishing old damage from the current event is a large part of what the instruments are for.

What is in the deliverable

• Air sampling with a calibrated pump drawing a measured volume through an Air-O-Cell or Allergenco-D spore trap cassette, submitted to an accredited laboratory for direct microscopic examination
• An outdoor control sample on every job. Outdoor air always contains mold spores, so an indoor spore count without a same-day baseline at the same property cannot support any conclusion. Elevated means elevated relative to outside. If you receive a report without an outdoor control, that is the first thing to question about it
• Surface sampling by swab or tape lift to confirm whether visible material is growth, and bulk sampling where a material sample is warranted
• Moisture mapping with pin and pinless meters, recorded by location
• Thermal imaging to identify temperature differentials behind intact finishes
• Borescope inspection of wall cavities and inaccessible spaces
• Psychrometrics by area and outdoors: relative humidity, temperature and dew point
• Chain of custody documentation for every sample, from collection through the laboratory
• Photographs tied to locations, with instrument readings and lab results in a single written report

Typical residential visit is one to two hours. Larger or more complex properties run three to four.

Pricing

Lab results normally come back in one to three business days with the written report within a day. Rush turnaround is available when a file is on a clock.

What we do not do

Being explicit about this is more useful to you than a longer capability list.

• We do not make coverage determinations. We document conditions. Coverage is your call and your policy language.
• We do not perform cause and origin investigations. We can document moisture distribution and the pattern of wetting, which frequently informs a cause and origin analysis, but we are not the ones assigning a cause of loss.
• We do not write remediation scopes or estimates. We do not remediate, so we do not bid remediation.
• We do not diagnose or attribute health effects. CDC has never established a causal link between Stachybotrys and serious illness, and says no test proves an association between a specific mold and particular health symptoms. What is documented in the literature is allergic reaction, asthma triggering and upper respiratory irritation in sensitive people, plus serious fungal infection risk in the severely immunocompromised. Our reports say what the samples and instruments show and nothing beyond it.
• We do not certify against a numeric limit, because none exists. There is no state or federal action level for airborne mold. A clearance evaluation is a comparison against the outdoor baseline and against the visual and moisture criteria in IICRC S520, and we describe it in those terms rather than as a pass.

Why the independence carries weight on a file

Washington's Department of Health states plainly that there are no certification requirements for mold work in the state and that anyone can call themselves a mold specialist without training or credentials. Idaho is the same and licenses neither mold work nor home inspection. There is no regulatory floor in either state.

That is why the structure of the vendor matters more than the acronym on the report cover. Nearly every mold company in this market also performs remediation, which means an assessment and the invoice to act on it come from the same entity. New York made that combination illegal under Labor Law Article 32, on the theory that an assessment cannot be relied on when the assessor prices the cure. Washington and Idaho have no such rule.

We test only, we are paid a flat fee by whoever engages us, and no remediation contractor pays us anything. That is the reason our documentation is worth putting in a file.

Adjuster questions

Can you get out on a file quickly? Usually within a few days, and faster on a loss that is actively drying. If containment is up and the crew is scheduled to break it down, tell us and we will work to that.

Will you go back and forth with the contractor? We will provide our readings and our report. We are not going to negotiate scope on your behalf and we are not going to argue with a contractor. The document either supports a position or it does not.

We have a claimant reporting health symptoms. What can your report say about that? It can document building conditions, moisture, and what the lab found relative to the outdoor control. It cannot connect any of that to a specific symptom in a specific person, because no test does that. We will not write something we cannot support, and a report that overclaims is a problem for the file rather than a help.

Do you do clearance on work your own company did? We never do remediation, so this cannot arise. Every clearance we perform is on someone else's work.

How do you handle a property with pre-existing damage unrelated to the loss? We document it separately and describe it as what it is. Distinguishing long-standing conditions from a recent event is a normal part of the inspection, and the moisture readings, staining patterns and material condition usually tell the story clearly.

What do you need from us before the visit? The address and access arrangements, the date of loss, what mitigation has already been performed, whether containment is in place, and any scope or moisture logs the contractor produced. More context means a better sampling plan and a more useful report.

Assign a file

Call or email with the loss address and what you need documented. We will tell you what we can and cannot establish before you assign anything.