Indoor Air Quality Testing in Spokane

Most people who call about indoor air quality are not asking a chemistry question. They are asking why they feel worse at home than they do anywhere else. That is a legitimate question and it is answerable, but only if the testing is aimed at the right things.

There is no single instrument that reads out "your air is bad." Indoor air quality is a set of separate measurements, each answering a different question, and a competent assessment picks the ones that fit your symptoms and your building. This page explains what those measurements are, what each one can and cannot tell you, and how we decide which apply to your house.

We test only. No remediation, no duct cleaning, no air purifier sales, no referral fees. Every number we give you is a number we have no financial stake in.

What actually degrades indoor air in Spokane

Spokane has an unusual air quality profile. The climate is dry, which means the humidity-driven problems common in coastal markets are less dominant here. What we get instead is seasonal and specific.

Wildfire smoke. Late summer smoke intrusion is the single most significant regional air quality event most years. Fine particulate loads outdoors climb, and how much of that ends up inside depends entirely on your building envelope, your filtration, and how your HVAC handles outside air. Homes that felt fine in June feel unbreathable in August, and the cause is usually filtration rather than anything growing in the walls.

Winter tightness. From November through March, houses are sealed. Combustion appliances run. Occupant moisture from cooking, showering, and breathing has nowhere to go. In a house with no mechanical ventilation, which describes a large share of Spokane's older stock, interior humidity climbs until it finds a cold surface and condenses.

Housing age. In the City of Spokane, roughly 27% of housing predates 1950 and single-family detached homes average around 70 years old. Old houses leak air, which helps ventilation and hurts everything else. When those houses get weatherized, and many have been, they get tighter without gaining any mechanical ventilation to replace the leakage they lost.

Water intrusion. The Inland Northwest gets 43.9 inches of snow a year in Spokane and sustained hard freezes. Burst pipes, ice dams, spring melt into basements and crawlspaces. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's compilation of the research puts roughly 47% of US homes as having dampness or mold, and the American Housing Survey finds 8 to 10% have leak-related water damage in a given year.

Crawlspace air. This one surprises people. In a house over an unconditioned crawlspace, the stack effect pulls air upward through the floor assembly in winter. Somewhere between a fifth and a third of the air you breathe in the living space may have entered through the crawlspace first. Ground moisture, soil gas, and anything growing on the joists are part of your indoor air.

The measurements, and what each one answers

Airborne mold spores

Collected with a calibrated pump drawing a measured volume of air through a spore trap cassette, Air-O-Cell or Allergenco-D, then analyzed by direct microscopic examination at an accredited lab. Results come back as spores per cubic meter by genus.

Every job includes an outdoor control sample. Outdoor air always contains mold spores, in numbers that swing wildly with season, wind, and what is happening in your yard. An indoor count of 800 spores per cubic meter is meaningless until you know whether outdoor air that hour was 200 or 12,000. Elevated means elevated relative to outside your own house on that day. Any report that gives you indoor numbers with no same-day outdoor baseline cannot be interpreted, and those reports get sold constantly.

Relative humidity, temperature, and dew point

Taken in each zone with a psychrometer, plus outdoors. Dew point is the number that matters. If interior air's dew point is above the surface temperature of a window frame, an exterior wall corner, or an uninsulated pipe, that surface will get wet. In a Spokane January, an interior at 70 degrees and 45% relative humidity has a dew point near 48 degrees, and any surface colder than that starts collecting water. That is the mechanism behind most winter mold in otherwise dry houses, and it is a ventilation and source control problem, not a leak.

Moisture in materials

Pin and pinless meters, mapped across suspect areas and compared to dry reference readings from the same material. Thermal imaging to locate temperature differentials that suggest wet cavities, always confirmed with a meter before we call it anything. A borescope when we need to see inside a wall rather than infer.

Ventilation adequacy

We assess whether the building actually exchanges air: bath fan operation and where they terminate, range hood function, dryer venting, any mechanical ventilation system, combustion appliance draft, and whether the return air path is doing what the designer assumed. A large share of the complaints we investigate resolve to a bath fan that runs but vents into an attic, or a house that was air-sealed without anyone adding the ventilation it now needs.

Add-on lab testing

Formaldehyde and volatile organic compound testing is available when the history points that way, typically new construction, new cabinetry or flooring, or a recent remodel. We will tell you when these are worth adding and when they are not.

What air testing cannot do

Being straight about this is part of the job.

An air test cannot tell you that mold is making you sick. There is no diagnostic test that connects a specific mold to a specific person's symptoms. CDC has never established a causal link between Stachybotrys and serious illness. What is well documented is allergic reaction, asthma triggering, and upper respiratory irritation in sensitive people, plus serious fungal infection in people who are severely immunocompromised. That is a real set of problems and it justifies real work. It is not the same as the claims marketed online, and we are not going to blur the two.

An air test is also a snapshot. It captures the air in that room during the minutes the pump ran. Spore counts change with activity, HVAC cycling, and whether a door was opened. This is why sampling has to be paired with moisture and building assessment rather than standing alone. Numbers without a building explanation are just numbers.

What the visit includes and what it costs

A typical residential assessment is one to two hours on site. Larger or more complex properties run three to four.

You get the interview and history, full visual assessment, moisture mapping, thermal imaging, borescope inspection where warranted, psychrometric readings by zone, a ventilation review, and air sampling with a mandatory outdoor control.

Lab results normally return in one to three business days. The written report follows within a day of that and includes the raw lab data, the outdoor comparison, photographs, meter readings, thermal images, and a plain language interpretation.

Why we do not sell the fix

Every competitor in this market that tests air also sells something that supposedly cleans it: remediation, duct cleaning, encapsulation, whole-house filtration. When the company measuring the problem also sells the cure, borderline results tend to become urgent ones. Neither Washington nor Idaho prohibits that arrangement. New York does, under Labor Law Article 32, which makes it illegal for one company to both assess and remediate the same job. Here it is a choice, and we made it.

Jesse Futia owns the company and does the fieldwork himself.

Frequently asked questions

I have symptoms but no visible mold anywhere. Is testing worth it? Often yes, because the point is to find the source rather than confirm the obvious. Hidden moisture in a wall cavity, a crawlspace with a failed vapor barrier, or a bath fan venting into an attic all produce symptoms with nothing visible in the living space.

Should I test my ducts? Duct sampling is easy to sell and rarely diagnostic. If the house has a moisture problem, the ducts are downstream of it. We assess the system and sample the air people breathe. If there is a genuine reason to sample supply air, we will explain it first.

Do you test for carbon monoxide? We check combustion appliance draft and note anything unsafe, and we will tell you immediately if we see a hazard. Detailed combustion analysis belongs with a licensed HVAC technician, and we will say so rather than pretend otherwise.

How should I prepare? Keep windows and exterior doors closed for a few hours beforehand, run the HVAC normally, and skip vacuuming that morning. We want typical conditions, not scrubbed ones.

Can you test after wildfire smoke to see if my house is clear? We can measure spore counts and assess your filtration and envelope, and we can tell you whether your system is capable of handling the next event. We will not claim a lab test proves your house is smoke free, because that is not what these methods measure.

Do you work in Idaho? Yes. Kootenai County including Coeur d'Alene, Post Falls, and Hayden is regular territory.

Book an assessment

Describe what you are experiencing and in which rooms. We will tell you which measurements are worth taking in your specific building, what they will cost, and what the results will and will not be able to prove.