For Restoration Contractors: Independent Clearance Testing

We do not remediate. Not now, not as a side business, not on a job you referred to us. That is the reason to use us and it is the only promise that matters in this relationship: we are never going to show up on a bid sheet next to your name.

What we do is independent post remediation verification. $375 flat for up to three samples, 45 to 60 minutes on site, scheduled around your crew, with lab results normally back in one to three business days and 24 hour rush available for another $100.

Why self-certifying is worth nothing when it counts

You already know how to tell whether your own work is clean. That is not the issue. The issue is what happens eighteen months later when a homeowner, a buyer's attorney, or a carrier's counsel asks who verified it.

A clearance signed by the company that performed the remediation is not evidence. It is an assertion by an interested party. In a dispute it gets characterized in one sentence and there is no good answer to it. New York recognized this and made it illegal under Labor Law Article 32 for one company to both assess and remediate the same job. Washington and Idaho have no such rule, which means the arrangement is legal here and equally worthless as documentation.

IICRC S520, the standard your work is judged against, treats post remediation verification as the province of an indoor environmental professional independent of the remediator. Independence is not an optional refinement on top of the standard. It is what makes the verification mean anything.

The practical cost of not having it:

• Callbacks you cannot rebut. A customer smells something in month four. Without independent clearance you are arguing from memory against their nose.
• Carrier friction. An adjuster reviewing a supplement or a reopened claim treats a self-issued clearance as a document from the party being paid.
• Deals that fall through. A buyer's agent looks at who signed the clearance on a remediated property and asks for another one. Now it is happening on someone else's schedule, in the middle of a transaction, on work you finished months ago.
• The one bad job. Most of your work is fine. It is the one that was not that decides whether the documentation was worth $375.

At $375 a job, this is the cheapest liability instrument on your truck.

What clearance actually consists of

Forty-five to sixty minutes on site.

• Visual inspection of the remediated area and the containment. Condition of the work area, whether affected material was removed to a defensible boundary, dust and debris condition, and whether containment and negative pressure were maintained through the work.
• Air samples inside containment, collected 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. Every time, no exceptions. Outdoor air always contains spores, so an interior count with nothing to compare it against cannot support a conclusion. Elevated means elevated relative to the outdoor air at that property that day. This is the comparison the entire result rests on.
• Surface sampling by swab or tape lift where anything visible warrants confirmation.
• Moisture verification with pin and pinless meters. Drying to standard is part of the outcome, not a separate question.
• Psychrometrics: relative humidity, temperature and dew point inside containment and outdoors.
• A written report with photographs, readings, laboratory results and chain of custody, evaluated against IICRC S520.

How we work around your crew

Containment stays up until we are done. Schedule us before the teardown, not after. Once containment comes down, the sample no longer describes the remediated space and the verification is compromised.

Same or next day. Call when drying is complete and the work area is ready. We schedule around when your crew can be off the job, including early and late slots. We know what an extra day of equipment rental and crew time costs you.

We tell you before we leave if something is going to be a problem. If we see debris left in the cavity, containment that failed, an area of remaining moisture, or an obvious boundary issue, you hear it from us on site rather than reading it in a lab result three days later. That is not us grading you. It is us not wasting a $375 test and two days of your schedule on a result you could have fixed in twenty minutes.

We do not talk to your customer about scope. We report to whoever engages us. If that is you, the report is yours. We are not going to second-guess your scope to a homeowner, and we are not going to suggest they should have hired somebody else.

We do not solicit your customers. Not for remediation, which we do not do, and not for anything else.

What we need from you

The more of this we have going in, the better the sampling plan and the fewer surprises.

Pricing

The $375 partner rate is standing. It is not an introductory number and it does not move based on how the job went. No trip fee across the Spokane metro, Spokane Valley, Liberty Lake, Cheney and Deer Park, or in Coeur d'Alene, Post Falls, Hayden, Rathdrum, Dalton Gardens and Hauser.

Lab results normally come back in one to three business days with the report within a day of that. Rush lab gets results in 24 hours.

The market you are working in

Water damage and freezing claims run at 1.61 per 100 insured homes per year with an average severity of $13,954, per Triple-I and ISO five-year averages. Across Spokane County's 241,434 housing units and Kootenai County's 86,151, that is roughly 3,100 to 4,500 water claims a year in this two-county area, and the American Housing Survey suggests actual leak-related water damage runs five to six times the claim rate. There is no shortage of work. The differentiator is whether your file closes cleanly.

The regional drivers are consistent: freeze and burst events against 43.9 inches of snow in Spokane and 42.4 in Coeur d'Alene, ice dams into attics and wall cavities, spring melt into basements and crawlspaces, and old plumbing in a City of Spokane housing stock where single-family detached homes average around 70 years old.

Contractor questions

Do you ever bid remediation? No. We hold no remediation capability and we have no revenue from remediation, in this market or any other. That is the entire basis of the relationship.

Do you take a referral fee if I send you a customer? No, in either direction. We do not pay for referrals and we do not accept them. When a homeowner asks us for a remediation contractor we give them several names, including yours if you are one of the companies we know does good work, and we are not paid a cent by anyone on that list.

What happens if a job does not clear? You get a report saying so, with the readings and the lab data behind it. We will tell you what we observed. Re-testing after you address it is billed as a new clearance. We would rather flag the issue on site before we sample, which is why we walk the area with you first.

Can you do multiple units or multiple jobs in a day? Yes, and that is the efficient way to use us. Give us the addresses and we will build a route.

Do you certify the property as mold-free? No, and neither should anyone else. There is no such thing and there is no numeric legal standard for airborne mold in Washington, Idaho, or federally. What a clearance report establishes is that the remediated area met the visual, moisture and sampling criteria under IICRC S520 relative to the outdoor control on that date. That is a defensible statement. "Mold-free" is not.

Will your report criticize my work? It reports conditions. If the work is clean, the report says the criteria were met. If something is wrong, it says what and where. We are not writing commentary and we have no reason to make you look bad, since a contractor who clears consistently is exactly the kind of partner we want calling us.

How fast can you get out? Same or next day in most cases. Call when you know your drying completion date rather than the morning you want us there, and we will hold the slot.

Set up a partner account

Call once and we will get your jobs onto a standing $375 rate with a scheduling contact who knows how your crews run. No contract, no minimum, no fee either direction.