If you’re reading this post, you may have discovered a mold infestation in your home or business. Maybe it’s a small spot, or maybe you’ve got a serious infestation on your hands. Perhaps you’re just curious about what professional mold removal would cost if you discovered a problem in the future.
Either way, the cost of mold removal is an important consideration for any property owner. With so many other maintenance and repair issues to worry about, spending hundreds or even thousands to bring in a professional and eradicate mold is never an ideal situation.
On the other hand, when a significant amount of mold is present, there’s no point cutting corners. Left unchecked, mold can greatly decrease the value of your property. More importantly, it poses serious and proven health risks to your family, employees, or anyone who spends time inside your property.
So what’s the bottom line? If a mold problem needs to be addressed, what kind of damage can it do to your pockets? The answer depends on three important variables.
1. How extensive is the mold colony?
If an inspector finds that your mold problem is well-contained—for example, there is an infested area of 10 square feet in one single room—you’ll be on the low end of the cost spectrum. A professional mold remediation service can run anywhere from $200 to $2000, depending on where you live and which company you hire.
However, if the mold has formed an extensive colony across a wide area, your costs can easily reach $3000 or more. Since mold spores are microscopic, taking care of a large-scale problem is a meticulous and time-consuming process.
2. How difficult is the mold to reach?
Mold is a tricky customer. It prefers to grow in hard-to-reach places. Removing mold that has colonized outer walls or ceiling panels is relatively straightforward, but if the mold is growing inside the walls, on the insulation, inside ducts or within tight crawl spaces, professionals will need more time to gain access and perform the necessary work. You could be looking at costs of $1000 or more, even if the hard-to-reach mold is relatively contained.
3. How much structural damage has been caused?
Let’s say your mold problem is limited to surfaces that can actually be cleaned. You’ll be on the lower-end of the cost spectrum because you won’t have to replace building materials. But the most serious infestations have been running rampant for some time, and have caused so much damage to the surfaces they’ve colonized that cleaning is not an option. In such cases, the materials themselves need to be removed completely and replaced. This often happens in older properties with bad ventilation, or properties in which serious flooding damage has occurred. You might get lucky and pay only $3000 to resolve such a case, or you might have to part with as much as $30,000 in extreme cases where the value of the property itself is at risk.
Tallying up the cost
Since every case is unique, professional mold inspection is the only way to pinpoint the true cost of eradicating the problem. Fortunately, you can bring in the pros to inspect your property—and assess the true extent of the problem—at a reasonable cost. This involves a detailed inspection by qualified professionals who use industry-standard techniques and scientific lab work. As a result, you’re given a clear idea of what the solution will entail, how long it will take, and how much it will cost. Then you can decide what course of action to take.
Remember—the cheapest and most effective way to defeat mold is through education, foresight and simple prevention measures. Knowing the causes and signs of mold are the first step toward keeping your home or business free of mold, along with the financial costs and health risks it entails.
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