schimmeljager

How can I start a company like this?

Armillaria usually infect trees when they are still alive. So I am not sure they could even happen to in a house. I never heard of that. There some other typical wood-rot fungi (many of which could produce macroscopic fruiting bodies). Most of them are not really edible, not poisonous but just too tough. However, once I was contacted by some guy who had oyster mushroom (Pleurotus) growing at the edge of the floor of the apartment he was renting. He sent pictures.

What kind of wood is this btw?

It may attack the inhabitants by making them fall down through the floor. But it the fungus could be one of those producing edible fruiting bodies (mushrooms), for example Armillaria mellea - honey mushroom. It may be something else thorugh, non-edible. But look at figure 2 here for example http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/fidls ... ecline.htm

I am not trying to defend mold testing. I happened to work in mold testing (and not even in the field but in the lab) due to combination of circumstances. I needed a job and I got what I could. I did not have a plan to do it all my life before it. I see that what is going on is pretty ridiculous. When I tell my friends in my home country about what I do they often laugh at it. I am trying to figure out what should I do with my current situation since I am philosophically opposed to what I live of. Should something like this be done but in some other, more efficient, way or is it wrong apriori? Yes I do believe that mold inspection/testing business is seriously overblown. Mold testing is often done in situations where it is not needed. It produces a lot of useless information and leads to the increase of beaurocracy. At the same time some important aspects are being ingored. However I think there are cases when some mold investigation should be done but it should done in a different way. Home inspectors' opinion is very important forme. That's why I am asking these questions here.

What do mean by "test"? Who "takes samples" or do mold inspections in general? Do you refer it inspectors who are just regular home inspectors and deal with mold sometimes as well while "real" mold consultants are ok because they know what they are doing? or you mean that the whole concept mold inspection is wrong because presence of mold is usually obvious and mold should be removed no matter what kind of fungus is there?

The Home Depot kit is not a complete kit. You still send it to a lab. And get pretty meaningless report btw - no quantitation.

As a person working in a mold testing lab I can say that 95% mold tests are useless. I wonder if this some sort conspiracy done by somebody on purpose or just it naturally developed into this dead branch of economical evolution. It sucks for me more than for you guys because if the system was right I would not have had my job.

As far as I know there are two companies making mold test systems for immediate detection. Alexeter and AdVnt. They both look like pregnancy tests and tests the same analytes. They both use immunochromatography method. Alexeter's kits are easy to buy since they are sold on Amazon. I am not sure how you can buy the AdVnt's one but there must be a way. Probably you should ask the manufacturer. I am not a home inspector but a mycologist. I never checked them in action but from theoretical prospective it seems they should work. I am actually really interested to see how they work in real life. I could do some evaluation comparing their results with other methods (direct microscopy, culture, PCR...). It does not look like that it has been done so far. Anyways... each of them contain the same pair test systems - one for Stachybotrys and one for Aspergillus and Penicillium combined. Probably the latter test is specific to the family Trichocomaceae in a wider sense since it covers some Paecilonyces species too http://www.alexeter.com/iaq/information ... %20pen.pdf. Actually from a mycologist view their lists of species which are detected the strips and which are not does look very proffesional - they have a bunch of spelling errors in fungal names. Besides there might have been some misidentification or contamanation issues. In my opinion Paecilomyces marquandii for example should not be there since is totally unrelated to Aspergilli, Penicillia and Paecilomyces variotii if you look at the DNA based evolutionary tree (phylogentic tree). It think this is a great start and this method has a big future but so far it is not quite complete. The Home Depot test is a total bs btw. It is just a Petri plate with MEA agar which you are supposed to leave open for a while then send to the lab. Of course you would get colonies growing there since molds are ubiquitous. The question is the concentration but you would never know the concentration since spore get on the plate not by impaction when you know the air volume but by passive sedimentation - who knows how rapidly the spores (which could have been atteched to other dust particles) are settling on the plate. The "pregnancy tests" primarily target mold testing in dust or bulk samples if I understand it right. However Alexeter also sells and even rents some equipment for collecting air samples too. Also Alexeter sells and rents machines which would automatically read the strips quantatively, some abstract units though of course, not the spore number/hyphae length/total weight. So, unlike the case of regular pregnancy, house could a little bit "pregant with mold" LOL. Both company's primary business is biosafety kits. They both make most of their money out of tests for anthrax and other serious stuff. Mold tests are some hobby-like side business for them. Therefore they have not marketed mold tests agressively enough. I tried to talk to people from both of them. they both shopwed some interst in collaboration with an experienced mycologist but due to what I just said (or maybe other reasons) these coversations did not go too far. AdVnt showed more enthusiasm than Alexeter though considering that I found out about Alexter a couple of months ago and only last week did I about AdVnt.