Testing Your Home For What Ails It

It is now easy and inexpensive to test your home for indoor air quality, water quality, radon, allergens, and mold.  Do-it-yourself test kits are available to test your home for all of these concerns. 

Why Use Home Test Kits?

Home test kits are an inexpensive, quick way to screen your home for may potential health concerns, without paying for expensive professionals.  It provides, a first-pass evaluation to determine if professional testing is required.

How Do Home Test Kits Work?
Home test kits come in many forms.  Some test kits such as overall water quality (to test your drinking water for nitrates, pH, metals, alkalinity, pesticides etc.) use simple titration tests (example: you add 2 drops of chemical A, then count the drops of chemical B you add until the water changes color.  The number of drops can be used to calculate the alkalinity, pH, etc.).

Other test kits (example: bacteria in pool or spa water) are immunoassay tests (similar to a early pregnancy test), that tell you either yes or no, whether a certain contaminant is present.

Many other home test kits require you to collect a sample from your home (in a container that comes in the kit), and mail this container to a laboratory for analysis.  This sample collection may include filling a jar with water from your faucet (example: radon gas in well water), exposing a collection media like a charcoal filter to the air for en extended period of time (example radon gas in air), or hooking a filter onto your vacuum cleaner (examples: mold and allergies).  The results are then provided to you via mail, fax, or on a website.

Are Home Tests Kits Hard to Run?

In general, home test kits are very easy to run.  They contain step-by-step procedures thtat provide a detailed description of collecting, packaging, and shipping your samples.  They also provide detailed results, in easy to understand language that lets you know whether or not you have a problem, and were to go for help if you do have a problem.

Are They Accurate?

Test kits are generally very accurate, if used according to directions. In some cases (radon for example), test kits may be EPA certified.

My eStore contains a number of test kits!!!