Find out before it is your problem.

Who should test, and when

Buyers under contract on a property with any history question. Landlords at turnover, particularly after an eviction or a tenant who left abruptly. Anyone who has been notified by a local health department. And anyone buying a home that has sat vacant or been a rental for a long stretch with unclear history. Testing during a due-diligence window is a routine cost; testing after closing is a problem you now own.

What a sample actually is

Surface wipe sampling on measured areas — typically walls, ceilings, HVAC components and high-contact surfaces — sent to an accredited laboratory and reported in micrograms per one hundred square centimetres. A composite screen across several rooms answers "is there a problem here" cheaply. If it comes back positive, discrete individual samples are what tell you which rooms and how bad, which is what a decontamination scope is priced from.

Where contamination concentrates

Smoking and cooking deposit differently. Residue migrates through HVAC systems and settles well beyond the room it originated in, which is why ductwork gets sampled even when the visible signs are in one bedroom. Porous materials — carpet, pad, unsealed drywall, cabinetry — hold residue far more stubbornly than hard sealed surfaces, and that distinction drives most of the cost difference between two otherwise similar jobs.

We will tell you if you do not need us

Plenty of tests come back clean, and a clean result on paper is worth having either way — it is documentation for a file, a sale or a tenant dispute. If your numbers come back under the action threshold we will say so and send you the lab report, not a proposal.