Home inspectors don’t check for mold, radon, water quality, or septic problems

What is your home inspector doing in there?

Walking, looking, writing things down, and that is close to all of it. The standard he works to states plainly that he is not required to determine whether mold is present, whether radon is in the air, or the quality and potability of your water, and it excludes anything underground, which is where a septic system lives.

Picture a weekday morning in an empty house. Your inspector is two steps ahead with a flashlight and a clipboard, and you trail him through the house. He photographs a scorched outlet cover. He taps the frame of a window. He stands in the basement a while, says nothing at all, and you hear that silence as an all-clear.

Most of the time it is, and the report you get back is worth reading twice. Roof wear, a furnace near retirement, wiring somebody’s cousin ran in 1994, the stain creeping across a kitchen ceiling. All of that turns up in his write-up, and we think it’s worth every dollar you handed over.

Then read how the job itself is written down. A home inspection is “a non-invasive, visual examination of the accessible areas of a residential property, performed for a fee”. Non-invasive means nothing gets opened. No wall comes down, no panel is removed and no floorboard lifts, because the standard he works to describes a visual survey of what is on show and nothing underneath it. Visual means he tells you about whatever can be seen from wherever a person can stand.

Which sounds obvious, until you start listing what a house keeps out of sight.

InterNACHI’s standard then says the rest out loud, in a sentence you don’t expect inside a trade document. An inspection “will not reveal every issue that exists or ever could exist”.

So five expensive questions fall outside that morning by design. Not laziness. Not a bad hire. They’re written down deliberately, in a document nobody puts in front of you at the closing table. Nobody put it in front of us either, and that gap between what a buyer assumes got checked and what a standard asks for is the whole of what follows.

Does anybody look for mold?

Press a thumb into the drywall under a bathroom window. It should feel like a wall. Where it gives a little, water has been arriving for a while.

Your inspector may well mention that, and plenty of them do. Not one has to. His excluded list names “the presence of mold, mildew or fungus” outright. ASHI writes almost the same sentence about suspected hazardous substances. Texas folds mold and fungal activity into state rules that carry a license behind them. Three standards. Same exclusion.

Even when he does speak up, he’s describing a surface. Mold grows wherever water reaches, and it gets there out of sight. Under a shower pan. Inside a wall below a window. Beneath the flooring by a dishwasher.

Testing is a separate trade carrying its own bill, and we’d rather you knew one thing first. EPA has set no federal limit for mold or its spores, so a laboratory has nothing federal to check your sample against, PLACEHOLDERcessary anyway.

What we can hand you instead is size and time, both from A Brief Guide to Mold, Moisture and Your Home. Anything under about 10 square feet, roughly a three-foot square, most households clean up themselves, and anything soaked wants drying inside 24 to 48 hours, which is when growth starts. A humidity meter off a hardware store shelf runs $10 to $50, and it answers whether that room stays under 60 percent, ideally between 30 and 50.

radon“>Can your inspector find radon?

No, and not for want of trying. Radon has no smell, no color, and nothing whatsoever to look at.

Stand in that basement with the finest flashlight ever built and you’re no closer than when you walked down the stairs. Nothing on a wall to photograph. This is the one gap a more careful person can’t close, and sure enough, airborne hazards including radon appear on the same excluded list.

Which matters more than anything else on that list. A Surgeon General advisory calls indoor radon the second-leading cause of lung cancer in this country, and EPA now puts about 21,000 lung cancer deaths a year behind it. That figure is modeled from risk estimates rather than counted off death certificates. It’s still the heaviest thing on this page.

So two federal bodies say test. One trade standard says not my job. The Home Buyer’s and Seller’s Guide to Radon says to test any home being bought or sold, and to fix the house at 4 pCi/L or higher. HUD form 92564-CN, handed to every FHA borrower in this country, repeats it, saying EPA and the Surgeon General recommend all houses be tested. That same form says flatly that “FHA does not perform home inspections”.

A kit costs roughly what lunch for two does. National Radon Program Services, run at Kansas State University, sells a short-term kit for $20 and a long-term one for $30, laboratory work and return postage included. New Jersey adds $10 on top, and we’d put this appointment ahead of the other three.

Fixing it’s where nobody hands you a figure. We went looking for one and came back with nothing. That radon guide prints no price for mitigation anywhere, saying instead that cost turns on how your home was built. So anybody quoting a national average is guessing, and we’d walk out on a quote that arrives before somebody has seen your basement.

Who checks what comes out of your tap?

He runs it. Kitchen tap on, sink drains, water heater sounds about right, no puddle underneath. That’s plumbing, which genuinely is covered.

What is dissolved in the water belongs to somebody else entirely. His standard says he is not required to “determine the water quality, potability or reliability of the water supply or source”. Texas writes the same limitation into its plumbing rules. Lead off an old service line, bacteria in a well, whatever a factory left in the groundwater in 1970. None of it has an appearance.

On a public system somebody at least tests the mains for you. Past your meter it’s yours.

A private well has nobody standing behind you at all, and that’s the one that worries us. Private wells fall outside the Safe Drinking Water Act and outside most state law as well, so more than 43 million Americans are quietly running their own utility with nobody checking the work.

Annual coliform and nitrate testing is a floor rather than a luxury, and we would treat it as one. Test straight away following a flood, digging nearby, or new industry turns up near you.

Does anyone go under your yard?

Walk out back and look at the lawn. Somewhere under it there may be a steel tank that once held heating oil.

Nobody has to look for it. Excluded items run to “underground storage tanks (or indications of their presence), whether abandoned or actively used”. ASHI covers “other underground indications of their presence, whether abandoned or active”. Texas skips “anything buried, hidden, latent, or concealed”, which is about as wide as a sentence gets.

Buried tanks turn up more than buyers expect, especially in older neighborhoods and anywhere that ever heated with oil, and an abandoned one can leak quietly for years without marking the grass above it. A leaking tank turns into a remediation project, which is a different order of money from a repair.

That same exclusion swallows septic tanks, wells, buried utilities, everything below grade. That is worth knowing before you buy a house with a septic field, because a failed one is among the most expensive surprises in residential property and it is invisible from a lawn on a dry afternoon.

Your inspector is not required to research what stood here before your house did, either. Texas puts “review historical records” on its excluded list too. Federal law is gentler still. A residential buyer who walks a property and runs a title search has technically inquired enough to keep a liability defense, which tells you where a legal floor stands and nothing at all about what is in your ground.

Old maps and city directories are free. We’d spend an afternoon on those before spending anything else here, because it’s the one item on this list you can finish while walking away is still an option.

What happens in your ten-day window?

If this house went up before 1978, a clock started when you signed, and odds are nobody said so.

Sellers of most pre-1978 housing owe the buyer 10 days for a paint inspection or a risk assessment, under the federal Lead-based Paint Disclosure Rule. Ten days. You can lengthen it, shorten it, or sign it away. About three-quarters of American homes built before 1978 still carry lead paint somewhere.

Those are two different services, and we watch buyers mix them up constantly. An inspection tells you whether lead paint is there and where it is. A risk assessment tells you whether it’s a hazard now and what to do about it. A toddler moving in makes the second one what you want.

Your home inspector does neither. Environmental hazards including lead paint are named on that excluded list, and the work goes to a certified firm.

What is worth booking separately?

Four appointments, and we’d book every one. None of them costs much against the price of a house.

Radon. Order a $20 kit from National Radon Program Services, or hire a tester, which in most states means a home inspector who turns up with a device suited to your house.

Water. Coliform and nitrate at a minimum, and on a well we would call that non-negotiable rather than thorough.

Land. Search the address for buried fuel tanks and former commercial use while you can still change your mind. Free, and nobody does it for you.

Then ask your inspector, in advance, for whichever exclusion list he works to. Any good one hands it over without blinking, because that list protects him as much as it warns you. Reading what a service doesn’t cover is the cheapest hour in a house purchase, and we have never met anybody who charges for it.

We’re not telling you an inspection is poor value. We’re telling you it answers one set of questions very well, was never built to answer these five, and nobody at that closing table will separate the two. Your inspector’s silence in the basement was accurate, and it says more about a standard than it does about your house. It was never an all-clear, and we’d want somebody to have said so before you signed.