How To Check For Asbestos In Your Home?

Asbestos is a serious health hazard, even in small quantities; it can do irreparable damage to your health. Asbestos mainly affects your respiratory system and can even lead to lung cancer. Asbestos can harm your health in such a way that after a point, medicines may not work on you. This is why it is often called a slow poison.

Asbestos becomes a health hazard when its fibres become airborne and can be inhaled. Since asbestos was an essential material used in construction and was banned only very recently, it is quite possible that your house may have asbestos, if it was built before the 1990s as asbestos was still legal and extensively used in construction. In this case, your family is prone to the harmful effects of asbestos, and you should check to see if your home is well-protected.

You can hire asbestos removal experts to come and survey your house. They can accurately determine if your house has traces of asbestos and work towards removing them so that you and your family members can rest assured and not be tensed about your health. When the experts arrive for inspection, they may ask your certain questions and inspect some places. Here are some of the things to watch out for at the inspection:

• Date of construction: try to find documents that mention the original date of construction. The exact year can determine how much asbestos may be in your house based on constructions statistics from that year.
• Pipe insulation: before the 1980s, asbestos was used to line pipelines. Your pipes may be checked for traces of asbestos.
• Roofing sheets: most flat and corrugated roofing sheets contain asbestos to increase durability; however, this also leaves the family susceptible to various respiratory problems.
• Vinyl flooring tiles: these are very likely to have asbestos in them since this flooring was highly popular back in the days when asbestos was regularly used in construction.

These are the main things the inspection team will focus on. In order to detect asbestos in your home, they can perform different kinds of testing:

1. Microscopy: in this, samples collected from various parts of your home are sent to the lab where each fibre is separated from the samples and tested for asbestos. This is usually a more time consuming process and is now considered quite outdated, since if your house really contains asbestos, it may only endanger you more since the lab results take very long to arrive.
2. Handheld spectroscopy: in this, the inspectors bring a device with them which can accurately detect asbestos in the surrounding in a very small time.
3. Using a magnetic field: this is also a recent development in asbestos inspection. It uses a magnetic field device which uses lasers to detect asbestos fibres in under a very short time.

Asbestos fibres will most definitely harm your health if they are removed as soon as possible, to ensure the safety of your family members, it is vital that you hire an inspection team to visit your house.