Abstract

Building inspections for mould still commonly use spore trap air sampling for non-viable mould. A flaw with non-viable air sampling of buildings for mould is that the samples only capture a short duration ‘snapshot’ of the mould content from a single time point. To help mitigate this issue, we propose and explore the use of a different sampling strategy in which each sample is collected using a single spore trap cassette with two sampling events separated by a time gap. Preliminary data for samples taken in this fashion showed promise as the split fungal spore trap samples showed more mould types observed and fewer types missed as compared to standard sampling methods. This sampling strategy could provide building inspectors with more representative data without the requirement of spending more resources on air sampling cassettes.

Keywords

building inspection, mould inspection, mould assessment, mould sampling, fungal analysis, non-viable, spore-trap, air-O-cell, allergenco-D, gross fungi, gross fungal, building inspection