Buying or selling a house in Mapleton? Get an attic mold inspection before closing. General home inspectors are good at a lot of things, but attic mold is not one of them. They do not carry the right gear and they are not trained to assess it. Call us too if your upstairs ceilings have dark staining, the top floor smells musty, or the rooms up there feel damp instead of dry.
Homes with bathroom exhaust fans vented into the attic are high risk, because every shower dumps warm wet air into a space that cannot handle it. Mapleton adds its own twist. We are dry most of the year, which fools people into thinking moisture is a coastal problem, but the freeze-thaw swings along the Wasatch bench are brutal on an attic. Warm indoor air hits cold sheathing on a January night and condenses. Snow piles up on north-facing roof planes and sits there for weeks. Add ice dams backing water under the shingles and you have a wet attic in the middle of a desert climate. Swamp coolers make it worse, since they push humid air straight into the house all summer, and a lot of Utah County homes still run them. If your house is more than fifteen years old and nobody has ever checked, something is probably growing up there.
