How can water get into your home? Let me count the ways. On second thought, let me just try to describe many of the ways. Water is endlessly creative in finding its way into things that we think are tightly sealed.

We have a free ebook available, “How to Find Mold and Moisture Problems in Your Home: Secrets of the Professionals.” If you haven’t already downloaded it and read it, now’s the time to grab it. Go here to get it. Inside, you’ll find a comprehensive guide to inspecting your home and finding signs of water and moisture problems. If you find moisture problems, it may be time to test your air for evidence of indoor mold growth. If someone in your home is chronically ill, or just not feeling well, a mold test is imperative.

Water matters, because without it mold won’t grow. Of course, without any water, no life will grow. But humans, pets and plants can get by on lower relative humidity than mold. Mold is happy in the same temperature range people like. And pretty much everything people use to build homes and furnish them is pure mold candy, as long as there’s enough water.

How much water? Well, 50 percent relative humidity or more is adequate for mold. It helps if the air is fairly still, too. This explains why so many schools have mold problems every fall: They are closed up in June with no ventilation or air conditioning, giving mold a nice summer vacation with warm, humid air to grow and get healthy. Healthy mold means sick people. Often they make it even healthier by shampooing the carpets in August, and leaving the windows closed and the AC off. Yow.

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Every company on the planet will tell you their product or service is the best you can get, or the least expensive, or the easiest to use, or some such superlative. One of my favorite gadget catalogs often said about its too-cool products, “Bestest Best Ever..” whatever it was.

So we think the Got Mold? Test Kit is the “bestest best ever” do-it-yourself mold test kit on the globe. You ask why. And you should. I’m glad you did.

For starters, it works. I can’t say that about some of the best-selling kits on the market, because, well, they don’t. Consumer Reports did a review of a bunch of mold test kits awhile back and basically shredded them all. Unfortunately, ours wasn’t out yet, so we missed a shot at being an overnight sensation. But we were already in development, and none of the flaws CS found in other kits exist in ours.

The non-working kits are the ones that feature “settling plates,” or Petri dishes – little flat saucers of goo that mold spores like to grow in. The theory is, you leave one of these goo gardens out on your counter or table for a few hours, then clap the lid on and wait a few days to see what sprouts.

In most cases, you get a pamphlet with some photos, which you’re expected to match up with the creepy, fuzzy stuff in your goo garden so you know what “type” of mold you have. This is an exercise in futility. Here’s why:

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While striving for long-term goals is common in business, it strikes me as rare for a company’s long-term goal to be putting itself out of business. Oddly, that’s our goal. No doubt it’s an unreachable goal, an impossible dream, but we do dream of a healthy world – one in which no one is made sick by their home, office or school room.

The origin of MycoLab USA, the maker of the Got Mold? Test Kit, was the realization my son Jason and I had years ago that indoor mold growth is a serious health issue for millions of people. The follow-on realization was the fact that there was no scientifically valid, affordable home test kit available on the market.

All this percolated to the surface while Jason was working with his Mold Dog™ Oreo to develop what would turn out to be the model for MycoLab USA’s sister company, 1800-GOT-MOLD? During five years of business building, research and brainstorming, we got a lot of feedback from customers, and lots of unsolicited queries from all over the country, thanks to the internet.

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