Home › Old Brooklyn
Air Quality Testing in Old Brooklyn, Cleveland
Old Brooklyn runs south of the Big Creek valley, the low green corridor that holds Brookside Reservation and the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Above it the housing is compact bungalows and Cape Cods from the 1920s through the 1940s, lined up along Pearl Road, State Road and Memphis Avenue toward the Parma line. They are full-basement houses on block foundations with the furnace and the laundry below grade. In a great many of them somebody finished a rec room down there in the 1960s or 70s.
That finished room is why air sampling comes up so often on these streets. A block wall taking on damp behind paneling gives you almost nothing to look at. The smell reaches the kitchen well before the stain reaches the surface. An air sample answers the question people actually have, which is whether spores are circulating in the part of the house they live in or whether all of it has stayed on the far side of the finish.
We are the introduction, not the inspection. The person who opens your basement door works for themselves, carries their own insurance and sends you the lab report directly. There is no charge for the connection.
Why do the houses at the low end of a block get damp first?
They take the runoff from everything uphill. The streets that fall toward Big Creek collect roof water, driveway water and street water from blocks of bungalows above them. All of it ends up at the last few houses before the valley floor. Those owners are handling their neighbors' rain along with their own, which is how one house on a street can stay dry for decades while a house four doors down goes damp at the base of the wall after every hard storm.
The creek itself is rarely the culprit. Water shows in these basements long before Big Creek does anything at all, because it is moving through soil and across the surface rather than up out of the channel. That distinction is worth getting straight before you spend money. A sump and an interior drain answer a groundwater problem. Neither one does much about a downspout dumping at the corner of a Memphis Avenue driveway.
What does a spore count tell you about a rec room you did not build?
It tells you whether the room is a comfort problem or a breathing problem. The rec rooms in these bungalows were framed straight onto block: furring strips, thin paneling, a drop ceiling to hide the joists, carpet laid on the slab. No vapor control anywhere in the assembly. When the wall behind that paneling stays damp through spring the finish works as a lid. What does escape goes up the open stair into the kitchen.
A same-day outdoor sample is what keeps the indoor number honest. The air outside carries plenty of mold spores in a wet Ohio June, so an indoor count on its own can read as alarming when it is ordinary. Set side by side, the pair shows whether the basement is pushing anything into the living space. If it is, the sensible next step is opening a small section of paneling where the moisture meter reads highest rather than gutting the room.
Households with an asthmatic kid, an older parent or anyone home during the day tend to notice these rooms first. If that is your house near Brookside or off Broadview Road, sampling is a reasonable place to begin. Tell us the block and what you smell on the stairs. We will hand you to a local pro who tests, reports and then leaves the decision entirely to you.
Air Quality Testing in Cleveland