Indoor Mould Testing and Benchmarking

Indoor Mould Testing and Benchmarking
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Although indoor mould growth is an extremely common phenomenon in the residential building stock in the UK, there are still not widely accepted, standard testing methodologies. This situation makes benchmarks, reported in the literature to define acceptable and unacceptable mould levels, of little use.

In May 2016, UKCMB launched the “Indoor Mould Growth Testing and Benchmarking” project with the aim of testing a proposed methodology and defining benchmarks for the UK building stock. The methodology proposed here combines surface and active (aggressive) air sampling, in order to exploit the predictive potential of testing in the best way possible, with an understanding of localised problems and the distribution of mould within the tested space.

To this end, we tested 140 residential rooms, some with and some without visible for a thorough appraisal of the normal, background levels of mould in non-problem indoor environments. We also carefully documented the physical and usage-related characteristics of a subset of the tested properties to identify how these relate to the measured mould concentrations.

This project started as a pilot project with the funding of Polygon UK and support of Mycometer, and was later awarded the EPSRC Impact Acceleration Funding (EP/K503745/1).

Team

Dr Yasemin Didem Aktas
UCL Dept of Civil, Environ & Geomatic Eng (CEGE)

Prof Dina D’Ayala
UCL Dept of Civil, Environ & Geomatic Eng (CEGE)

Dr Hector Altamirano
UCL Institute for Env. Design & Engineering (IEDE)

Download a copy of our report

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