How to Test Your House for Mold Before You Hire Anyone | Sinclair Kennally

Sinclair Kennally is a CNHP and CNC who works on the root causes behind complex chronic illness. She got here the hard way, through her own collapse.

Most house mold isn't something you can see

Here's the line I keep coming back to. Everybody thinks, but I don't see any mold in my house, I would know. Sinclair says you usually wouldn't. What you'd see instead are small things. Paint bubbling. Swelling under a windowsill after rain. Warped wood floors. Those aren't the mold. They're the sign it's time to look harder.

She puts the scale of it plainly. Around 85 percent of buildings have had water damage, it takes less than 24 hours for mold to set up shop, and roughly half of buildings have a current active issue. If you've been indoors, you've been exposed. That's not meant to frighten you. It takes the mystery out of it.

Test the house before you hire anyone

This is the part that saves you money. Sinclair's order of operations is to run an ERMI test kit yourself first, before you bring a professional in at all. It's a dust test, you do it with a Swiffer, and you go for the places that rarely get cleaned. Tops of TVs. Tops of door jambs. Baseboards, in the cracks. Under the cabinets.

She's specific about why the sneaky spots matter. Black molds are heavier and don't stay suspended in the air, so an inspector who sets up a tripod in the middle of the room and samples at eye level may not pick them up at all.

She doesn't take the score at face value either, and she says that's where people get tripped up. She isn't reading the algorithm. She's looking at which molds turned up and where they sit by quadrant and toxicity.

Your assessor shouldn't be your remediator

This is the one I'd put on a fridge magnet. Only assess the house with someone who doesn't do remediation. You don't want the person telling you what's wrong to be the person financially incentivised to rip out your walls.

What she looks for in an inspector: are they an indoor environmental professional, do they understand HVAC systems, and will they actually get inside the HVAC rather than glancing at the vent grate. She's hired people who looked at the grate, saw nothing on it and left. The mold, she says, is usually deep on the coils. She wants moisture cameras, thermal cameras, and someone who'll go into crawl spaces and attics.

You also don't have to tell them you ran a test first.

Why she brings in a dog

Her favourite pass at a house is a mold dog, alongside someone carrying the cameras. It's usually much less expensive than the alternative, and it can go straight to the dishwasher and alert. One practical note. Clear the scents out of the house first. Candles, plug-ins, anything strongly fragranced, or you'll skew the result.

Why mold can look like something else entirely

This is the part that reframes everything. Sinclair says mold can look like anxiety attacks, histamine flares and skin issues, autoimmune disease, gut distress and joint pain. It can look like depression with some species and anxiety with others.

There's a mechanism underneath it. Mycotoxins can affect the olfactory nerve directly, which is a short route to the brain. And she describes an immune system pushed into overreaction, so you're flushing with a glass of wine or reacting to fermented food you used to tolerate. She calls that the histamine bucket filling too fast.

Mold isn't the only cause of any of that. But if a gut protocol isn't clearing the way it should, it may be worth asking whether there's a layer nobody has looked at.

If it is mold, the order matters

Sinclair's sequence starts with the nervous system, not with a binder. She talks about getting the body back into parasympathetic dominance first, because that's the state you digest, repair and drain in. Topical GABA in the evening is one thing she reaches for.

Then the sleep environment. She wants the bedroom low on electronics and low on EMFs, because that's the window your body is supposed to be catching up in.

Then bile and bowels. She says mold is inflammatory to the bile ducts and can slow bile flow, and that moving your bowels daily isn't optional during a mold detox. Where constipation is the problem she'd reach for something non-habit-forming, an ozonated magnesium, to get some motility going.

None of that is a protocol for you. It's the shape of one, and the order is the part worth taking.

If any of this is landing, you don't have to start with the frightening version. Look at your own house with fresh eyes this week. Check under the windowsills after rain. Then run a test yourself before you spend money on anybody else. Be your own detective about it, and take the shame out of it, because none of this is something you did wrong. There's hope here, and there are answers.