Do you know if your home has inferior Chinese drywall in the walls?
Chinese drywall is tainted drywall imported from China. It contains toxic materials that release toxic gasses into the homes built with this inferior product. Any home built since 2003 has the possibility of having Chinese drywall "hidden" in the walls. Making matters worse, lots of homes are what is becoming known as "hybrid homes," or homes that contain some good domestic drywall and some inferior Chinese drywall. The best method to test your home for Chinese drywall is the one that best fits your lifestyle.
Instructions
1. Test your home for Chinese drywall yourself. Remove the light switch and outlet covers and look at the copper ground wire inside. DO NOT touch the wire or you can get a severe electrical shock -- just look at it. It should be shiny and copper-colored. If it is dark or black, there is a high possibility that you have Chinese drywall. The main disadvantage of this method is that you're only checking drywall where the outlets and switch boxes are. There still may be Chinese drywall elsewhere in the house.
2. Continuing with your home test, check the copper pipes leading to and from the water heater. Again, dark colored copper indicates the presence of Chinese drywall.
3. If you are not satisfied with what you've found yourself, hire a home inspector to check for Chinese drywall. The advantage here is that these inspector are trained, they provide you with photographic evidence of what they find, and they supply you with a printed summary of the inspection results. One disadvantage is that even professional inspectors can miss large portions of your house, since they don't check every sheet of drywall. Also, as of 2011, there are no federally-mandated guidelines for Chinese drywall inspection, so each company follows it's own steps. In 2011, the cost for this professional inspection was between $150 and $200.
4. Another option is to send a sample to a professional lab for chemical analysis. In 2011, these analyses cost anywhere from $150 to $500 per sample, so this is by far your most expensive option. Also, since the price is per sample, to test every sheet in your home would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
5. Your final option is a do-it-yourself Chinese drywall test kit. This kit allows you to chemically test every sheet of drywall in your home. As of 2011, there is only one company that offers this kit -- it can be found online at ChineseDrywallTesterKit.com. The advantage of this kit is that you can test your whole house for less than the cost of a home inspection or a lab sample analysis. The downside is that you don't get a photographic summary from a home inspection, but you could always take your own photos of the test results and have that as proof.
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