I evaluated the GOT MOLD? Test Kit by asking a different question: What problem does the test actually solve?
There are a growing number of products that allow homeowners to test their homes for mold without hiring a professional.
One of them is the GOT MOLD? Test Kit.
The basic kit costs $199. It includes a small air-sampling pump, one indoor air sample, one outdoor air sample, laboratory analysis, and a report designed to help the homeowner understand the results.
That may sound like a good deal. A professional mold investigation may cost considerably more. If all you want to do is collect a couple of air samples, why pay someone else to operate a pump you could operate yourself?
I know the product as I interviewed its creator, Jason Earle, on The Daniel Stih Podcast. During our conversation we kept returning to a question more important than whether the kit costs $199 or $500:
What problem does the test solve?
That's the question I want to explore.
First, Is $199 a Good Deal?
Let's start with cost.
The $199 kit includes the pump and two air samples—one indoors and one outdoors. A sampling cassette currently costs roughly $5–$7, and standard laboratory analysis of a spore-trap sample commonly costs around $35–$45, depending on the laboratory and turnaround time. For simplicity, I'll use $50 per sample for the cassette and laboratory analysis combined. Two samples would represent roughly $100 in sampling and laboratory costs. That leaves approximately $100 for the pump and the convenience of having everything packaged together.
That's not a bad deal.
A more conventional professional sampling pump can cost around $300. Some laboratories will rent one for around $25, plus shipping. If you're simply comparing the cost of getting a pump into your hands and collecting a couple of air samples, the GOT MOLD? kit has an obvious appeal.
There's another question:
Are you buying the right test?
One Air Sample Is Not Enough for Me
This is my first disagreement with the testing approach.
The basic kit provides one indoor sample and one outdoor sample. Larger kits essentially add additional indoor locations.
When I perform indoor air sampling, I don't like relying on a single sample from an indoor location. I generally want at least two samples from each indoor location being evaluated.
Why?
Air is dynamic.
I asked Jason about this during our conversation: How much could an air sample change if I collected it now instead of tomorrow?
His answer was straightforward:
“It's constantly changing. It's constantly changing.”
We agree about that.
Where my approach differs is what I do with that information.
If something is constantly changing, I don't want to make a conclusion from a single measurement, if I can reasonably obtain another measurement. Two samples can differ even when they're collected from the same environment. Replication doesn't eliminate uncertainty - it gives me more information about whether the result is representative. I would not normally collect one indoor air sample and place much confidence in that sample by itself.
That's not my biggest concern.
What Are We Trying to Find Out?
Imagine you're a homeowner who thinks there may be mold in your house.
What do you really want to know? Probably:
Do I have a mold problem?
If you do:
Where is it?
Compare those questions with the question an air sample answers:
What fungal particles were captured from the air at this location during this sampling period?
Those aren't the same. We need to be careful about the conclusion we draw from air testing. Jason made this distinction himself during our conversation: “The test is picking up what's in the air. And what we're telling people is that this is one indicator.”
The problem begins when we unconsciously turn an indicator into an answer.
A Good Air Sample Doesn't Mean There's No Mold
This is probably the most important limitation for homeowners to understand.
Most mold in buildings isn't sitting out in the open where you can see it. It may be behind a shower, behind a sink cabinet, inside a plumbing wall, below a window that has leaked, inside a wall affected by an old roof or exterior leak.
Imagine mold is growing inside one of those cavities.
Will enough spores necessarily enter the room at the time you collect your air sample to produce an obvious difference?
Not necessarily.
During my conversation with Jason, I asked whether someone could obtain a reassuring air result and still have a mold problem. He acknowledged that circumstances can produce apparently clean air samples even when other conditions in the building remain relevant. His larger point was that the air test is one indicator and shouldn't provide an automatic “all clear.”
A good air sample means the air sample was good.
It does not mean:
There is no hidden mold anywhere in the house.
Testing the Air Isn't the Same as Testing the Source
This is why I often prefer wall-cavity air testing.
With a general room-air sample, I'm depending on material from mold growth making its way out of the wall cavity, entering the occupied space, remaining airborne, and being captured during the few minutes I'm collecting the sample. That's a lot of things that have to happen at the same time.
With wall-cavity air testing, I don't have to wait for evidence of the problem to make its way into the room. I can sample the air inside the suspect wall cavity itself.
I was trained in this method by Charlie Wiles, creator of Wall Check. He told me that, when the procedure is performed correctly, he's never experienced a false-negative result.
That doesn't mean error is impossible. Every test method depends on proper sampling and interpretation. In practical terms, systematically testing the wall cavities with potential moisture sources can eliminate one of the biggest weaknesses of general room-air testing: hidden mold that doesn't show up in the room-air sample.
This changes the question from:
Did evidence of hidden mold show up in the room air when I tested the air?
to:
Is there evidence of mold inside the wall I suspect it is capable of growing?
That's a more useful question.
A Bad Air Sample Creates Another Question
Suppose the opposite happens.
Your air sample shows an unusual fungal profile.
Where is the mold?
The room air sample doesn't answer that.
This was a central question in my conversation with Jason. His position is that the kit is a first step. He described its purpose as providing an affordable way to determine whether conditions may exist that deserve further investigation. The kit isn't being presented as a complete mold investigation. Jason emphasized that testing needs context. At one point he said. “There is no test for the building or for the body that you can take that is actionable by itself.”
I agree.
That leads me to a different question.
Why Not Investigate the Suspect Locations First?
This brings me to the difference between how I approach a mold investigation, and room-air samples such as those that can be taken with the Got Mold? Test Kit.
I start with the building.
Where could water have gotten in?
Where is the plumbing? The showers? The windows?
Where have there been roof or exterior leaks?
Where has staining or previous water damage occurred?
Where could condensation have occurred?
Those observations give me places to investigate.
If there's been a leak beneath a window, for example, the question I care about isn't primarily, “Are spores from that wall showing up in the room air today?”
It's: Is there mold inside that wall?
Why not test the wall?
When testing is warranted, I use different methods depending on the question. I may use conventional spore-trap air samples. I may use cultured air samples, which provide different information and can reduce the uncertainty that comes from relying on spore-trap microscopy alone. When I'm investigating a suspected hidden source, I can simply sample the wall cavity itself.
These methods don't answer the same questions.
A room-air spore trap tells me about fungal particles captured from the room air during the sampling period. A culture gives me more confidence in those results. A wall-cavity air sample allows me to find where hidden mold is located, or to conclude mold in not present in a wall.
That's why I often tell clients to skip general air testing, and spend the money investigating suspect walls instead. If the objective is to find hidden mold, I'd rather use the building's moisture history to determine where to look and then test those locations.
That's why the type of pump matters.
The $100 Pump May Not Save You $200
Let's return to economics.
Suppose you want to evaluate two areas of a house, perhaps upstairs and downstairs.
Using my preferred approach to general air sampling, I would collect two samples from each indoor location plus an outdoor sample. That's five samples. At our assumed $50 per cassette including laboratory analysis, that's approximately: 5 samples × $50 = $250. Suppose you buy a conventional sampling pump for approximately $300. Your total investment is around $550, less if you rent the pump.
With the GOT MOLD? system, the initial cost may be lower. Perhaps you can save $100 or $200 depending upon how you configure the testing.
The calculation changes if the air results lead you to the question: Where is the mold?
If you need equipment capable of performing wall-cavity testing, the less expensive pump is no longer capable to accomplish what you need it to accomplish.
The meaningful comparison isn't, Which pump costs less?
It's:
Which equipment lets me perform the investigation I ultimately need to perform?
Saving $200 on a tool is only a savings if the tool does what you need it to do.
The Refill Model Is Worth Considering
There's also the ongoing cost.
The company sells additional sampling packages that include cassettes and analysis. If you continue testing, you're continuing to purchase samples through that system. Perhaps that isn't unreasonable if you're consider it as paying for convenience, packaging, and an integrated system.
There is another option:
Many environmental laboratories work directly with home owners. Depending upon the laboratory, you may be able to purchase sampling media, rent equipment, submit samples, and pay the laboratory directly.
The important comparison isn't the sticker price of the starter kit. It's the total cost of the testing strategy you're likely to need.
What Does Green Mean?
The GOT MOLD? report simplifies the laboratory results into four categories:
Green — Not Evident
Yellow — Slightly Evident
Orange — Moderately Evident
Red — Significantly Evident
Initially, I questioned why the system didn't simply tell homeowners yes or no.
Do I have mold or don't I?
After discussing it with Jason, I think that's the wrong criticism. He explained that the categories are a gradient, precisely as the test isn't diagnostic. The problem isn't that the company refuses to give you a definitive yes or no. The problem is that the test may not be capable of giving you the yes or no answer you thought you were buying.
Consider a green result.
What does it establish?
It can provide evidence about the fungal material captured in the air samples you collected. If hidden mold can exist without producing an obvious air-sample signal, green cannot mean: There is no mold in my house.
Consider orange or red. That may tell you something deserves further investigation.
I doesn't tell you:
The mold is behind this wall.
You have another problem to solve.
Measurement Is Not the Same as Conclusion
This is where the GOT MOLD? kit becomes an example of a larger problem I see in environmental testing.
We measure something.
We get a number.
We get a laboratory report.
The measurement looks scientific. We unconsciously assume the conclusion is equally scientific. A laboratory can accurately identify what was captured on an air-sampling cassette, while the investigation fails to answer whether mold is growing inside the wall behind your shower.
The laboratory result isn't wrong.
We asked the wrong question.
What About AI Analysis?
There is another issue worth watching.
During my interview with Jason, he discussed laboratory variability, and acknowledged that results vary, not only between laboratories, between analysts within the same laboratory. He explained that the company was working with SporeSight on automated microscopic analysis using artificial intelligence, with the goal of reducing analyst-to-analyst variation.
I'm interested in that technology. I wouldn't assume AI analysis is better. I've conducted informal experiments using general-purpose AI to identify mold and found errors. That doesn't establish that a specialized system trained on a large fungal image library will make the same errors. Jason described SporeSight as a purpose-built system trained on a much larger dataset, with uncertain identifications routed to human analysts for review.
The question isn't:
Do I trust AI?
It's: How accurately does this system perform, when compared with qualified human analysts examining the same samples?
That's something that can be tested.
And it should be.
So Is the GOT MOLD? Kit Worth $199?
It depends on the problem you're trying to solve.
If you want an inexpensive, convenient way to collect an indoor and outdoor spore-trap sample, the kit provides a way to do that without hiring someone to come to your house.
I would think carefully before starting with general air testing.
If I have reason to suspect particular areas because of plumbing leaks, window leaks, showers, roof leaks, previous water damage, odors, staining, or other moisture indicators, I would rather spend the testing budget investigating those locations first.
In my phone and Zoom consultations, that's what I help clients figure out.
Not simply how to operate a pump:
Where should we test?
Which testing method answers the question we're asking?
What do the laboratory results mean?
Based on testing results, which locations appear to have a mold problem?
What do we do next?
That's the part of mold testing that matters most.
Spores Are an Indicator—Not the Indicator
Jason ended our conversation by saying. “Mold is a moisture problem. You can worry about spores all day long. We sell a spore trap kit. Spores are the indicator.”
I agree with the first sentence: Mold is fundamentally a moisture problem.
I would change the last sentence to: Spores are an indicator. They are not the indicator.
A mold or moisture problem can affect a building and its occupants in ways not represented by the spores captured on a spore-trap cassette. Mold can be growing inside a building cavity, without producing an unusual room-air spore-trap result at the particular moment the air is sampled. Jason made essentially this distinction earlier in our conversation when he described the air test as “one indicator.”
The GOT MOLD? kit isn't measuring the wrong thing. The question is whether what's in the room air is the thing you most need to measure. If your goal is to learn something about the fungal material airborne in a room at the time you test, air sampling can provide useful information.
When the room air is what I want to evaluate, I have more confidence in cultured air samples than I do in spore-trap samples. Over more than 25 years of investigating mold problems, I've seen projects where the spore-trap results appeared comparable to the outdoor air while the cultured air samples indicated an indoor mold problem. Based on experience, I would not place a high degree of confidence in spore-trap results alone. If you want to characterize the air indoors, do both spore traps and cultures. When I do want to evaluate room air, I don't rely on a single spore-trap or cultured air sample. I use duplicate samples in each location.
If my real questions are:
Do I have hidden mold in my house?
If so, where is it?
I approach the investigation by starting with the building. Identify where moisture has been or could have been. Test those locations. Choose the sampling method based on the question you're trying to answer.
The goal of a test isn't to collect a mold sample.
It's to find the mold so you can get rid of it.
If you don't find mold, the testing should be capable of answering the question you actually need, answered with a reasonable degree of confidence:
Do I have mold in my home?
Need Help Testing Your Home?
If you're concerned about mold and aren't sure where to test, what type of testing to use, or how to interpret the results, I offer phone and Zoom consultations to help you do the investigation yourself.
I'll help you determine which areas of the building are worth investigating, which testing methods make sense for the questions you're trying to answer, what equipment and laboratory services you'll need, and how to collect the samples properly.
Once the results come back, I also help you understand what they mean and determine the next step.
The goal isn't to sell you testing.
It's to help you test the right places, use the right methods, and get information you can actually use to solve the problem.
Learn more about Mold Testing Consultations →
About the Author
Daniel Stih is an engineer, Council-Certified Indoor Environmental Consultant (CIEC), Council-Certified Indoor Microbial Consultant (CIC), engineer, and author who has investigated mold and indoor environmental problems for more than 25 years. His work focuses on finding hidden mold, testing methods, interpreting laboratory results, and helping people by developing specific remediation recommendations based on the building, its construction, and the problems identified. Read more about Daniel Stih's Experience and Expertise.