Mould contamination of an apartment for adjacent property

Occupiers of an apartment in an inner city London were concerned about mould contamination in their home from an adjacent property. The neighbouring property was affected by water leak from the bathroom and construction fault on the balcony which resulted in significant water damage and mould contamination. The adjacent property was stripped to shell and all contaminated materials removed. Due to the similar construction and interconnected floor, wall and ceiling cavities my clients were naturally concerned about the indoor air quality in their own apartment.

I have carried out in mould inspection of the property which included moisture check of all the construction material. My tests did not picked up any elevated moisture levels in the top layer of construction materials. The partition walls between the apartments and the floors were constructed from multilayer plasterboard and engineered wood panelling. I was not able to assess the moisture content of all the layers of materials between the properties as this would involve destructive access which my clients did not wish.

I have carried out mould spore sampling throughout the apartment to evaluate the indoor spore levels in comparison with the existing environmental background. I have not identified any visible mould contamination in the apartment itself. The mould spore samples showed that in overall the mould spore levels in the apartment were lower than the existing environmental background. However, mould genera identification showed that some of the moulds counts were significantly amplified indoors. In particular the Chaetomium and Stachybotrys were elevated in the bathroom of the property in excess of 2000%.

My conclusion from this investigations was that although the fungal spore load in the apartments was in overall lower than the environmental background, the detail mould genera identification showed amplification of water damage moulds. This was indicative that mould contamination was likely to be present in the wall or floor cavities of the apartment.

I have analysed the collected samples in accordance with international standard and provided the following microbiological sampling data.