Testing Indoor Air Quality

The indoor air quality of your Manitowoc property is important to your health and wellbeing. Make sure the air you breathe every day is actually safe.

You breathe about 20,000 times a day, and most of it indoors

Americans spend roughly 90% of their time inside. In Wisconsin, where buildings stay sealed for five months of the year, that number climbs. Anything circulating in your indoor air — mold spores, dust mite allergen, combustion by-products, volatile organic compounds off new furnishings — you are exposed to repeatedly, at length, and often without knowing it.

Indoor air quality testing puts numbers on something you cannot see.

Symptoms worth taking seriously

The pattern matters more than any single symptom. If any of the following get better when you leave the building for a few days and return when you come back, the building is a strong suspect:

• Persistent congestion, sneezing, or a runny nose that antihistamines only partly touch
• A dry or persistent cough, especially at night or first thing in the morning
• Asthma that has become harder to control, or new wheezing in someone with no history
• Itchy, watery or irritated eyes and skin rashes without an obvious cause
• Headaches and difficulty concentrating that lift when you are out of the house or office
• Unusual fatigue that does not track with sleep or workload

None of this is diagnostic on its own — a physician has to make that call. But when several people in the same building report the same pattern, testing the building is the sensible next step.

What our air quality assessment covers

Airborne spore counts

Spore trap samples from the rooms of concern plus an outdoor control, analysed by an accredited lab. This tells you whether indoor concentrations exceed the natural outdoor background, and whether the species present suggest an indoor growth source.

Humidity and dew point mapping

We record relative humidity and temperature throughout the property. The target range is 30–50% relative humidity. Sustained readings above 60% will support mold growth indefinitely, even with no leak anywhere — and in a Manitowoc basement in July, 70% is entirely ordinary unless something is managing it.

Ventilation and HVAC review

We look at whether the building is exchanging air at all: bath and kitchen exhaust routing and actual flow, dryer venting, return duct locations, filter condition and rating, evidence of growth on coils or in the plenum, and whether any part of the system is drawing from a crawl space or attic.

Moisture source identification

Meters and, where useful, thermal imaging to find wet material behind finishes. Air numbers tell you there is a problem; moisture mapping tells you where it lives.

Practical things that improve indoor air quality

• Run a dehumidifier in the basement from May through September and keep it between 40% and 50%
• Vent bathroom and kitchen fans to the outside — never into an attic or soffit — and run them for 20 minutes after use
• Upgrade to a MERV 11–13 furnace filter if your system can handle the static pressure, and change it on schedule
• Seal and insulate the crawl space with a proper vapor barrier rather than "venting" it, which in this climate often makes summer humidity worse
• Deal with condensation on windows in winter rather than wiping it up — it is telling you indoor humidity is too high for the glazing
• Fix small leaks the week you find them, not the season you find them

Serving Manitowoc County

We provide indoor air quality throughout Manitowoc, Two Rivers, Mishicot, Kiel, Valders, Reedsville and the surrounding communities. See our full service area, or take a look at recent jobs we have completed nearby.