Unfortunately, we had a disappointing experience with Certified Indoor Air. We contacted them to conduct an ERMI test at our house as that is something that was listed as one of their services. ERMI kits are available online for roughly $400 but I wanted a professional to do the swabs. Bill email us an estimate which read verbatum, " The assessment consists of Home inspection, collection of samples, laboratory analysis, and a final written report. The cost is $699."
We set an appointment with Bill and his son to perform the testing. They were at our house for close to 5 hours inspecting and collecting the samples. When they were done, they mentioned that they had everything they needed for ERMI but each of their additional tests would be $99, which I thought was outrageous because that wasn't what their original estimate indicated. The next day they sent us a complete breakdown of the samples collected, and the estimate for all the testing suddenly came up to $2893! Nothing even close to the original $699 quote! After some back-and-forth messaging, we agreed to proceed with the 2nd floor ERMI ($699) and 2 source mold samples ($99 each), for a total of $1095. When we were paying to Bill over the phone, I did mention that we were disappointed that there were all these additional costs added to the original estimate and that we would have liked that communicated to us before the testing, and he said nothing. He was silent on the phone. He didn't explain why the original quote was so off.
The communication with Certified Indoor Air wasn't easy either. I had some questions for Bill while waiting for the results, and he only responded to some. Some questions were ignored.
The narrative report Certified Indoor Air sent to us was pretty comprehensive. Over 25 pages. However, the report indicated that Prism Analytical Technologies Inc. evaluated some samples, but when I emailed Bill and asked to see the Prism results because they weren't in the report, he said it was a mistake and that testing wasn't performed.
When we called Bill and his son to discuss the ERMI results, particularly, the results relating to "black mold" (we basically asked to validate ERMI's conclusion that black mold is not a concern at our house because that particular species of mold wasn't highlighted in the ERMI report as high), they kept pushing for us to take immediate steps and avoided to confirm that black mold isn't a concern. We got a very negative vibe from them. We thought they were more financially-motivated than helpful in assessing the situation at our house.
Overall, I think they do extensive testing and devote a lot of time to check everything. I just wish they were honest about the pricing in advance of coming out and helped to understand the situation without trying to benefit financially by using scare tactics and jump on remediation with them. read more