How to Know if Your Home Has Asbestos
At one time, asbestos was used in several types of building materials, including flooring, siding, and roofing. As time passed, people started to have adverse reactions to asbestos, including mesothelioma, lung cancer, and asbestosis. When doing updates to your home, you may encounter materials such as flooring tiles that are made from asbestos. Here’s some common ways of identifying asbestos in your home.
If you suspect that your home may have asbestos tiles, you can contact a professional to take a small sample and test it for you. Search your local area for professional asbestos abatement teams that can help you with that. Once they remove the sample, they’ll do some testing and let you know whether your tile has asbestos or not. There may be a fee for this service, and if they find that your tile is made of asbestos, the best thing to do is to either cover it or hire the asbestos abatement team to remove it for you. There are special protocols that they need to follow for removal.
Another way to determine whether your floor may have asbestos is to try to determine the age of the flooring. In North America, vinyl flooring installed before 1986 can be assumed to contain asbestos. Go online and take a look at some photos of asbestos flooring and see if you can match the pattern with your floor at home. If the patterns and colors are similar, your flooring could contain asbestos.
If you can, try to identify the brand, pattern, or floor style. Sometimes older homes will have extra boxes of tiles stored in the attic or basement. Those boxes can help you identify the flooring and determine whether or not it contains asbestos.
If your floor does contain asbestos, be sure not to remove it yourself, as you could expose yourself to health hazards. Keeping the floor intact is the only way to avoid releasing the asbestos fibers into the air which is how the ailments are caused.