Mold Symptoms in a House That Has Been Closed Since November

What a seven month heating season does to indoor air

The heating season here runs from about October into late April in an ordinary year, longer in the years nobody calls ordinary. For that whole stretch the house is a closed box with a fire burning in it. Warm air is buoyant, so it exits high and replacement air gets drawn in through the lowest openings available. In most older Syracuse homes the lowest opening is the cellar.

If last spring's melt left that cellar damp, then cellar air is the intake for the entire heating season. Nothing new has to be actively growing for this to matter. Dried growth on a joist still sheds when air moves across it. Air moves across it every time the burner fires.

Modern tightening makes it sharper. New windows in an Eastwood bungalow, spray foam in the rim joist of a Liverpool ranch, a replacement back door that actually seals: every one of those cuts the accidental ventilation that used to dilute the problem. The air did not get worse. The dilution went away.

Where people sleep decides how much of this matters. A finished basement bedroom in a Liverpool ranch, a home office in the cellar of a Westcott double, a teenager moved down into the low-ceilinged back room: those spots collect the most hours per day of anywhere in a Syracuse winter. They also sit closest to the damp material. Two people in the same house can have completely different experiences of the same problem based only on which floor they spend the night on.

The pattern that points at the building instead of a bug

A head cold has a shape. It arrives, it peaks and then it goes. Other people in the house catch it a few days apart, then they get over it too.

Building symptoms have a different shape. They track place and time inside the house rather than the calendar. The common versions: worse first thing in the morning if the bedroom sits over the cellar, better an hour after leaving for work, back within a day of getting home from a weekend away, worse on the coldest days when the furnace runs hardest.

Pay attention to who is affected as well. If it is the person working from the basement office plus the person sleeping in the back bedroom directly above it, the pattern belongs to the building. If it is two kids who both attend the same school out in Camillus, the pattern belongs somewhere else. It may just be January.

Duration is the other marker worth trusting. A cold clears inside a couple of weeks whether anybody treats it or not. Something running since Thanksgiving with no sign of breaking by the middle of February is not a virus that outlasted a season. It is either the building or an untreated allergy. Both are worth chasing down rather than waiting out until the windows open.

The February thaw tell

Central New York gets a warm stretch most winters, usually in the back half of January or somewhere in February. Everything drips, the streets turn to slush, the banks along Erie Boulevard finally drop and for two or three days people open a window because they can. Watch what the symptoms do during those days.

If the stuffiness and the headaches ease while the house is airing out and return within a day or so of it shutting again, the house is the variable. A virus does not behave that way. A cat allergy does not behave that way. The same experiment repeats itself for real in April when the windows go up and stay up, then reverses in October when they close.

Write it down while it happens. A week of dated notes is worth more to an inspector than any description of how bad it feels, because notes tell them when to come out and which room to start in.

The reverse tell is informative too. Some households find things get worse the week the house finally opens up in April, which usually points outdoors rather than at the cellar. Tree pollen here arrives the moment the snow is gone. It lands in the same weeks as the melt, so the two get confused constantly. An inspector taking an outdoor sample on the same visit is measuring that as well, which is one more reason the outdoor number belongs in the test.

What to rule out before paying for an air test

Dry air comes first. A furnace running flat out against a Syracuse January drives indoor humidity very low. Low humidity by itself produces a dry cough, a raw throat and nosebleeds. If running a humidifier for a week fixes it, you had a humidity problem rather than a mold problem.

Then look for a source you can smell. Go stand at the bottom of the cellar stairs first thing in the morning, before anybody has opened a door or run water. A musty smell there that fades as the day goes on is a real signal worth acting on. In a Northside or Solvay double it usually sits at the back of the cellar under the kitchen, where the drain line runs. Check under the kitchen sink, behind the washer and around the base of the first floor toilet while you are at it.

Then ask whether air is even the right question. Radon is a separate test with separate equipment answering a completely different question. No mold sample will say a word about it. A furnace or a blocked flue is a different investigation again. It is also a more urgent one.

If the smell is real, the pattern follows the house and the simple explanations are ruled out, an air comparison is the next step that will actually tell you something. It is a measurement, not a diagnosis. It reports what is in this house's air today against what is in the air outside the same house on the same day.

Then look at the humidity the household generates on its own. A shower with no working exhaust fan, a dryer venting into the basement through a split duct, firewood stacked inside to dry, a couple of fish tanks: a family puts a surprising volume of water into the air every day. In a sealed Syracuse winter almost none of it leaves the building.