Testing for Chinese Drywall
The first option is a self test. To self test your home for Chinese drywall, first check your copper wiring by removing the covers to your light switches and outlets. Look for your copper ground wire. It should be shiny and copper colored. If it is dark or black, there is a high chance that you have Chinese drywall. NOTE: Exercise extreme when entering these wire boxes. Those wires are live and carry enough electricity to kill. Do not touch the wiring, simply observe it.
Measure up about 49” above the floor, that should be the horizontal joint between the sheets, cut out a piece about 6” above and 6” below that height, for about 4 feet, that should give enough edge to find the name.
Repairing drywall is cheap and easy, and if the piece comes out in one piece as it should, that same piece can be put back in and patched around. Of course, if it is Chinese drywall, put it back in temporarily, but why patch it? All of the drywall may end up getting ripped out anyway.
Continuing with a home test, check the copper pipes leading to and from your water heater. Again, dark colored copper is an indication of Chinese drywall. The advantages of a self test is that they are cheap, pretty straight forward, and you know your own house. The disadvantages are the danger of checking live wiring, and the fact that this only examines the sheets of drywall where the outlets and switch boxes are. This still misses most of the drywall in your house, so you could still have Chinese drywall in your house and not see it with this method.
The second method of testing is to hire a home inspector. There are a plethora of home inspectors that offer Chinese drywall inspection, usually ranging from $150-$200. These inspectors generally perform all the steps you would do in a self inspection, but save you the trouble of doing it. They also take photographic evidence of what they find and supply you with a printed summary a few days after the inspection.
The advantages of a home inspector are that they save you the hassle of inspecting yourself, and keep you away from any dangerous live wiring. They also give you written and photographic documentation of what they find, which allows you to present that material when it comes time to sell your house. The disadvantages are that these inspectors can still miss large portions of your house, since they don’t check every sheet of drywall. This means that even if their report comes back clean, you could still have Chinese drywall in your home. Also, there is no federal mandated method of inspecting for Chinese drywall, so these home inspectors all follow their own unique guidelines.
The third option is to send a sample away to a professional lab such as Pro-Lab or Caslab for chemical analysis. These usually cost anywhere from $150 to $500 per sample, and as such are the most expensive option. Also, since the price is per sample, to test every sheet in your home would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The last option is through a do it yourself DIY Chinese drywall test kit. These test kits allow you to chemically test every sheet of drywall in your home for Chinese drywall. There used to be two competing companies that offered DIY chinese drywall test kits, www.InspectorsInc.com and www.ChineseDrywallTesterKit.com, but the first one appears to have since gone out of business. Now only the latter, www.ChineseDrywallTesterKit.com still exists. The advantage of these kits is that you can test your whole house for less than the cost of a home inspection or a lab sample. The downside is that you don’t get photographic summary from a home inspector. But you could always take your own photos of the results of the test and have that as proof.
