Mold Inspection In
Okeechobee County

Okeechobee County is the one part of our territory with no coastline, and that changes the problem. There is no sea breeze to move the air. Summer sits hot, still and wet over the north shore of Lake Okeechobee, and the area takes about 50 inches of rain a year, most of it in the summer wet season. A house here spends months with humid air pressing on it from every side and very little wind to dry a wall once it gets wet. That is why we spend as much time on the air conditioning and the indoor humidity as we do on the roof.

The housing is different too. A large share of the homes around the lake are manufactured homes, park models and older frame cottages, many of them on canal lots along Taylor Creek and out at Treasure Island. They tend to fail from underneath. Once water gets past the skirting it sits in the belly wrap and the subfloor, and the first thing an owner notices is a soft spot in the floor or a smell that gets stronger when the air conditioning starts. Site-built block homes in town and in the newer subdivisions behave more like the coast: slab edges, air handler closets and window perimeters.

Many properties here are seasonal. Owners come for the winter and close the place up for the summer with the thermostat set high or the power off altogether. Four months of still, humid air inside a closed building can be enough on its own, with no leak involved. We also inspect ranch houses and the older commercial buildings in downtown Okeechobee, where decades of roof patches and added rooms make the water path harder to follow.