Why Indoor Air Issues Are Often Missed During Routine Home Inspections
When a house passes inspection, but your body doesn’t.
I remember the relief I felt reading the report.
No major findings. No red flags. Nothing urgent.
Everything looked fine — except how I felt living there.
That disconnect made me question myself more than the house.
A clean inspection didn’t mean the environment was neutral for my body.
Why inspections focus on structure, not lived experience
Home inspections are designed to assess visible risk.
They look for damage, safety hazards, and code issues.
They aren’t built to measure how a space feels over time.
This helped me understand why my experience didn’t align with the report.
Passing inspection doesn’t guarantee physiological comfort.
How indoor air issues can exist without obvious signs
There was no visible mold.
No musty smell. No obvious leaks.
The absence of clues made the pattern easier to dismiss.
This echoed what I later learned about how indoor air problems can exist even when homes look clean, which I explored in why some homes trigger symptoms even when they look clean.
Invisible stressors don’t announce themselves.
Why symptoms often become the first indicator
In my case, my body noticed long before any test did.
Subtle fatigue. Lower stress tolerance. Poor recovery.
My symptoms became the data point no one asked for.
This mirrored how indoor air issues rarely show up on standard medical tests, which I wrote about in why indoor air issues rarely show up on standard medical tests.
The body often detects what tools overlook.
Why missed issues can delay understanding for years
A clean report created false closure.
It made me stop asking questions.
I trusted paperwork over patterns.
This explained why indoor air problems can go unrecognized for so long.
Reassurance can unintentionally silence curiosity.