Lead Paint Testing
samrn
17 years ago
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scryn
17 years agosamrn
17 years agoRelated Discussions
testing for lead
Comments (4)You can try Cornell or the "Health Department" but to get the answer you want, collect a sample yourself and send it to a commercial environmental testing laboratory. Most college soil testing programs are aimed at nutrient analysis. Most health department testing programs are for lead in blood attributable to lead paint. Lead in the environment like water, air or your backyard soil is the domain of your State's environmental agency NYDEC. I looked at the DEC website to find what lead soil concentration they deem acceptable for the protection of human health in a residential setting like your yard. They don't have one, that I could find. NY clean ups are to background lead conditions. Not much help to you in an urban setting. However the NJ DEP and the PA DEP residential lead direct contact standards are 400 mg/kg and 500 mg/kg,respectively. Mg/kg are also known as part per million (ppm). There are commercial labs both local and national that you can find in a web search. I use a few in NJ. For about $100-$150 you can get the 8 RCRA (haz waste) heavy metals including arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead, selenium, silver and mercury. The lab may also be able to do just lead for maybe $25-$50. They can mail you a sample jar for the sample. Or you can buy a large plastic spoon and bowl/bucket at the dollar store, collect a portion of soil from several yard locations, mix the soil in the bucket then take enough soil from the composite mix to fill a clean glass mason jelly jar (or even a ziploc plastic sandwich bag. Send it to the lab and in about 2-3 weeks you should get the results. Some labs will take credit cards. Good luck but don't be surprised by what you find particulary in a dense urban setting. High lead around a bridge is likely old lead paint residue both from weathering as well as sand blast residue prior to painting. Soil concentrations are only part of the complete risk picture. If the concentration is higher than YOU like, not just what the DEP/DEC standard is, then take whatever steps YOU feel are necessary to give you peace of mind about your backyard garden and its crop....See Moredust from wooden kitchen drawers
Comments (12)Thanks! That is a good point about the swollen/warped wood. The drawers are fairly hard to slide the whole way out. Let me clarify what each drawer look like. It is just a box that rests on two flat pieces of wood on the bottom. They don't run in grooves on the side, and there's no center runner. The drawer fits quite snugly in the slot. I think the "runners" might be structural to the cabinets, and I am not sure it would change anything to replace them. Maybe sanding to reduce the size of the drawer slightly, followed by "greasing," would help? And no, the runners aren't painted, nor are the sides of the drawers. I think the paint is just coming from the top edges of the drawers where it rubs against the front opening as it opens and closes....See MoreVery old painted wallpaper
Comments (4)A good professional painter will know how to minimize the visibility of the seams if you decide to paint over the wallpaper. I said minimize. Some seams may still show. Removal of painted wallpaper from plaster walls will be difficult. Good luck!...See MoreWood floors tested positive for lead? Advice please!
Comments (20)Certainly! I think I mentioned in another comment but we did have a lead consultant come out who tested everything with an XRF gun and determined that most of the positive results were from lead dust covering the floors (it was even on the staircase put in in 1993). The white paint borders around the edges of the floors were lead paint too. We ended up refinishing them taking precautions for lead paint. We bought a HEPA vacuum and sanders that could attach to the vacuum to control the dust. We wore p100 masks throughout all the work, taped up all doorways, and tried to keep any dust from our feet as contained in the area as possible. We taped off all HVAC vents and shut the system off to keep it from getting in there (it was January in new England, this sucked lol). We initially wet mopped the floors and HEPA vacuumed to get as much off as possible. We used a belt sander a bit but most of it was done with a random orbital hand sander (this is because the floors are uneven and a drum sander would have torn through them. We also wanted to take as little off as possible). We took as much of the solid lead paint off as possible before sanding. Did multiple passes with different grits. We dug out between each groove in the floor and vacuumed the 150 years work of crap that came out up. Once floors were ready for stain we started cleanup. We wet mopped the floors again and HEPA vacuumed again. Cleaned other areas of the house to get rid of any dust we might have tracked through there. We used TSP (turns lead into lead phosphate. Carcinogenic but not immediately harmful) on all the walls, baseboards, doors, window trim, everything. Wiped off with water. Put a coat of stain down and then 3 coats of oil based poly. We chose oil based because it's more durable than water based. the entire point was to encapsulate the floors. There is likely no way we could have cleaned up every little speck of lead dust (and it could have even soaked into the wood itself) so encapsulating it was the only way to ensure it won't be harmful to us. Oil poly is much more durable than water based poly, so it is less likely that the finish will come up and expose us to anything that we might have missed in cleanup. Many people don't like to use poly on antique floors but with the lead element it was really the only way we could safely use them. We then cleaned other areas of the house again just in case we got some more in there. When everything was totally done we did have the ducts cleaned too just in case. We've done lead tests on the floors, in dusty corners, and near HVAC vents since, and all have come up negative. Our process does appear to have worked! It is a lot of extra time and effort to keep the lead contained and cleaned up, but thankfully it was worth it in the end. If you're doing it yourself, drink lots of milk too! Calcium can help prevent your body from absorbing the lead if you accidentally get some in you. If you have any questions, want to know what products we used, anything, please let me know! It was a crappy time trying to figure this all out so I'm very happy to help with anything you need. Edit: here's an imgur album with before, during, and after: https://imgur.com/a/iDpEngZ...See Morebrickeyee
17 years agorachel_17
17 years agoscryn
17 years agopebbles396
17 years agoscryn
17 years ago
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