What the equipment in Pompano Beach can and cannot remove
Split systems with attic air handlers on the inland houses, and on the beachside blocks a mixture of through-wall packaged terminal units in the older buildings and modern split systems squeezed into closets in the renovated ones. The packaged terminal unit is the one to watch in Pompano: it drains through a sleeve cast into an exterior wall fifty years ago, and when that route blocks or the slope is lost, the water goes into the wall assembly rather than outside it. That failure wets a wall from inside and outside at once and it is routinely diagnosed as a facade leak.
The reason that matters is a gap between two numbers, both from the Florida Solar Energy Center at the University of Central Florida. Through the hot months, with cooling running, indoor relative humidity should not exceed 55% during the day on a regular basis. And the great majority of mold species need a material moisture content corresponding to a relative humidity of at least 70% to grow at all.
Note where that second number is measured. Not in the room. At the material. Air holds less moisture as it cools, so the film of air against a chilled surface sits at a far higher relative humidity than the room average. A wall at 68F with 78F room air at 55% is close to saturation at its own face, and it does not need a leak to get there. That is the mechanism behind almost every complaint where nobody can find a source.
So in Pompano Beach we read surface temperatures with an infrared thermometer alongside the room air, calculate the dew point of that air, and record the margin at every surface that has one worth recording. FSEC also give the point at which cooling alone stops being enough: sustained readings of 70 to 75% mean dehumidification rather than a colder thermostat, and turning the thermostat down at that stage chills the surfaces further and makes it worse.
The commercial position in Pompano Beach is the one published on every page of this site, because the rate card is not a Fort Lauderdale rate card. A flat price by property size, agreed before anyone drives out, with the accredited laboratory fee already inside it. It does not rise if the samples come back positive, nothing is added for the drive, and we take no payment of any kind from anyone who removes mold.
What Pompano Beach itself changes
The buildings in Pompano Beach
Pompano Beach is two housing markets that happen to share a name, and an answer written for one is wrong for the other. Thirty per cent of its 61,070 units sit in buildings of fifty or more, concentrated on and near the barrier island, while 29% are single-family detached and sit inland. The median across both is 1974. On the oceanfront side the water almost always arrives from somewhere that is not your unit: a facade that has had fifty years of salt and ultraviolet, a window perimeter seal that has given up, a riser in a shared chase, or the flat above. Inland the buildings are single-storey slab houses on generous lots and the water is nearly always the cooling system or the roof.
Where the water comes from
Salt is the variable that separates this city from the inland towns and it is chemical rather than atmospheric. Airborne chloride attacks sealant, fixings and reinforcement, and the first thing to fail on a 1970s beachside building is the joint between two materials: window to wall, balcony slab to facade, parapet to roof. Every one of those is a route for driven rain into the assembly. Inland the story is the ordinary one for this coast, a wet season carrying 71% of the annual rainfall between May and October, with a flat water table underneath it.
Where it hides in these buildings
On the tower side, access is the whole problem. The evidence for where water entered is usually behind a finish, inside a chase or in a unit somebody else owns, so the work is metering on a grid and reading the gradient rather than opening anything. On the inland houses the difficulty is different and more ordinary: attic air handlers, duct runs above a ceiling that has never been lifted, and slab-edge growth at exterior wall bases hidden behind fitted furniture.