What the equipment in West Park can and cannot remove
Retrofitted split systems throughout, with all the compromises that implies: air handlers in converted spaces, condensate lines improvised at the time of installation and modified since, and duct threaded through an attic with limited insulation around it. The single most useful thing to establish in a West Park house is where the condensate actually goes, because in a good number of them the honest answer is that nobody currently knows.
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 West Park 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 West Park 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 West Park itself changes
The buildings in West Park
West Park has the oldest housing stock in Broward County, at a 1961 median across 4,944 units with 87% of them single-family detached. Although the municipality itself was only incorporated in 2005, the neighbourhoods within it are among the earliest built in south Broward. A 1961 median means most of these houses went up before central air conditioning was standard equipment in Florida housing, and were built accordingly: modest ceiling heights, small window openings on the sun elevations, concrete block walls and a slab with nothing underneath it.
Where the water comes from
Ordinary south Broward conditions on flat, low-lying ground with a shallow water table. What is unusual is the age of everything else. A 1961 house has had sixty-plus years of roof coverings, sixty-plus years of plumbing, and sixty-plus years of alterations by whoever was available. Water in a house this old rarely has one source and one date; it has a history, and reading that history from the material is most of what the survey does here.
Where it hides in these buildings
The slab edge and the wall base, as in all the early stock, plus whatever the retrofit history has buried. Air conditioning in a house of this age was added later, so the ducts run where there was room rather than where they should, frequently in an attic that was designed as a ventilated void with no thought of services in it. Tracing a run in one of these houses is genuinely exploratory work.