Mold vs. Bug Feces: Which Is Worse?

Managing your home means more than just making sure chores are taken care of. You want to keep uninvited guests out of your home, including mold and bugs.

Unfortunately, if you’ve never seen what a bug infestation looks like, or if you’ve never had a close encounter with mold, it can be difficult to tell the two conditions apart. The longer you let these conditions sit, the less comfortable your home may become. 

Luckily, the professionals in your area can help you take the steps you need to make your home less hospitable to both mold and bugs. At the same time, they can give you the tools to distinguish between the two conditions in the future. 

How Bad Is Mold for Your Home? 

Nowadays, mold is a problem of a unique caliber. There are several different types of mold: allergenic, pathogenic, and toxigenic. All these molds can force your family members to contend with new respiratory problems and allergies, even if your family has no medical history of these conditions. 

Unfortunately, because various molds can get into your home, it’s hard to pin down precisely what mold growth is going to look like. You can trust mold to reveal itself through a few consistent properties, regardless of what species it is or the category it falls into. Some of the most common physical conditions that give mold away include: 

• Coloration: Mold comes in a variety of colors, ranging from pink to green to black. That range of colors differentiates it from bug feces. 
• Texture: Mold is often fuzzy in texture, often resembling moss or fur. If it’s started to grow on tile or ceramics, however, mold will not have a texture but rather will reveal itself through what appears to be discoloration. 
• Smell: Mold tends to grow in the dampest part of your home. If you smell mustiness, earthiness, or dampness in your crawl space but don’t see any puddles, you may have mold growth on your hands. 

Mold has a dual effect on your home, damaging both the health of your family and your property’s overall value. As mentioned, your family can fall victim to several respiratory problems. If you try to move out of a mold-damaged home without repairing the damage in question, you risk losing up to 30 percent of your home’s market value in the process due to the nature of the loss buyers would be taking. 

Types Of Bugs That Leave Droppings Like Mold 

Few homeowners are fond of bugs. Most of these creepy crawlers can make their way into your home at some point or another. There’s a difference between dealing with the occasional spider and dealing with insects that are actively destroying your home, though. When it comes to your house’s overall structural integrity, you’ll want to keep a wary eye out for carpenter ants, camelback crickets, cockroaches, and termites. 

How To Identify Bug Feces 

The droppings of bugs can be off-putting under the best of circumstances. If you’ve never seen it before, its abrupt appearance can confuse you to the point where you fail to force the related insects out of your home. There are some key traits you can usually identify in bug feces that can distinguish it from other threats in your home. 

Bug feces usually appears smooth, small, and circular. It also tends to congregate in a particular part of your home, even though the circles of feces will be separate from one another. It also tends to be consistent in color, ranging from brown to black. 

If you notice a cluster of unusual black dots near your ceiling, wall, or floor, you may have an infestation on your hands. 

Are Bug Droppings Bad for Your Home? 

Bug feces itself isn’t so much a threat to your home, though it can be an eyesore. Rather, bug feces tends to be a symptom of a larger problem in your home: a bug infestation. A significant amount of feces tends to indicate that you’re housing a significant number of pests. You’ll want to work with an area exterminator to remove those pests from your home and then assess what kind of damage they’ve done to the parts of your space that they invaded. 

Call a Professional for Assistance

If you don’t have the professional experience to tell bug feces and mold apart, you may not always know what kind of problems your home is facing. Luckily, you don’t have to do that hard work all on your own. Instead, you are free to reach out to area professionals whenever you suspect something may be wrong in your home. 

Our expert team at JES Foundation Repair has more than 30 years of experience with diagnosing and fixing crawl space problems. While we cannot remove insects from your property, we can recommend area exterminators before helping you determine what crawl space solutions your property may need. From there, you can rely on us to help you restore your home to its original value. 

The same can be said of homes that have fallen victim to mold. If it’s spores you’re dealing with, mold remediation professionals can remove the mold from your home. Then, our team will provide you with a free inspection and repair quote on what you may need to restore your home’s overall stability. 

Phillip Mazzotta