How to identify asbestos in your home.

Here I talk about how to identify asbestos.  You will need to be able to do this if you have a house that was built prior to or around 1980, then there is a good chance that somewhere in the building there will be products that contain asbestos.  So how to identify asbestos? 

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A visual inspection, sometimes may identify asbestos if you know what to look for.

Assuming that the house is in the right age group, 1920's to 1990's then a visual inspection alone may help a prospective purchaser or intending renovator to decide that the house has asbestos problems.  As stated above there is only one sure way, by lab tests, to truly determine that it does not have asbestos problems.  However unless the house purchase is about to go ahead, nobody wants to spend a lot of money on expensive tests, so below are a few pointers that may help you to identify asbestos containing products in a property.

• A couple of light raps with the end of say a screwdriver and the sound it makes usually can tell you if you are looking at painted drywall, Masonite, solid masonry plastered, or some sort of cement based sheets.  If this doesn't help, scratch or poke it with the tip of a fine screwdriver. AC sheets are hard, brittle and sound drummy, not solid when rapped.
• Any smooth sort of sheeting, inside and out, on the walls, ceilings and as lining under the eaves that has the the 8mm thick batten covering the joints is immediately suspicious.  Add to these the use of the moulded "L" shaped external corner moulding and you can be fairly sure that you have identified asbestos cement sheeting.  The presence of shear point nails will also confirm suspicions.
• Because AC siding is brittle compared to other more modern sheets it is common to see pieces chipped off near the edges of sheets. The cover battens are often split or broken off near the bottom or top right at the last nail.
• As mention before, AC sheeting in the thinner sizes has a slight ripple effect on the face.  You may have to get your eye close and look along the surface to see it.
• If there are any broken, non painted edges then sometimes it is possible to see small fibres exposed.
• Brick houses are usually free of problems, but check any eaves lining which is where you are most likely to identify asbestos in these houses.
• If you rap on what appears to be painted brickwork on a brick veneer home and it sounds drummy the look further, it could be the asbestos containing fake brickwork.
• In an old Fibro clad house, if a previous owner has taken off the old AC cover battens and corner moulds, and bogged the joints up, and say put aluminium angles on the external corners it should be fairly easy to pick.  Given that we had 40mm wide cover battens to play with and that we used that fairly imprecise tool the Fibro cutter to cut the sheets then the joints between the sheets were less that perfect, and also, given the quality of the timber frames then some of the sheets were not level with their neighbors, making it almost imposable to mask the joints.  Attempts to cover it all up with texture paint also fails to cover the joints between sheets.
• Harder to find, and sometimes impossible to see are the jobs where new cladding or new siding has been fixed on top of existing Fibro.  On high level houses it is sometimes possible to see the old material from underneath.

Check out my other pages in this series for photographs which will also help you to identify asbestos products with a visual inspection.

identify asbestos- My old Fibro cutter.

The Fibro cutter on the right was in effect just a pair of shears.  With a lot of care it was possible to get a reasonably straight cut but more often than not they left a fairly crude jagged edge.  As a result the cut edges were nothing like as straight and the joints less precise, than on later more modern sheets reinforced with cellulose fibres that replaced Fibro.  Fibro cutters hardly work on moderns sheets as they are not as brittle as the old asbestos sheets were.

Other more invasive methods that may identify asbestos containing products.

Once again, a word of caution, suitable precautions should be taken when removing even the smallest pieces 

• For a few years before it was banned totally it was possible to identify asbestos products by the fact that they sometimes had a warning label or stamp on the back of the sheets saying that "this product contains asbestos"
• Conversely you may see "this product does not contain asbestos" stamp on them.
• So by gently prising off a suspect sheet you may be able to see one of these labels.
• It has been said, though I have never tried it that if a cigarette lighter is applied to a broken edge of AC sheet with fibres exposed then these fibres will not burn, whereas the fibres in other similar looking material will burn.  Hardly scientific.

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