At Airsafe, one of the questions we most often get asked by householders and businesses is “I’ve found something suspicious in my house. How do I test it to find out if it’s asbestos?”
The short answer is: you can’t test for asbestos yourself. There’s no way of telling with the naked eye whether a substance is asbestos. Nor is there anything you can buy to do an asbestos test at home. So-called “asbestos testing kits“, sold in hardware stores, are just a set of tools for collecting asbestos samples, with a voucher to get testing done in a laboratory.
Asbestos testing in a laboratory
Laboratory testing is simply the only way to tell if something is or isn’t asbestos. Fortunately, laboratory testing is easy to organise: all you need to do is collect a sample and get it to a NATA accredited laboratory like Airsafe’s. See instructions on collecting a sample for asbestos testing.
Our laboratory will examine the asbestos using a process known as Polarised Light Microscopy (PLM). We’ll get back to you quickly with a definitive answer. If the sample does turn out to be asbestos, we’ll give you helpful advice on what to do next.
Asbestos is too serious to take chances with. Get the experts involved!
