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I rely almost entirely on the swabs for testing things around the house, because they're what I have, and they tell you whether lead is actually transferable from a surface, versus being merely present in the material. But if I had an XRF tester I would use it all the time. The swabs are relatively slow, especially the way I use them, and they don't work at all for some things. For example, a swab won't tell you if there's lead paint under a layer of safe paint. This is important because that lead paint is just as much of a hazard when it chips or when you do any remodelling. You can scrape away paint a layer at a time to swab it, but you'll never get a whole house tested this way, whereas an XRF could do it in an hour or two. Every so often I gather up some particular things and take them to the tri-county health department here in south Denver for XRF testing. The last batch I took included some old red-painted hand tools, a chip of red paint from a yard decoration, a set of chinese-made pastel crayons that my kids got for christmas, and a bag of dust I collected from the HVAC in our house. These things aren't testable with swabs; the dust isn't swabable, and the red tools and pastels colored the swab regardless of lead content. The people there are friendly and eager to help. I made an appointment, and the lady actually drove in for it from a different department. She tested all my stuff in about 15 minutes, and everything came back negative except for one of the red tools. Even the chinese-made pastels were completely clean, which surprised me. Fun bonus: she told me a story about how the county health department updated their standard household lead testing protocol twelve years ago after some guy brought in a bunch of dishes that tested shockingly high. Guess who that guy was? :) |