isnotbadforyou.com/debug-kit

A debug kit is not bad for you... ...your house is just running code you never wrote

How to find every hidden leak, pest entry, moisture problem, and electrical drain in your North Port home before they find your wallet.

⚖️Florida Statute 553.84 requires home inspectors to be licensed, but nothing stops a homeowner from performing their own inspection on their own property.
Why this matters: North Port sits on sandy Myakka soil with a water table that moves around like it owns the place. That means moisture intrudes from below, pests enter from gaps you cannot see, and your FPL bill creeps up from phantom electrical loads you forgot existed. A debug kit is just a set of cheap tools that let you inspect your own home the way a $400-an-hour inspector would — except you do it on a Saturday morning. Ignore these problems long enough in Zone 9b humidity and you are looking at mold, structural rot, or a termite colony that has been paying rent in your walls for two years.

1 Start with a thermal camera you clip to your phone

I clipped a FLIR One onto my phone and walked every exterior wall in under an hour. Cold spots showed up in three places I never would have guessed — two were moisture intrusion points and one was a gap where my AC duct had separated inside the ceiling. In North Port's humidity, that separated duct was dumping conditioned air into the attic and growing a mold patch the size of a dinner plate. A thermal camera does not lie, and this one is good enough to find what matters.

Start Here
FLIR ONE Gen 3 Thermal Camera for Android or iOS
$179.99 ★★★★☆ 4.3 (2,400+ reviews)
"It is the cheapest thermal imager that actually resolves enough detail to distinguish a wet wall from a cold pipe — the $40 knockoffs cannot do that."
⚠️ Avoid: Skip any thermal camera under $60 on Amazon — they have resolution around 32x32 pixels, which means you get a colorful blur, not an actionable image.
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2 Check moisture levels before you trust your eyes

Your eyes cannot see 19% moisture content inside a baseboard. A pin-type moisture meter can, and it costs less than a pizza. In North Port, I run mine along every baseboard after a heavy rain and around every window frame twice a year. Anything over 16% in wood is a mold risk; over 20% means you have an active problem right now. This is the tool I wish I had bought five years earlier.

Step 1
General Tools MMD4E Digital Moisture Meter
$14.97 ★★★★☆ 4.4 (18,000+ reviews)
"It reads accurately in the range that matters for Florida homes and costs so little there is no reason to not own one."
⚠️ Avoid: Do not buy a non-pin meter for checking walls and wood — the non-contact versions are designed for flooring installation and read surface moisture only, which misses everything hiding an inch deeper.
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3 Find what is eating your FPL bill overnight

A kill-a-watt meter plugs between any appliance and the outlet and tells you exactly how many watts that thing is pulling. My old second refrigerator in the garage was costing me $18 a month by itself — I never would have guessed. In Charlotte County, FPL's tiered pricing means the kilowatt-hours you waste in the evening cost more than the ones you waste at noon. Plug in every major appliance for 24 hours and you will find at least one thing that surprises you.

Best Value
P3 Kill A Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor P4460
$29.99 ★★★★☆ 4.6 (14,000+ reviews)
"The EZ model projects your monthly cost automatically so you do not have to do the math yourself — that is the feature that makes people actually use it."
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4 Inspect your attic without climbing into it blind

North Port attics in summer hit 150 degrees and they share that space with palmetto bugs, roof rats, and occasionally a snake that found a gap in your soffit. I put a $35 borescope camera on the end of my phone and poked it through the attic hatch before I ever put a foot up there. Found a rat nest near the ridge vent and a section of blown insulation that had shifted away from an exterior wall. The camera saved me from stepping on something unpleasant and showed me exactly where to aim the spray foam.

Don't Skip
Depstech WF010 WiFi Borescope Inspection Camera 1080p
$35.99 ★★★★☆ 4.3 (6,800+ reviews)
"The WiFi version streams to your phone without a cable dangling from the hatch — that matters when you are balanced on a ladder in August."
⚠️ Avoid: Skip wired USB endoscopes for attic work — the cable length limits you to about three feet of reach and they require a second person to hold your phone.
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5 Test your air quality before something tests you

Florida homes seal up tightly for AC efficiency, which means VOCs, radon, and particulates accumulate. After Hurricane Ian, remediation crews in Charlotte County found elevated VOC levels inside homes that looked fine on the outside — just from disturbed materials and wet drywall drying poorly. The Airthings Wave Mini sits on a shelf and updates every five minutes via Bluetooth. It is not a medical device, but it will tell you when something has changed and you should open windows or call someone.

Game Changer
Airthings Wave Mini Smart Indoor Air Quality Monitor
$79.99 ★★★★☆ 4.3 (3,200+ reviews)
"It tracks CO2, humidity, temperature, and VOCs simultaneously and logs historical data — you can see exactly when your air quality dropped and correlate it with what you were doing."
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6 Seal every gap you found before the next rainy season

After you run the thermal camera and the borescope, you will have a list of gaps. In North Port, most of them are around pipe penetrations, soffit vents, and garage door frames where Myakka sand has shifted the framing slightly over the years. The right product for all of them is a can of Sashco Big Stretch — not spray foam, not silicone, not standard caulk. It stays flexible through Florida's temperature swings from 45 degrees in January to 95 in August, which is the exact cycle that cracks rigid sealants in two seasons.

The Fix
Sashco 14010 Big Stretch Caulk 10.5 oz White
$11.49 ★★★★☆ 4.7 (5,100+ reviews)
"It stretches 500% without cracking, which means it actually survives a Florida year instead of shrinking and letting bugs back in by March."
⚠️ Avoid: Do not use standard silicone caulk on exterior gaps — it does not accept paint, it yellows in UV, and it gets brittle in thermal cycling faster than anything else on the shelf.
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DIY total: $352 total for everything on this page
vs. professional: A licensed home inspection in Charlotte County runs $350 to $500 and covers far less than this kit does over its lifetime.
You save: $350 to $500 on the first inspection alone — the kit pays for itself on day one.

Your house has been running diagnostics on you for years; now it is your turn.

isnotbadforyou.com/debug-kit · A North Port neighbor's honest take

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