Franklin Safe · Columbus & Franklin County

Ohio's lead is in its old houses. Here is where, and a free way to see it.

Most homes here went up before lead paint was banned. This shows where the risk concentrates across Ohio, lets anyone check a ZIP in seconds, and in Franklin County drops all the way down to your actual block, house by house, by the year each one was built. Then a kit makes the lead glow green in the home itself.

Where the risk is, county by county

Every Ohio county, shaded by its lead-exposure risk score. Darker means older housing and tighter budgets, the two things that put lead in kids. Hover or tap one to see it. Columbus sits in Franklin County, which drops down to individual homes.

 
 
 
 
lower riskhighest risk
Highest-need counties, where to start
Score blends Census housing age (share built before 1978) and poverty. It is a screen for where to look, not a test of any one home.
Columbus is in Franklin County — click it to drop into real homes, one parcel at a time, colored by the year each was built →
County
loading homes…
Pre-1950 1950–1977 1978 or newer year not recorded
Every shape is a real parcel from the Franklin County Auditor's records. Drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom, hover a home for its address and age. Many older records leave the build year blank, shown in gray.
Where this map comes from

I built a model that predicts childhood lead-exposure risk down to the neighborhood, from housing age and Census poverty, and checked it against measured childhood blood-lead in eleven states. It holds up. The model, its code, and the validation data are openly published, and the full write-up is under review at AGU's GeoHealth journal. The lookup below is that model, made usable. Paired with a kit that makes lead glow in an actual home, you go from a map to a confirmed hazard in a single visit.

Check any Ohio ZIP

Housing age and Census poverty, combined into a lead-risk read for the area. Real records, not a guess.

Area-level screen from ACS housing-age (B25034) and poverty (S1701). It flags where lead is likely, it does not test any one home. That is what the kit is for.

It is already this bad in Columbus

Franklinton
ZIP 43222
100
1,373 of 2,311 homes from the lead-paint era
Near East Side
ZIP 43205
99
4,798 of 7,303 lead-era homes
South Side
ZIP 43206
75
8,014 of 12,758 homes pre-1980
Weinland Park
ZIP 43201
71
6,926 lead-era homes, 43% poverty

The kit that makes the lead show itself

You spray a painted surface or settled dust, shine a UV light, and any lead glows bright green in seconds. It reads on a windowsill, a porch, a dish, a toy, or paint chips. A home visitor, a WIC nurse, or a parent at the kitchen table can run it off a one-page card. Columbus Public Health already bought a thousand of these to give to families here.

30,000+
kits already sold to families
1,000
bought by Columbus Public Health to give away
100
donated to PA's Lead-Free Promise Project, now going out statewide

This is not a prototype. It is a shipping product that public health programs are already buying and handing out, Columbus among them.

Two ways to run it, your call

Tracked kits

Every kit carries a code. Families report what they found, and you see the picture build across your area: where the glows are, who wants a follow-up. A live map of the lead you are turning up.

choose this

Just the kits and the info

No portal, no tracking, no strings. We ship kits and the field cards to you, you distribute them your way, and we send along the research and the how-to. Simple.

choose this

We will customize it to however your program wants to run it.

Start the conversation

Goes straight to Eric Ritter, who makes the kits. No list, no spam.

What the kit is, and is not

Fluoro-Spec is a fast field screen that makes lead visible. It is not an EPA-recognized test kit, and it is not a replacement for XRF or for lab dust-wipe clearance where those are legally required. A glow, or the absence of one, is a field indication, not a lab result. Its purpose is to find the likely lead first, so limited inspector and lab time goes to the homes that need it. More on how that compares to the RRP cleaning card.

Area risk from U.S. Census ACS housing age (table B25034) and poverty (S1701), weighted by national lead-based-paint prevalence by housing era. Method and validation: detectlead.com/lead-validation.

Fluoro-Spec · Eric Ritter · detectlead.com · eric@detectlead.com · 631-461-1838