Why 50% of Homes Are Toxic

Welcome back once again, everybody. This is our second episode of talking about toxicity. Yes. Toxicity. And actually Dr. Jensky and I were talking between last episode and this episode and we just decided to talk about our houses and talk about our homes. Talk about what we've had to do.

The Money Pit.

The money Pits. Yes. It's something we talk about. Yes. We have on our website the Harvard School of Public Health Healthy Home Guide that walks through different parts of the home and it walks through basic, super basic things, which I encourage you to go there and download it. But we're gonna just give our own personal experiences. You've had health issues. Still working through stuff.

Yeah.

I remember there's one point in time with your crawl space that you were like. I was, I was like, get encapsulated. Check it. You know, and you're like, oh, I had an expert look at it. It's done. It's da, da. And then I'm like, when you, when you open the door, you're like, I smell this thing. I'm like, it's not done. Yeah. So why don't you. The first thing with your house.

What was the first.

The like you're working through. Yeah. EOE. And these are all things Dr. Jensky said. Otherware in the podcast. This is public knowledge. Yeah. That eoe. Pre diabetic overweight hypertension. Hypertension.

Heavy metals autoimmunity.

Yeah.

Eczema surge.

You were a mess. Yeah, You're a mess. And like, let's figure out, let's focus on your home. Right?

Yeah.

Like, what was the first thing? Because, because we talked about. Mike, you should check this. And yeah. The average person. My home's is a crawl.

It was the crawl. You were right. You were right. And so tell us about the crawl. I've learned since then to not trust experts at face value and, and, and get second and third opinions or become an expert yourself and understand what you need to know and what you should be looking for. Bare minimum, asking the appropriate questions. And if you're not getting answers that you want, then you just move on to the next person. It was the home inspector that was working with the realtor who said, I've been doing this for 30 years and this is one of the best places I've ever seen. Which clearly is just a can phrase that he says. And, and you know, I, I had seen a little bit of water staining and just the laid. It wasn't encapsulated, just the laid down plastic. And I inquired about it and he said, yeah, but I Don't see an ongoing leak. It was probably a little bit of condensation, but there's no mold, everything's fine. And I believed him. Well, I was a mold patient and I shouldn't have believed him. And when we worked it up and discovered that you were like, it's your home and your best starting point is probably your crawl space. And so I had my crawl space evaluated, and it was full of mold and it was full of bacteria. It was actually endotoxins and actinomycetes and mycotoxins. And so we had the entire crawl space encapsulated, which involved removing all the insulation, cleaning all the joists, putting in two sump pumps. After digging four egresses and then encapsulating and sealing everything, one of the H vac units runs through the crawl. That H vac unit wasn't sealed appropriately. So all that was just getting right into the system and being sent up. So the H vac system had to be addressed. Encapsulation, and then subsequently an Aprilaire dehumidifier. And it was a game changer because to this day, that was, what, 11 years ago? I had an inspector come out last year and she was basically like, when was this done? And I said, about 10 years ago. And she was like, it seems like it was done yesterday. It's still that great. I took it a step further, and I had a radon remediation company come out and they did a sub vapor barrier radon stack, which is basically corrugated piping in the soil that then connects to an exterior fan that kind of creates this negative pressure and pulls soil gases from below the vapor barrier up and out through this stack. So I wanted to make sure that that crawl space was just a done deal. And to this day it is. And any retesting in my home has always been kind of spot on and perfect. That was a game changer.

Yeah. And the thing about crawl space is, at least here in Virginia, there's a lot of people whose air. Their air handlers are in their crawl space. And so your. The typical air handling unit will leak about 20%, so it's 80% efficient, which means it's pulling air into the pipes from leaks and pushing out into the leaks. So if you have piping coming to your air handler in your crawl and stuff is leaking in there, then whatever, particulate, dust, mold, whatever gets in there then gets on your. Into your coral seeds, that. And you start growing stuff on your coral in your unit. And so if you have a unit in Your crawl space, you have to do the best job you can to make that air as close to indoor air as possible. And that's something people don't talk about. You know, so what you mentioned before, the April air unit, which is A, a 4 inch material bear that is kind of like a HEPA filter for the air handler and then having a UV light on the actual coral so that if anything does make it there.

It just gets killed.

And because of the way fluid, fluid dynamics work, you know, the air conditioner is conditioning the, the air in your house. It's not filtering it per se. The goal of all this is to make sure that the air handler, wherever it's at, does not become a source for biotoxins, mold, actino, endo, whatever. It's not to filter the, the air in your house. That's something else that's, I think it's important people to know because like, oh, I, I put a whatever on my air handler. It's like, yeah, but it's, you know, it's not circulating the room. The air in your room. You need a individual.

Yeah.

HEPA filter in your, your rooms for that. So. And I love the vapor barrier idea because I have that in my home as well because it's like, it's a vapor extraction device. You know, actino and endo come from the soil. Right. So all of a sudden radon comes from the soil. Radon. Radon's the number two cause of lung cancer in our country. People don't realize it's particularly in central Virginia where anyway have granite, you're going to have some radioactive degradation products.

And, and they test for this right before you buy the home. They'll test. But even if it's normal, it doesn't mean that you don't want to do this for other reasons. This isn't about radon per se, but it will help with all these other things.

So they test it. You know, this is where you get in the weeds. Based on the water table level, you know, you might have a negative test because it's been dry.

Yeah.

And it rains a lot. And now it's positive.

Yeah.

And when do they test it? And so really to know if you're radon clear, you have to test it multiple seasons. Dry, wet, hot, cold. That doesn't happen. Same thing when people come. The inspector, all my crawl space was fine. When did he inspect it? They inspect it, you know, at the end of winter when you've had a relative humidity in your house of my house is like 28 30% where they expected at the end of July or August here, where it was October, it.

Was dry and it was cool.

Yeah. And so you want to be done when worse situations. So. So what was the next thing? So you looked at your, your crawl spare?

Yeah, so we got the crawl done. That was, that was a big deal. And we thought we were done and we were not even close to being done. And so ultimately over the course of years now, so we've been in this place since, I think it's been about 10 or 11 years now. So the crawl was the big issue since then. We've subsequently found out that the vents in the bathrooms, two of the bathrooms were going to basically blind pockets in the attic. They weren't going, being directed to the external area, to this office. And so essentially it was just putting air up there, putting condensation up there, potential for mole growth, microbial growth, etc. So we had those rerouted so that those can get vented appropriately. In addition, we did not have a hood set up over our stove, so we had to have one built and put in. So anytime we were cooking any of the particulates and VOCs and other things that are coming off, we were just breathing those. The stove itself was leaking gas, so we had to replace the stove. We had a dishwasher that was leaking. We had a laundry machine that was leaking. We had to replace both of those. We had a refrigerator that was leaking, we had to replace that. Our water was not great. It's in Horico County. And we looked at the water sources and so we wound up getting a reverse osmosis filtration system that goes under the sink and then runs to the fridge through the crawl space. And so ice and water from the fridge or ro and we put shower head filters on in the showers. We did not deem it necessary to do a whole house filter at that time and don't really have the space for the tank to do that. We wound up having to address some attic related issues. We had some microbial growth and some mold up there. The attic is not part of the building envelope. So it's hot and humid up there. It's not conditioned. It's just basically this. It's just basically insulation and wood and it's hot as hell up there. And you know, you go up and you're sweating within seconds. But we had to address the fans that were creating laminar flow on each side that they were not working appropriately.

These are attic fans.

Attic fans were not working appropriately. We had Some roofing issues that were addressed. The fireplace, the flashing was leaking so we had to have that readdressed and we had a water leak at one point in time. We have an area that's now the playroom. It used to be like a screened in porch. And it was a flat top roof with the kind of glue and gravel. All these leaves had fallen over time. Pine tags and leaves. And then basically when they a framed over it, they just left all that debris there. So all that debris had to be cleared out. All of that area. I'm telling you, man, you don't even know that. This is. This is. This is kind of insane. This is all we've had to do since we moved in there. And then the gutter system and the downspouts had to be rerouted because they weren't directing water far enough away from the house. Ideally I would love to get French drains at some point in time, but that's what we have at this point. I think that's the bulk of was a lot. And I mean we. That was over the course of years. Oh, we had a bathroom redo. That's right. It's the. The. The addition on our main bathroom. The hardy plank was not sealed appropriately. So all the water that was coming from the outside was going in between the hardie plank and the wall in the main shower. And the tile started to kind of pucker. And when we popped it off, it was all black behind it. And when we had someone come and pop it all off, it was all stachybotrys, which is black mold. So that entire. And then when we popped off the floor, it was basically eroding. And the entire shower was going to collapse into the crawl space. So we had to replace that shower, replace the tile, redo the hardy plank. We didn't do the whole bathroom reno because we didn't feel like it was necessary. And we had someone come out and an IEP improve that. One of the toilets had to be resealed from a water leak standpoint. So it's a lot of appliances that were replaced and are now great. Like two or three main issues really. The crawl space, that bathroom, and then kind of like the attic and other little things. Those were all the main issues. And once that was all said and done and. And then we like fully cleaned and decontaminated every room and had air purifiers and air scrubbers and we have hardwood floors with area rugs. If I had carpeting, I would have pulled it up and we wiped everything down and we hepa vacuumed everything. We all got better. All of our biotoxin counts came down. Autoimmunity went to remission. My skin cleared up. My. My daughter's night terrors went away. My son's like. It just, like, things just kind of autocorrected. Some that I was actively working towards getting better and just holding space, and others just, quite literally, all of a sudden turned a corner because the holding space became progression because I wasn't. I wasn't taking on this toxic burden anymore.

And night terrors are interesting because those are also a dysautonomic response. Yeah, that unfortunately. Yeah. Okay. Hypermobile as well. There we go. That sometimes is treated with medication, like prazosin or clonidine or whatever. But it's interesting how in some people, it can be a marker for a biotoxin, like a trauma thing. Are you. This is a side note. The attic fan. Do you still. Is that still running? You still use that? Yeah. I remember when I did my shoemaker training, one thing they talked about was, like, attic fans, which make. They make your attic life last longer because it keeps it cooler, and it's cheaper to cool your place. But one thing. If they're really powerful and strong and moving, like 10,000, 15, 20,000 CF cubic feet per minute, that can actually create a relative negative pressure in your attic and actually pull stuff into it. So it can actually create some penetrations.

Yeah. So they're tiny. It's a ranch house. So they're at each end of this 20. Yeah. And they're small.

I don't know what they're.

What they're circulating.

Typical bathroom fans are, like 70 cfms cubic feet per minute, so. But something small like that, not as big, because obviously everybody's house has, like, as bathroom fans. Yeah. All throughout. But me, when I did mine when I was younger, I got the biggest fan possible and put it up there because I want to move as much air, sort of keep it as cool as possible, and that was a bad move. That's interesting. Yeah. With my place, it was interesting because we were doing a renovation there. My wife was there 20 hours a week. I was overseeing the builder. And there's still so many things that fell through the cracks. One of them was a faucet going outside the house. And so every time it rained, I'd go into crawl space and noticed a little bit of water, the one for the faucet, and I pulled insulation away, and it was like, there's a little pinhole just leaking. And it's one of those Things that knows on the far side of the crawl space. So if I hadn't done that, you'd have sat there probably for years, potentially. Another thing that I noticed was on one side of the house, every time it rained, if you went in the crawl and looked back on the wall, you'd see it like, wet. And so I'd get back there and look at it and try to figure out, look outside the house. I just couldn't figure out where the water was coming from. So one these crazy ideas pop in your head and sometimes you don't know where they come in. So I decided to download the installation instructions for Hardiplank because that's what we had. I just kind of went outside my house and started looking through it and looking at my house, the side and looking at it, I realized there's these little thingies, these flashing thing you call them, that didn't exist. So what was happening is the roof border was coming down and the way the house was designed, which was poor. Now I know in hindsight I should have told the architect not to do this, but water was running and hitting the house side, coming down. And what was happening is because they didn't have flashing, they followed it and went behind the hardy plank, ran down the outside wall, hit the seal plate that was coming inside. And I was seeing that. Yeah, that took about six weeks to figure out.

Yeah.

But if I had to figure that.

Out, yeah, it's a problem. That's what happened to our bathroom. I mean, it was water in between the hardy plank and the wall that.

Would have rotted out the whole, entire, whole entire wall. One issue, you know, we. And we had had an IEP come out to our house. Every couple years I have someone come out because I'm.

Yeah, same.

I'm a little paranoid. My goals is not to become a patient. Right? Yeah, I love patients. I love taking care of people. I just don't want to become one of the people who need someone to take care of me. And. And one of the times they came out, they found dampness in my daughter's. Her tub space. So I took a deep dive in because we did this stuff called Schluter, which is supposed to be. It's like a material that you put. And you plaster Michelin, then you put the tile on top of it. So it's like almost doing like a triple layer for water leak stuff. And come to find out, it actually we didn't do anything. Because what come to find out the way that the tile is made is that Water gets through the tile, always gets wet. Nothing was coming through the crawl space. And the design was when it gets wet, it spreads out and then dries off. And because it's plaster, it's alkaline, so stuff doesn't grow in it. And because the schluter material is inert, stuff doesn't grow in it. But it's one of those things where I could have pulled out that entire thing, which would have been a lot of money, a lot of time. It probably caused more exposure to particulates.

Yeah.

And all kinds of stuff that wasn't necessary. Yeah. So I think it. I think the story is people need to become experts of their.

Yeah. At least asking them questions, at least paying attention to things that don't seem right. Trusting your instincts, looking how you feel in a certain aspect of your house, how you feel about your house in general. Are you smelling smells that don't smell right? That don't make sense to you? You know, that musty smell that you smell? It's informative. And it's supposed to be telling you that there's something wrong. It's not always mold. It's sometimes bacteria. And so you. If you get pigeonholed into this confirmation bias that, oh, it's musty, so it must be mold. Let me call a mold specialty company. They come out and they don't find any mold. They charge you a bunch of money, and you think everything's fine, but it's really a bunch of bacteria. Like, you need a. A licensed iep, an indoor environmental professional that's going to do a really good job of thoroughly assessing the home beyond just one thing and telling you what they think, and then slowly, methodically making those corrections you then can create. You can turn your house into a home. You can feel safe. You can feel comfortable there and know that it's not poisoning you, because this was our starter home. This is. This is our starter home. It's our forever home now. Man, we're not going anywhere. I mean, the reality is, like, we moved in and. And didn't like the paint on the walls, redid the floors. I did some esthetic things, not expecting any of this other stuff, thinking we'll be here for a couple of years, and then we're not going anywhere. The amount of time and energy and money that we've put into this place to make it the way it is now, which feels so comfortable for us, and it's. I'm looking forward to that point down the road where we can do some esthetic stuff, because that's what my wife wants. But we've had to do all the functional stuff first. Right. Like, she's so patient.

She.

She, like, our kitchen is small. She wants to, like, you know, knock down a wall. I'm like, I don't know what's behind that wall.

Leave it alone.

I would love for all that. Or, you know, vault the ceilings so that it's a little bit higher because it's just a ranch house with low ceilings. Like, the reality is we've had to do a lot of cleanup work for people that cut corners to make it livable for us. Oh, my God. I forgot this one completely. Here's the best part. So we have a tankless hot water heater, which we just had to replace this summer when it went kaput, and we had nothing but cold water for a week. It turns out the average age of these things is about 20 years, and it's about 21 years old. And thankfully, we have a family friend that really helped us out, and we were able to kind of get it done for. Not super expensive and in a timely fashion, but prior to the tankless hot water heater, there was a diesel tank. And typically in the state of Virginia, if you're using diesel fuel to heat the house, a tanker that it has to be emptied and buried or sealed and buried. Well, whomever had this tanker that eventually switched over to the tankless hot water heater just buried it. And apparently it still had diesel fuel in it. And over the course of who knows how long, because it precedes the previous owners, and I don't remember how long they lived there. So two owners ago had this. They just buried it. The owners before us got a tankless hot water heater. And one day my wife is outside, and she's like, I smell. I smell gas. And we live close to a school, and their maintenance is behind our house. And so we thought maybe it was the trucks or something like that. And I'm like, yeah, I smell it. It's probably just the trucks. It's exhaust, whatever. And then we smell it again, and then we smell it again. And then all of a sudden, there's this shimmering, shiny liquid accumulating in my backyard next to the patio. And it was oil. It was diesel fuel. It was oil. And so we call the fire department because we didn't know what to do, and they're like, oh, yeah, that's probably an old diesel tank that someone didn't drain or seal. We'll make some phone calls. They had to call the Virginia Department of the EPA to come down. My house is now deemed a biohazard zone. The entire crew is down there. They tear up my patio, they excavate this thing, they pull this rusty old tanker up in this little crane device and remove it, fill the rest with dirt. And then we had to replace the patio on our own dime.

But they did that other part for you.

They did that other part for us because there was an emergency fund in the state of Virginia that covered it. Otherwise we would had to pay for that too. Because when you buy a home and you sign on the line, you're paint, you are signing on anything that is buried in the ground. Dead bodies, diesel fuel, tankers, whatever, anything that's on that land you just signed on for. And we didn't know. So I, if we ever move, I know all the questions to ask that. But yeah, that was the other one that, that tends to escape my mind because it's still so surreal that that actually happened.

That is. Yeah, I'm going to remember that. Did you notice after that was removed any change in like the way you felt or was it more like a.

I'm saying I don't know. I do know that I felt more comfortable about our garden because that thing was in the ground and we have, we have raised beds and granted like they're, they're a little bit removed from where that was. But I'm like how much of that was pollute the, the, you know, the surrounding ground?

One thing I want to, this is connect. I want to jump off this. When I go to friends houses, I don't want to say all because. Because all is a very absolute term. We're not supposed to be absolutist, but. Yeah. Yeah, but almost. It seems like almost everybody I go to, I walk in their house and I smell like scents, perfumes, air fresheners, plugins. Yeah, whatever. And one thing I like to say is one, those are, you know, so bad for you. You know, there's, there's three. I forget which chemical it was. It's, it's not a styrene, but it's an off gassing chemical indoors. The number one source of this chemical, of this is smoking. Number two is gas fireplaces, gas stoves. Number three is plugins. And people just don't, it's just people don't realize how toxic those plugins. Yeah.

Are first and foremost in the top three.

Yes.

Compared with gas stoves and smoking.

Yeah.

It's like it's not, that's not benign.

That's, that's no bueno. No bueno. Right. But to our point here is it covers up smells. Like how are you going to smell if you have mold or a leak or whatever? I feel like sometimes people will smell stuff. I don't like that smell. Let me cover it up. Yeah. Instead of investigating. Yeah. You know, what is, you know, for. From, from my story. In one of our rooms in our house, the big family room, big kind of vaulted ceilings, and started smelling this kind of interesting smell. Interesting smell. Only certain times it was more pronounced if we'd been on vacation for a week and come back and kind of smell it. And what it was, long story short, is basically the smell of air coming inside the house, going through the insulation and then coming through penetration points into our house. So we ended up going and getting all the. This outlets, you know, sealed off, all the penetrations for, for light sealed off, all the plumbing things sealed off and it went away. But it's one of those things you don't realize you can do everything you want to do. Yeah. But you can still have certain smells and things and not covering them up can be. Is huge. And also sometimes you just have to go back and the tidy work is, you know, every, every place there's a light fixture, there's a. There's an outlet in your house, a penetration for plumbing. Those are holes made in your. Your building envelope that shouldn't be there. And sometimes something is basic and there's places are also where air comes in. If you have a temper diff temperature differential, you can get condensation.

Yeah.

More severe and really cold climates like up in Canada and whatnot. But either way, like sealing those off with a little bit of, you know, sealant, it's not a difficult thing to do. It just takes time. But it can make a big difference in actually keeping your. Your, your house and breathing the air that goes to insulation. Insulation has fire retardants and much other stuff.

Yeah.

And it's not a good thing to be breathing.

Yeah.

And.

And those smells are supposed to be informative, like not ignored. And if they're toxins, they're hurting you. And if you do a plug in that's off gassing VOCs, you're compounding the issue.

Yeah. You're covering up and making it worse.

You're. You're covering up and making it worse. And, and is that the triggering event? You know, like you're at your tipping point and all of a sudden you buy a bunch of Glade plugins and all of a. And now you have Autoimmunity or disautonomia. Like, I'm not blaming anything on Glade.

But the point being amazing. We love it. Yeah, it's awesome.

The point being that these things are problematic. I can't. Like, it brings me back to my childhood. Like these aha. Moments of being in church and incense being burned or walking through a shopping mall. Shopping mall still exist. Walking through an indoor shopping mall and walking by like a Yankee candle.

Bed Bath Beyond.

Bed Bath and Beyond. And like I just, I would get a headache, I would get dizzy and I'd want to throw up and I'm like, what is going on? And I would just sit outside and wait for my parents or whomever was there to be done. I just didn't like it. So it's. It was my body's way of saying, you are multi susceptible and these are not good for you. Get out. And so I just think these things are informative. You do what you can. If you don't know what to do, that's what the Internet's for. Or get somebody who knows what they're doing to come out and at least give you some expert advice. Assuming they're an expert. And if you don't like what they're saying, you don't get a good vibe, try the next person. But we have a ton of good information on our website and people can always reach out. I just think it's really important to take care of yours. And, and for me that means my home. It houses the three most important people in my life right now. So I'm going to make sure that.

It'S right, you know, so that was, that was fun.

Yeah.

For you.

I have trauma going through all that, man. It's reliving it.

Yeah. Hopefully, you know, you don't go leave here. I need to get.

No, I'm good.

Yeah. So. So hopefully this information was helpful. I wanted to do this just for us to talk about our homes a little bit. Specifically some of the things you had with your house. Just for people to realize that, you know, and these are things that we would not have found if we weren't proactive looking for them.

Yeah. If I wasn't a biotoxin patient, I wouldn't have had a clue to look for this stuff and I'd probably still be sitting in it.

You still probably sick and your wife and kids would be sick and you know, depending on what statistics you read, maybe you know, 80, 80 of childhood asthma is related to mold. And so it's like all these kids with Respiratory issues, like, do we just need to clean the environment up and make it less moldy? You know, and so. Yeah, you know, what if kids have got, you know, your. Your think your daughter had the positive celiac markers you've talked about before? Like, would they have cleared up with the dietary interventions if your environment had stayed toxic? Yeah, I mean, you'll know, but it's.

Well, I got an N2. My daughter has HLA DQ2 and DQ8 and celiac positive. My son. HLA DQ2, DQ8, non celiac positive. We had remediated the crawl space by the time he was born. She was born into a moldy house and then moved into a moldier house. By the time he was born, we had at least addressed the crawl space. So was that her triggering mechanism? He's got the same genetics, but he hasn't triggered.

Yeah.

The genes yet. So I don't know. But it's. It's interesting, I'll tell you that.

And through dietary interventions, clean your environment up and some other fancy functional mess and stuff. Your daughter's testing.

She's. She's great.

Normal.

Normal. Thriving.

Yeah.

Doing great. Crushing it. Winning awards.

Nice.

Loves basketball. She's in middle school now.

Oh, cool.

She's got a locker.

Locker.

They had cubbies, man. When you go from cubby to locker.

That'S a big deal. Really?

Yeah. You're a big kid now, right? You got a locker. Anyway.

Yeah, she's thriving. She's thriving.

They both are.

So your. Your. Your pain and suffering has helped your kids to.

I would. I would do it again and more.

Yeah.

Always for the kids, man.

That's what. That's what a good dad would say.

Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. Awesome. So, anyway, we'll stop there. I thought that'd be fun to talk about our homes in a little bit because, you know, we're fortunate to do what we do to be able to kind of help ourselves out. And one of the things we want to do is help other people out because it's. If half of all buildings in the country have water damage, which I think is an EPA, that is that EPA.

That was in the 90s. They estimated that. Who knows now?

Yeah. But if it's half, then the. Then half the people listening to this right now have issues, whether they know it or not. Yeah.

So one or many.

Yeah. Or maybe more. Who knows?

Cool.

Cool. All right, well, thanks a lot once again. Take care, and we'll talk to you soon. Sam.