04: Q&A - Cross Contamination / Best Air Filters

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Okay, guys, so Today's show is 100% answering your questions. So I've had some of you submit questions through my Instagram, through different messaging platforms. And so all I'm going to do is start looking through these and answering these. These are like my favorite types of shows to do because ultimately, this whole thing is about helping you guys, right? And so there's a lot of information that is like evergreen information that will help you understand stuff. But at the end of the day, I know everybody's trying to kind of figure out their own situation, so that's why I really like doing these. Just so you know, this particular episode I'm doing while I'm driving to an assessment appointment right now, so I'm going to do this one, and we're going to see how it goes. I'm going to listen back if the noise is too much, and this will be the last time that I do it this way. But I just have these questions, and I want to be able to answer them. So I couldn't wait until I got home and hit the weekend. So let me know if it's too much. I'll not do it this way again. But in the meantime, we're going to start diving into these things.

The first question we have is from Kelly in Arizona. She wrote, I saw you post a while back about particles coming off of mold colonies. Do they travel far from the colony? So it's a good question, right? Because I think a lot of us, we think of this idea that mold is growing in a certain place, and because we see it there, that's just kind of where it stays. And it's not really true. The particles and the spores and even the toxins, they move off of that colony. So you may have heard me use this analogy. I'll use it a lot. So bear with me. If you've heard it already, but mold is like a factory. And so if you drive by a factory, you'll see there's people inside, and they're kind of making whatever they're making inside of the walls, inside the factory, but there's smoke coming out top of it. And the smoke moves into the air, and that becomes our air pollution. And so the same concept holds true with mold. So the mold is the factory, and the particles and the spores and the toxins and the different things that they release move off. And that is essentially, what is the air pollution within our house? Right. So the question is, like, how far can that move off of these colonies? Is it kind of localized? Does it move throughout the whole house? So there's a few things to keep in mind with that. The first thing I'm going to do is just tell you a quick story about when I was a little kid to help kind of illustrate this for you. So I was young. I was probably like six, maybe six or seven or something. And I would go in. My parents would tuck me into bed at night, and they would crack the door open because they wanted to make me feel like, I guess, that I wasn't trapped in there. And it let a little light into the room. And what would happen every night is that the air or the door would shut by itself. It like, really freaked me out. I thought that there were ghosts in my room. And I finally, like, told my dad I was scared to go to bed. And he was trying to figure out, and he kind of realized what was happening. And he asked me why. And I told him it was because the door kept shutting after they left me alone in there. And so I thought that there were ghosts in the room. And so that's not what was happening, obviously. And so what he did is he did this little experiment, this demonstration to show me what was happening so it wouldn't scare me anymore. And basically what he did is.

We. He would go into the room, we shut the door, and then he would have my mom turn the air conditioning on. When the air conditioner turned on, it changed the air pressure in the room. And what that did is that it forced the door to close when the air conditioner turned on. He did that like five times in a row. He would say, okay, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to sit here with you, and then your mom's going to turn on the air conditioner. She's going to do it right now. And she would turn it on. She's like, okay, now watch. In a couple seconds, a minute or so, this door is going to shut. And sure enough, that happened over and over and over again. And what was happening is that that door shutting is like a visual representation of how the airflow moves through your house. So in that scenario, what was happening Is that there is air in my room, and the air conditioner turned on and started pulling it out of the room. And when it was pulling it, it pulled the door shut, too. So this is a really simple way to show us that air moves throughout a home, and it doesn't just stay isolated to a certain area. Now, one way it moves is just like that. So that change throughout the course of the home. So this happens anytime you open doors, you open windows, you run your clothing dryer because the exhaust fan is pulling air out of your house. You turn on the air conditioner because it's forcing air to move. So there's a lot of different reasons why airflow is going to basically change direction and move around. And that happens continuously. So that's one way it happens. Another way it happens is actually through your heating or air conditioning system. So not only is it pulling air kind of through the different rooms, but once it hits the system, it's now distributing it all over the place. So it's kind of like a portal to teleport whatever particles were in one place of the house and then kind of like teleport them somewhere else. So think Star Trek, right? So, like, the air conditioner is that platform that the guys would stand on. And then when you turn the air conditioner on, it's like when Jordy would be like, engage, you know, and then everybody would disappear, and then they would just, like, show up on the. On the surface of some planet somewhere. So that's what happens in the house too, right? You turn on the air conditioner, and that's like saying, engage. And then it pulls all the stuff in the air conditioner, and then it magically moves it everywhere else. So that's another way that it can spread. So to answer your question, Kelly, it could travel really far, right? It's not isolated. And that's why when we're doing an assessment and also putting together a remediation strategy, it has to incorporate the entire house. Now, that doesn't mean that we have to rip open the walls in every room in the house, but what it means is that we have to figure out where sources of the problem are, and we have to remediate those and fix those properly. So that may require removal of contaminated walls or cabinets, but at the same time, that problem didn't just stay isolated in that area. It caught up on these air currents and it moved around.

The two things we have to look at is the actual. Your ventilation system, did that become compromised as a result of some of these other sources? And there's testing we can do in those systems to figure that out. And if it did, we need to understand how significant it is. And do we think that it's possible for it to be cleaned or is it too contaminated to the point where we think it needs to be replaced? And then the third step of that is to then say, okay, how has this air moved and impacted just the other living spaces of the house? What kind of cleaning plan needs to be put in place in order to extract whatever particles or toxins might be present? And so we have specific protocols that are outlined kind of for each one of those things. And so at the end of the day, when we put a remediation plan together, we're addressing essentially all three components of the home's living system. We're getting the source, we're getting the conduit for how things move around, which is the air conditioning or heating system, and then we're getting the other surfaces throughout the house, which is basically where those things were teleported to. So.

That'S the answer that I got for you and hopefully that helps illustrate some of this stuff and let it make more sense. Thanks so much for that question.

Alright, so the next question we have here is from Jennifer in Colorado. She asks what is the most important thing for me to look for in an air filter? It's a good question. So before I get into that, I just want to immediately off the top, if you're listening to this show, then you're probably somebody who's sensitive to mold, right? That's how you found this. And with that said, I'm going to tell you right now that any sort of filter or purifier that you could buy from, like Walmart or Costco or the grocery store or Amazon or any of these places, is not going to be enough for the goal that you're wanting to achieve for yourself. Okay, A lot of these things are a couple hundred dollars. They don't really filter out and do what is necessary for someone who's more sensitive. So like, effectively you're kind of wasting your money on that stuff. I don't really want you to do that. It's not going to cause any more problems, but it's not really going to help the situation probably to the extent that you're wanting it to help. So that's the first thing I wanted to point out for you guys. Okay, so with that said, there's kind of three components of air treatment technology. The first one is filtration. Filtration is the act of air basically moving through a filter. And the filter is able to pull out the particles that are in the air. So as the air goes through it, you get less and less of these particles. And when you have less of it in the air, Then you can obviously breathe less of it. So that's the first concept. The second concept is what's called purification. Purification is the use of ions that basically come off of the colonies, or, excuse me, ions that come out of the purifier units. And they're essentially oppositely charged from these biological contaminants like mold and bacteria. So what happens is that they get drawn to them, and then they destroy them or deactivate them at the source of wherever they live versus having to come near the filter. So it's a really cool technology, and I like it a lot. And I actually have both of them working in the options that I have for my own place. The third element is what's called sanitization. It's the same ion technology, except the ions are really only kind of magnetically drawn to biological contaminants like mold and bacteria. They're not drawn in the same way to more kind of standard air particles like.

Pet hair and pollen and other things that might just be part of the particulate load in the house. So they're not going to have that effect where they kind of get magnetized to it and destroy it. But what they are going to do is they're going to attach to those particles and then make them bigger. And when those particles get bigger, it allows the filter to be more effective at pulling it out. So the ion process does both of those things, Depending on which system you're getting. And that's what's really cool about that technology. So you kind of have this reactive approach of filtration, which is pulling everything toward the unit in order for it to cut out the particles that are in the air, like remove a lot of them. And then you have this proactive component of these little ions that are floating around and kind of proactively getting rid of stuff. So that's the two pieces of it. If I had to pick one piece that was the most important piece, I would say filtration is the most important piece. Getting these particles out of the air in the first place Is really going to have the biggest impact. So that's the first thing that I would look at. Depending on what your goal is Is going to depend on kind of what type of unit that you're looking for. So most of my clients are one of Two things. One, it's all about mold and mycotoxins, or for some of them, the mold exposure has created a secondary condition for them that's given them a really heavy sensitivity to chemicals. It's called multiple chemical sensitivity sensitivity. Each one of those issues. So kind of your basic mold folks and then the folks that also have chemical sensitivities, they're kind of different units that might be best for each one of those. For just the mold folks, we're really focused on particle. And so what we want to do is get filters that can filter down to the smallest particle size, because that's what's going to be most effective. So a mold spore is around 0.3 microns. And I don't want to get, like, too deep into all the, like, techno babble of all this stuff with you guys. But basically, if you guys have heard of HEPA filters, HEPA was built around the idea of a particle that's about that size. These are the kind of filters that you can get at your Walmart and your Costcos and your Amazons. And, yes, they might be able to filter out particles that are the actual spore size. The challenge, though, is that's, like, the smallest piece of the problem. For us, the bigger issue is not the spores that are coming off, but it's actually the fragments that are breaking off of the colonies as well. So there have been many research studies that have been done and published that actually show that the spores are shown in quantity at a much lesser volume than the actual fragments that break off of the colonies. So specifically, I'll talk about Sacchybotryas. This is what's known as a black toxic mold. So there was a study that was done that showed that the number of fine particles that broke off of the colonies that are not the spores, but just the rest of the structure of the colony that those particles, if you're doing a measurement, could be up to 300 times the amount of spores that would have been detected. So, for example.

If you did a sample and found that there was one Stachybotrys spore, then that could mean that there's actually 300 of the small particles that came off of that colony that are also floating around. Those particles are much, much smaller than the size of a spore. And those particles can actually bypass our body's natural defenses in our nose and in our throat. And that's how they work into our lungs, get into our bloodstream. So it's those particles that we really got to focus on. If we can get rid of those. We're obviously going to be getting rid of the spores. Those little particles also carry the toxins. So we're addressing that at the same time. So the focus on filtration is to get down to these smaller particle sizes. There's been studies that show that the mycotoxin particle size, I mean, it could vary depending on how these particles break apart, but generally it's around, like, 0.1 micron. So, again, if a mold spore is 0.3, then the smaller particles where they're seeing mycotoxins is like 200% smaller than that. Right. So we have to get even smaller than that. And so there's really kind of two numbers you will see when you're looking at filtration options on filters. One will be that it filters down to 0.007 micron. The others it filters down to 0.003 micron. Okay, 0.007.003. We're talking about spores being 0.3. So that's like thousands of percent smaller, Right, than what we're looking at just from a regular HEPA filter. And that's where we want to be. That's how we're going to get all these smaller particles pulled out of the air more effectively for you guys. And those particles, like I said, will also be carrying the mycotoxins if they've been produced. So that's the goal on the mold front, is to look for filtration that gets us to that piece, to that size. So.

That takes us now to the other component, which is purifying and sanitizing. Kind of talk about them together. But basically what happens is that these ions get released. So imagine that, like an ion comes out of a purifier unit. And imagine it's like this blue glowing ball that's, like, floating around your air. And what it's doing, it's like scanning the house for any sort of biological contaminant because they get magnetized to it. So imagine that this ball is floating around, and it sees, like, a mold fragment that's just sitting on top of a table somewhere that broke off of a colony. It's almost like on a search and destroy mission. And it sees it, and then bam, it goes to it, and it attaches to it, and it destroys it right there. Right. That's the concept of how these ions work. And it's really, really cool. So that's an awesome component, too. The same ions are what's going to float around and actually make the non biological particles larger by attaching to it. The only difference is that they're not magnetized to them because it doesn't have that opposite charge that creates that magnetic effect. So that's the only difference in those two things. Regardless, it's the same ion technology that does both. I like to have both options in my units. So I have, in my home, my units include both of those options. So from a mold front, that's what we're looking at. We're looking for filtering down a really small particle size. And if you want to add the ion piece on top to get a little extra, I'm all for that. So that's what we're looking for there. Now that's for our mold, mycotoxin only people. So now if we're looking at people that are also chemically sensitive on top of that, then what we want to do is add an additional layer into the filtration piece that will help absorb those chemicals that are being off gassed. That extra layer is called carbon filtration. Carbon is super effective at basically absorbing these organic gases, these organic chemicals. And so what happens is the airflow goes through the filters. Now there's a second filter which is this carbon filter, and it sucks out the VOC chemicals. It basically absorbs all of it. And then the filter blocks out all the particles that were there that are the mold fragments and the mycotoxins. And then it releases the air back out. That is less of both of those things and that's great. So there are other units that are made like specifically that, that, that can help maximize that chemical fighting effect. Right.

And so that's what I'd be looking for. You know, there's, there's a few different brands out there. I'm not, you know, I'm not about trying to like push you towards one brand or another. You know, I want you guys to be able to make that decision for yourselves. I just want you to understand what the different pieces are and what you need to be looking at in terms of like the tech specs and how effective they are. The last thing to consider when you're looking at this stuff is how big of a space is the unit going to be able to cover. So they'll tell you they could cover up to X number of square feet.

Some of them are for a single room size, some might just be a couple hundred square feet. Some claim they're 1,000 square feet, 700 square feet. You just kind of want to keep an eye on that and understand what type of room you're putting it in and to make sure that you're getting a unit that can support that room type. Personally, I would like to oversize the unit for the room that I'm in because it's going to give me more air changes throughout that unit, so it's going to be doing its job quicker and more effectively. The other thing to think about when you're considering your room size, these square footage numbers that the companies put out, they're all based on, like, rooms with normal sized ceilings. But if you live in a or if the room that you're putting in might have, like lofted ceilings where they're much higher or something like that, then the amount of air that is in that space is much more than what your standard square footage is of the room. Because you're thinking like cubic square feet now, right? Because you're getting much higher up in the ceiling. So you might need to have more than one unit in order to kind of COVID that space, even though it claims for the square footage number that it would be effective for that. So just kind of keep the size of like the ceilings and the whole kind of geometry of your room in mind and know that the numbers that they're giving you are typically just based off of like a normal 8 to 10 foot ceiling for the square footage. So hopefully that is helpful for you. Go out there, do your research.

Keep fighting the good fight. All right, great question. Thank you.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment, subscribe and give a rating wherever you get your podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most.