06: Q&A Day! HVAC Duct Remediation / Mycotoxins in My Hair? / Contaminated Electronics

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.

All right, today is Q and A Day. I'm very excited for this. I put up a story on Instagram yesterday asking for everyone's questions, and we got a bunch of submissions in. I think I might be able to get through maybe three of them in the time that we have here. So I'm going to try to pick these out. Just know, like, anytime that I put these things up on Instagram, I'm gonna look at them. Alright, so if I'm asking you to submit questions, if you want to know the answers, you can submit them and I'm gonna look at them. Okay, so this is your way to access me directly. You know, I Normally charge like $4.95 an hour for my time and it includes answering questions like this. So you can get that for free if you just want to.

You know, participate on. On the Instagram. So ouldmasterclass, you could get on there. I'll be posting a story probably like once a week asking for some questions. And then the episodes I put out throughout that week will be a combination of answering some of those questions and then maybe some things I want to share with you guys. Okay, but today I think we're going to do all Q and A. The first question that we're going to talk about Here is from bear2424. The question was, how do you get mold out of your ducts without having to totally replace them? Yeah. I'm going to give you the short answer here and then I'm going to walk you through the reasoning behind it. All right, so the short answer is you're not going to be able to get it all out without completely replacing them. So let's talk through that. So I'm assuming we're talking about flex duct, because most ductwork now is flexible ductwork. And so what that means is the kind of ducts that will, like, squish together to fit into corners and spaces, but they use it throughout the whole house now. And so you have these ductwork. It's kind of like an accordion. So you know how you squeeze an accordion together and like the kind of the line in between squishes together. So it's the same concept as what happens in flexible ductwork. And so what happens when it's squished together like that is there's all these crevices and nooks and crannies throughout the entire duct line that are places where particles and fragments and even mycotoxin particles, they can all basically, like, wedge into those crevices that are created. And so that's what makes cleaning flex duct so incredibly hard. And to be totally honest with you, it's not possible to completely clean it out. So I want to talk through kind of the standard way that they try to clean it and some of the things that we could think of logically as to how we understand how there's some limitations to what they do. So when someone comes to clean your ductwork, basically, what they're going to do on one line of the duct or one side of the duct. So let's say we're going to call the supply side. The supply side is like the vent in your bedroom or the vent in your, you know, your living room or something. So it's the. It's the side where the air is actually being pushed out of. Okay. So on one side, like that side, they'll put, let's say, a device that kind of pushes through the duct. And it's kind of like this big brush sort of device. And the goal of the device is it kind of spins around really fast. And they're trying to agitate everything in the duct to get it airborne. And then what they do on the other side of the duct line is they'll attach some sort of, like, suction or vacuum or something to it. And so the goal of what they're doing is to try to basically get all these things that are settled in the duct pushed up into the air. And then the other line of the duct is going to have this suction, this vacuum thing attached to it. And they're going to try to suck all these particles out of the duck line. And that is how they clean your ducts. That's the basic concept of how they do it.

Now, think about how it's all squished together like that. There's two things that happen when they do it this way. One, that disruption process is not going to get every particle up into the air. And even the particles that it does get up into the air, the suction process is not going to be able to pull all of it out of the system. There's going to be leftover. There's going to be residual. That's going to be popped up and still moving through the system. And I've actually seen with clients who've had this done, that they react even more after the duct cleaning, because what happened is that the disruption pushed everything upward throughout the duct lines, and now they're settling kind of on higher surfaces in the duct so they aren't wedged as tight in because they got all messed around with. And then when they turn the air conditioner on, it's looser, and then it pushes it all through the house, and they actually react even more to it. So that's one of the challenges with cleaning ductwork.

The second thing is to think of, like, how much ductwork there is in your house, okay? So if you. If you really think about it, I mean, you can only see, like, where the vent is on your side, you know, and that's all that you think is there. But there's like, hundreds and hundreds of feet of ductwork that run throughout the house, and then it's all squished together. So think throughout those hundreds of feet, you then have. It's all condensed even more, which means that there's even more ductwork if you actually spread it out all the way. The real way, if you were going to try to clean flex duct, is that you would actually have to spread it all apart, which would get rid of all the grooves and everything, and then you would actually wipe it all and get all the particle and the dust out. And that's really how you would do it. But it's just not possible, you know. So the limitations on cleaning flex duct is pretty significant. And that's why, you know, I tell my clients.

If there's a high mold load or there's any sort of toxin in the ductwork, a mycotoxin, an endotoxin, which is a bacterial toxin, if those are in the system at all. I'm immediately telling them that if you want to do this right, and you want to make sure that you're getting rid of everything, you have to replace them.

Some clients, it doesn't work for all of them. So basically what they try to do is they try to clean it the best they can, and then they'll attach different technologies to the system, which include filtration as well as different bipolar ions. And I actually talked a lot about this in one of my previous episodes. I forget what episode it is. I think it might be episode five, where I talked about the different air filtration technologies and how they work together. So what they'll do is they'll replace or they'll clean the ductwork as best as they can. For the actual air handler unit, let me take a step back. So there's two pieces of an air conditioning system. There's the ductwork, and then there's the actual mechanical unit that. That the ductwork attaches to. Both of those things have to be addressed. If you're only cleaning ductwork and you don't address the actual mechanical unit, then you're just going to push more of the mold and toxins and stuff throughout the ductwork. It's going to start all over again. So you have to address the mechanical unit, too. The mechanical unit is difficult to clean as well, because there's a bunch of joints and micro cavities where metal attaches to each other. These different places where particles can wedge into. So again, when we're looking at what the plan is, do we think it could be cleaned? Do we think it needs to be replaced? It's all dependent on the testing we do in the systems. If there's mold in there, how significant is the load? What types of molds are we seeing? Is it a lot? If that's the case, then we're going to lean more towards replacement. If there are any sort of toxins in there, like I mentioned, mycotoxins, endotoxins, then we're going to lean towards replacement. But for those who are not able to replace the H vac systems, and basically, we want to try to clean them as best as possible and then attach some of the technology pieces that will help to continuously kind of protect it moving forward and try to help.

Deactivate any of what might be left in the ductwork as well through the ionization process. So that is the quick overview on duct cleaning. Again, do you have to totally replace them? It really depends on what's happening inside of them. That's where the testing is really important. And it also depends on your level of sensitivity and taking those things into consideration and understanding that. So hope bear2424, hope that one's helpful for you. Thanks so much for listening for subscribing, and.

Yeah, that's what I got for you. So thank you so much.

Okay, question number two is from NYCM.

On Instagram. So you actually. Two questions for me. I'm going to split these up for you. So the first question is, can mycotoxins from black mold attach to long human hair? I mean, yeah, it can. So, I mean, these are just particles, right? So particles are going to settle on us. They're going to settle on our belongings in the house, on our clothing, on our bodies.

It's going to be a normal thing. Does that mean it can never come out? No, it's. It doesn't mean that at all.

I don't think that we need to be so worried about ourselves and what's in our hair and all this stuff. Let me tell you a story. It's going to be about clothing, but it's going to help you kind of illustrate why I'm not super concerned about mold and toxins like getting into your hair, even on your pets. I get asked that question a lot too. What if it's in our pet's hair? What do we do? The answer is you're not going to shave your pets completely bald. Okay? So you don't have to do that. And you're not going to shave your own head completely bald. So you don't have to do that either. So I'm going to tell you about this client of mine. His name was Mark.

He's a pretty wealthy guy and he lived in this high rise and he also had a separate very large house. And so what he was doing is he was moving from the large house, which we had found a variety of mold problems in. We had seen mycotoxins in the house, and he was moving into this kind of newer high riser, trying to get out of the moldy environment while they were going to remediate. And so his question was, hey, can I take my clothes with me? I don't want to bring this stuff into the new house. And he was concerned about it. And so we talked about kind of the two criteria, right? So one, I will tell you this. If you physically see mold growing on your clothing or your belongings or something like that, for me that's immediate discard. Growth is different than just particles settling on something. Those are two very different things. Growth, just like with regular remediation, you got to remove it. Okay? Particle setting on stuff, it's really just a cleaning process and just understanding how the cleaning process works. So when we're talking about your hair, it's not that there's mold growing all over your head, right? It's just that there's particles that are settling in your hair. So what does that mean? It means that we need to clean it properly. So for this story that I'm sharing for Mark for his clothing. So he basically had. He wanted to do some testing specifically on his clothes. He wanted to know if cleaning it was going to be effective. He had the financial means to do this, which is cool because I've used this as a case study for a bunch of my clients afterwards. And now I know that you can clean stuff. And so we did two things. He took one batch of clothes and he cleaned them through a washing machine, just a regular washing machine. His doctor had recommended that he use a solution that was a mix of ammonia and water. So he did like half ammonia or half diluted ammonia, I should say. So I think it's like a 3% ratio, but half diluted ammonia and then just half water, replace that or use that as his laundry detergent. So he didn't use laundry detergent, but that's what he used. And it was actually his doctor's recommendation. Some folks might not react to ammonia. There's other types of cleaning things that you can do. It's not so much about the solution you're using. What it's about though is that when particles are basically settling into contents and fabrics, especially into fragments, fabrics. You ever watch those like Tide or Gain commercials and they show you, like the close up, magnified view of this is how your clothing gets clean. The, the gain detergent gets in there and it pulls out all the gross black stuff and you see like the fibers and you see all the stuff, like coming off of it. And then they say, yeah, now your clothes are clean. It's kind of the same idea. So these particles are basically just kind of getting into kind of the pores and fabrics. So whether it's clothing or whether it's your hair, they're just kind of settling into that stuff. Right. So the process of cleaning it is really just disruption and removing the particle that's in there. So with Mark, what we did in the washing machine, he used that detergent and we washed it. And then we retested the clothing afterwards. So we tested it before. There was high level of mold. There was mycotoxins on the clothing. Tested it afterwards, immediately after the wash. Mold was much, much more kind of normal. You know, there's going to be a little, obviously just because it's everywhere, but it wasn't like there was a massive source or anything going on. And the mycotoxins were gone. And it was because the process of the water, like pushing through all the fibers and everything, it basically disrupted and got all those particles out of there. And so it's the same thing that's going to happen with your hair. Right? So basically, like, if we're just washing our hair and really doing a good job washing our hair, you're going to get a lot of that particle out of there. Same thing is going to happen with your pets, you know, you know, anything that's on our body. The truth of the matter is if you get particles that are setting on your body, you're not going to shave your body bald. You're not going to, like, cut skin off of your body. Right? I mean, it's. There's a level that we have to. We kind of have to understand. There's. There's like a line that we're not going to cross on certain things. We're going to be diligent, right? We're going to be precautious or cautious. We're going to take the right precautions, but we also have to make sure that we don't let our minds go down this rabbit hole that is going to create this, like, prolonged buildup of anxiety and fear and all these other things. Because when we start doing that, that actually can create manifest other medical problems, right? So, like, mental health is so important with all this stuff too. And so I just encourage everyone to try not to, like, get into the Facebook groups and start reading all this stuff of these people that are telling all these doom and gloom stories. Here's the truth. You know nothing about that person. You don't know where they were getting their direction from. They. They honestly probably don't know what they're doing. And. And so they were taking extreme precautions in order to make sure that they covered everything off. A lot of the times their efforts were not effective because they just didn't do it right the first time. And so because of that, they assume that there's no way to remediate, there's no way clean. It's just because they didn't know how, but because they didn't do it the right way and they still reacted, they now assume that they have to burn their whole house down and get rid of everything they own. And that's not always true. I know we get in these Facebook groups and stuff. I know we're asking these questions, and I get it. We're looking for information. There's not a lot of good information out there. But just because it's there doesn't mean that it's real and it's true. I'm going to do my best to share with you everything that I know. Hopefully my opinion might weigh a little more than, like, Joe Smith and somewhere.

Who knows what his deal is. So that's the deal with your hair. Try not to stress out too much about it. If you wash your hair, it's going to get clean, same way that this guy's clothes got clean. To finish up that story, we also did a secondary test on clothing that he sent to a dry cleaner. So half of the clothes he did through washing machine, half of the clothes he did through dry cleaner. Both ways got rid of the mycotoxins. All right, so it's all about this disruption process to get the particles out of, like, the pores or the fibers or whatever we're dealing with. So, yeah, so that's the quick. I don't know how quick it was, but that's what I got for you on being able to help maintain that cleanliness for your body and being concerned about it settling on yourself. So thanks so much for that question. And we got one more for you coming up right now.

Okay, and our last question for today's show is another one from nycmon Instagram. Again, when I post stories that ask about questions, fill them in and then we can answer them on these shows. Right. So we got a couple questions from NYCM here. So the second question is how can I disinfect and clean my laptop of mold when I move from my moldy apartment? So I've actually gotten this question a lot about electronics in general. And the big concern about the electronics for people is that sometimes there's like a little fan in the electronics and they're concerned that the fan is pulling in these particles into the device, whatever it is, and that that is going to be brought with us. And technically, yes, that can be happening. Okay. I would tell you, in the grand scheme of things, I wouldn't be as concerned about, like a laptop and bringing that with me and having that have a massive effect. Now, if you were incredibly, incredibly hypersensitive, it might. Okay, so just keep in mind, like, I don't know, everyone's health situation. Some people are so sensitive, they just can't have anything around that was in a moldy environment. And I understand that. I've definitely worked with some of those people. A lot of people are not though, right? A lot of times what's happening is that they're in this environment and their immune funnel, which is this concept I kind of share a lot of, where basically your immune system is like a funnel. And so as you're in your house and you're walking around through life, your body is taking in all these different environmental contaminants through the top of the funnel. And if you think about how a funnel works, it gets more narrow at the bottom and then whatever you're pouring in the top comes out the bottom, but it comes out slower. Our immune system basically has to process all these toxins and contaminants and stuff that our body's taking in. That takes time. And because it takes time, it basically slows down the flow of those toxins coming out of the bottom of the funnel. And that's this place where people start reacting. So people's funnels are different sizes. And this is what the crazy part is, right? So, like, if your immune system is functioning very well and you're able to detox properly and effectively, then the bottom of your funnel might be wider. And if the bottom of your funnel is wider, then then it can allow the liquid that's coming through the top to move through more quickly, which basically means the environmental contaminants and toxins that you're being exposed to are able to be detoxed more effectively more quickly, which means you could, in theory, be exposed to more of them without your funnel overflowing other people with really bad detoxification pathways. The end of your funnel, the bottom of it is really narrow. And so what happens is that the toxins and mold that you're putting in the top of the funnel builds up faster over the top of the funnel because it's taking longer to go through. And then eventually it overflows. And when your immune funnel overflows, that's when your body goes into the state of chronic inflammation, and that's when a lot of these problems happen because you're not detoxing properly. So I wanted to kind of set it up with that, because now we're going to talk about these individual items. So if you're removing yourself from a moldy environment, you're going to be cutting out a whole bunch of the mold and toxins that are coming in the top end of your funnel because you're not going to be exposed to it anymore. Which means that your body, even if your detoxification pathways aren't great, they're going to be more effective. Okay? So a lot of times people are able to basically clean a lot of these things and bring them with them and not feel reactions, because while it still might be adding a little bit of mold or something into their funnel, the overall load in general is much less. It's not going to overflow as significantly, and so your body's not going to react as heavily. Okay, So I don't know if this is going to be the deal for you, but this is a general concept in how this works when I'm talking with people about electronics. So let's talk about laptops specifically, because that was your question.

Most of it is solid surface. Actually, almost all of it is solid surface. Anything that's a solid surface can be surface cleaned. And part of the cleaning protocol in your entire house is wiping down all of the solid surfaces. We just apply that same concept to your individual items, like this. So you could use a product that's called Benefect. I like that one. It's a more botanical blend. It's like essential oil based. So it's not a heavy chemical, which seems to be better for people who may have developed a more chemical sensitivity because of their mold exposure, which is a thing that happens. So that's a good product. But you could also even use more natural things. You don't have to use that particular product. There's other things that you can use too. Whichever path that you go down, basically what you're going to do is that you're going to wipe and clean your laptop. You're going to wipe it and you're going to clean it. That's going to help a big chunk of it because the toxins or whatever settling on it, there's not a lot of pores for it to wedge its way into your laptop. So the question is then. Well, I've got all these, these gaps, like where my computer keys are, right? Like dust gets in there. Maybe if it's a laptop that folds over, then you've got like the wet, like the, you know, the hinge that folds over and sometimes dust builds up in there. So before you do the wipe down, what I would do is take it outside, make sure you're wearing a respirator mask because you're going to aerosolize some stuff. But you know, those like little, those little cans of compressed air, you can basically compress air throughout. All of those cracks and gaps, pop out as much of that stuff as you can get it out of there, right. And then you can wipe the whole thing down and a lot of those particles are going to be gone at that point. The last thing you could do is if you have a laptop that has a fan, like an exposed fan at the bottom, and you're really concerned about it pulling in particles into the laptop, then a lot of those laptops, you could actually open up the bottom panel and pull the bottom of the laptop, open it and it'll expose you. It's like the motherboard and all the stuff that's in there and you'll see the fan that's in there. So you got two things. You could either just replace the fan, right? If you replace the fan, all the components in there, then you're going to be pulling a lot of that stuff out and it's not going to be in there. Or you could just clean it and then try to also clean the interior of the computer as well. If you feel like you need to go that far, you could do that. And again, you just kind of wipe. You could actually air compress the inside of that too.

Okay, so remember, if you guys have questions that you want help with, just go to Mold Masterclass on Instagram. Keep an eye out. Like I said, once a week I'm going to be putting up a story that's asking for questions. So keep an eye out for that. Submit your questions. You can also comment on the different posts and things and if I see them there, we'll try to answer some of those too. But this entire show is about helping you guys. So I'm definitely going to be sharing some stuff with you guys and doing some teaching and doing some lessons. But I also want to actually answer your guys questions because at the end of the day, everybody's situation is a little different. And you can listen to experts talk about stuff all day long, but if it's not being applied to you, sometimes it's hard to wrap your head around. So this show is a hybrid of both of those things. I'm really excited for all the participation. I've already gotten a bunch of new subscribers that have come in since we've launched this. We're only six episodes in, which is very encouraging and exciting. So thanks again so much everyone. We will talk to you next time.

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