106: Is a sample bad? / Prioritizing remediation / Home kits vs Professionals

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.

Hello. What is going on, everyone? So today we're on. We're doing another episode live here on Clubhouse. So for any of you who pop in, I'll be here. If you're listening to this after the fact, obviously, anymore, but I guess that makes sense.

All right, so we've got me, we've got Rachel, who's jumped on, who is on my team, my knowledge strategist. On my team. Say, hey, Rach.

Hey, everybody.

Hey. So she does what it sounds like she does. She helps me figure out how to spread the knowledge. That's what the knowledge strategist does.

That is exactly what I do. Yes.

That's a great job, too.

Anyway, so. Yeah, so we put out this.

Story yesterday on asking for different topics for the show today, and I saw a couple that were kind of like, similar theme stuff, so I just thought I'd wrap them all up into one general kind of concept here. So that's the idea. So there was. There's different questions about, like, how to. How to interpret different types of samples. Like, how do you know if it's good? How do you know if it's bad? You know, I don't feel like my inspector actually knows what he's looking at. Like, somebody said that that one spore of, you know, of cotomium was okay, even though, like, you know, you're concerned about, like, all this stuff. Right. So I figured today I would do sort of breakdown on how I kind of look at that stuff.

And, yeah, that's kind of kind of the idea. Am I. Are you hearing me? Am I cutting out? Are we good? Just want to make sure everything's good.

I can hear you.

Okay, good. I saw this little, like, warning thing pop up. So I just want to make sure. Okay, cool. So I am, you know, just going to get started, I guess. So here's the deal. There's a lot of different types of samples. This is the first thing. So if there's a general question on, like, is this sample okay, I saw one of X type of mold or whatever. It kind of depends on what sample you're doing. Right. Like, if. If I kind of Want to focus more on like source level testing because that's really where the bulk of people, it's the bulk of what everyone's doing anyway. So that means like AEHR tests, surface test, basically. Right. I did a whole breakdown on these different sample types I think a couple episodes ago when I was talking on post remediation framework and like the order in which you do post testing and kind of what the purpose is and all of those. So I think that was two episodes ago. So feel free to go look back and, or listen back to that. But basically we're talking an air sample or a swab basically that's kind of what we're going to be talking about now. Now when you're interpreting, you know, somebody like me who's sitting behind the computer, I get the results back, I'm looking at them. So there's kind of like a standard language that's used which is in, it's in the industry guidebooks, the guidebooks called the IICRCS520. It's basically like the standard guide for remediation that everybody sort of references all the time. It's funny, they reference it. I don't feel like a lot of people actually look at it that much, but they reference it. But anyways, so part of that is basically classifying if a sample is a problem or not, right? That's part of it, right. So the whole thing, the whole flow of this is you go and you go in, you do this in depth visual, which I talk about all the time, right? And then you find areas that you think look like a potential problem. Then you sample those areas and you see if they are. Once the samples come back, then the next step is, well, what the hell does this mean? Is this actually bad or is it not bad? Basically? Right. And so that's kind of like the flow. So we're at that stage like is this bad, is this not bad? Right? And so the, the way that, that is kind of written up a lot and we do it too because at least in the way that we initially write stuff up, we then have further conversations on follow up calls and stuff with clients. But the way things are written are kind of basically written up is they'll refer to three different conditions. They're called mole conditions. There's condition one, condition two, condition three. Okay. And so basically what they mean is condition one essentially means that it's a normal fungal ecology. Basically the sample's fine, there's nothing weird. Right. That's kind of what one means. Condition two, let's go to three, we'll come back to two. Condition three means that there is basically a source issue there, right? We found a source. That's what three means. Condition two, backing up a step means that there's an elevation here as the result of a condition three somewhere else, meaning that the counts here are elevated because there's a source somewhere else, and that source somewhere else is making this sample over here elevated. That's what a 2 is. So there's confusion around the condition, I think, partially because condition two is a weird dependence upon condition three kind of conditions. So sometimes people don't understand what that means, really.

So.

So hopefully that kind of breaks down what that means a little bit. But beyond that.

It's looking at these conditions and not evaluating them as if they're a scale of severity. Right. And this is kind of. This is one of the things that sparked this idea in my head, so that's why I'm doing this today. So I had a client, they were going through this, and they were saying, well, this area is a condition three, and this area is a condition two. So should that means that this area is worse than this area? Right. And I was like, no, that's not what it means. So the thing on the conditions has nothing to do with severity whatsoever. Okay? It's a classification. It's not a ranking of severity. So that's like one really big, like, thing to get across because there are times where people will look at a report. And honestly, most of the reports that we do, because we don't do a lot of sampling and kind of open spaces. So everything that we do for the most part, Rachel can attest to this because she's been diving through all of our reports lately for a project we're working on is either condition one or condition three. That's typically what everything is.

Then you just have a bunch of threes, and it's like, well, how do I know what's worse and what's not worse? We'll get to that in a second.

But if there are times where you have a two and a three and people think, oh, well, the three is worse than the two. Not necessarily. I mean, the two could be really elevated. Here's an example. Let's say you're in an attic and there is mold growing on, like, the trusses and the framing and the sheathing, all stuff in the attic. And so you do a swab sample of that, you're directly on the source at that point. You know where it's coming from. If that sample Comes back and it's a problem. That's a condition three, right? That's a source level issue. Now, let's say you did an air sample in the attic too, okay? So if you do an air sample in the attic and that comes up elevated, that's technically a condition too, okay? Because the source isn't just the air throughout the entire attic. The source is the framing and stuff that's impacted, right? So the source is impacting the air sample that's floating around in nearby space. So technically, the condition two is the air sample and the condition three is the swab. It's on the framing and the decking, right? So it's kind of how it breaks down. Now, does that mean that the condition two issue in the attic is less important than the condition three? No, that's not what it means. Okay. And so that's like a really big distinction to make. The conditions are not about severity. It's just a classification scale, okay? So that's kind of the initial sort of thing. So when you're looking at your lab reports, when all these, you know, all these people do their lab reports and they send you all this stuff and you see all these different conditions somewhere, like, that's how you break it down. That's what they all mean, okay? And so then another question that comes up a lot with me after we kind of go through this stuff is, listen, not everyone can do all of this remediation, right? I mean, let's just assume there's a lot going on, I guess, like I'm just making assumptions. A big product or project.

I'm actually looking something up right now on my phone that I'm going to reference while we're talking. But not everyone can do everything, right? So then it's about.

Prioritizing and how do we kind of get a feel for what areas are we going to focus on? Maybe more than other areas, right? And here's the thing. If you're like incredibly mold sensitive, obviously if there's things left in the house, it can trigger you, right? But at the same time, if you're reducing a significant amount of whatever's moving around your house and what your exposure looks like, then that's less stuff that your body has to deal with. So, like, that's not a bad thing, right? And if you can't afford to do everything right away, or for whatever reason, you can't do everything right away. But you are kind of in the position where like, listen, I'm here, I'm not leaving. I need to Start incrementally making this place better. If your two options are, I can't do it all right now, so I'm just going to sit here and suffer for the rest of my life, or I can't do it all right now, but I could do a little bit and I can make an incremental improvement that I might not necessarily feel immediately. Like, keep that in mind. You might not necessarily feel that immediately, but if you're removing sources kind of throughout time, then that's less and less stuff that's contributing overall. Right? So there's nothing wrong with that if that's the path you have to go. So then the question gets into, like, how do you prioritize what you look at and what you don't? If I can't look at the conditions as a way to just tell me that one area is more worse than the other, and this is kind of where your consultant comes into play a little bit. And unfortunately, a lot of them just don't really look at it very well, in my opinion. So I'm literally going to give you my framework for how I prioritize stuff. Okay? So basically.

If I'm looking across the board, again, this is just source samples, right? So we're not talking anything else. We're just talking, like, know, swab test, air test, that type of thing. So the first thing that I look at is specific mold types that pop up. If I'm seeing stachybotryous or cotomium or Fusarium in a source sample, it's going to immediately move into, like, a priority one, like, tier one of the list. Okay. And for a couple reasons. One, we know that those are very toxigenic molds right? Now, this doesn't mean that, like, species of Aspergillus and Penicillium are not toxigenic. Like, we know that too. Right. I specifically didn't say those, but there's a reason I didn't put those here. And the reason I put those here is because stack and catamium and Fusarium require a lot more water in order to thrive and grow. Okay? So if we see those things growing there, then there is basically a larger impact that is either potentially going on now or has, you know, gone on at some point in the past. And, you know, maybe it got fixed, but the issue is still there. Right? So if you're seeing those, then that basically there's maybe a more significant water event that kind of created that. And if that's the case, you might just be seeing the tip of the iceberg on a sample there. Right. Because a lot of times stack doesn't come up in an air sample. And so if I do a wall cavity in a wall and I pick up one or two raw count a stack in a wall, it's a big red flag because they don't aerosolize super easily. So if I'm picking it up, then there could be a bigger problem back there. Right. And so that's kind of the first thing. So when I look at those three, if I see one of those three, I'll kind of stick it into tier one. Even if the levels are minimal. Right. Has nothing to do with concentration level, nothing to do with. With the amount. It's just present. If it's there, it's going to fall into tier one. Okay.

Then after that, when I'm trying to think of is there anything else that I would put in tier one?

This.

Then I start looking and this is where it gets more subjective. Then I start looking at all the samples across the board. There's times where we go in a house and there's like 20 things that we found, right? So let's say I have 20 samples in front of me. I'm looking at all of them. I'm like, okay, is there some sort of natural tear break that happens in these? Based on the. On now we're looking at concentration, the quantity, right? Total spore, total load. Right. That's kind of what we're looking at at that point. Then I look at that and I'm like, is there some sort of natural tear break that happens? Let's say you had. I don't know, let's say you had 10 samples you're looking at. Right? And let's say four of them, your total counts are. And I'm just literally throwing numbers. Don't put any context to them. I'm just making stuff up. Let's say four of them. The total count is over 10,000 count that we found on the support counts. And then the other ones are like, you know, less than that. To varying degrees, less than that. So let's say that's it. So if I see like a pretty. If I see a break and a number of samples are kind of falling above a certain range or something, I'll kind of take those out and then also stick those in the tier one. Okay. So that's kind of how I look at it. It's when you get past like hard black and white rules of if this mold is there, this mold is there, this mold is there. Then we're calling it Tier 1. When you get past the black and white stuff, like I said, it gets a little more subjective.

That's kind of how I do it. Right. I'm sure other people do it different ways. That's the way that I do it. And then what I end up doing with my clients actually is that I'll send a color coded kind of follow up email that I change the color of the remediation recommendations and I give like a key. So like red is tier one, blue is tier two, green is tier three. And so I'll send that to them and then they can look in their email that I send to them. And then, you know, let's say a wall in this room had to be removed and let's say a shower in the bathroom had a problem. It had to be whatever, whatever's going on, that part of the remediation will be highlighted blue or green. And that's how I send it to them. So it makes it like really easy for them versus having to go and like look at the reports and try to figure out the colors and try to figure like I just stick it on the actual recommendation to make it easier for them.

So, so that's how I do it. So I typically do three tiers if it makes sense. I definitely do two tiers for sure. I sometimes do three. If there's some other ones that are like really low at the bottom and it could be like questionable if the result even is problem. But maybe there was moisture in the area that I picked up and just my gut tells me I'm not happy. Even though the, the lab result says that technically it's not something to be super concerned about. Right. So if there's something like that going on, I'll still put those in there and I'll still put recommendations for those things, but I'll put them down in the lower tier because again, we can only go off of what we have, the comparison points or the samples. Right. That's all I can go off of. And when we do this tiering stuff again, it's not about saying one area is more important. Right. I said at the top for remediation, at the best chance to succeed, you know, you got to do the whole thing. Right. Because you have to remove exposure. Right. So if we're consciously and purposefully not doing things, you know, you can't do it all at this time, whatever you're phasing into it, we just have to like manage our expectation. You have to reset what the expectation.

Things remediate. And I'm going to be doing four of them. These four might seem to be the most significant four, but there's still six other things that are having some level of issue. They're still going to have some level of impact. Right. So the expectation on what, what post testing looks like in terms of the whole house and what a whole house clean looks like and even, you know, maybe what you might be feeling in terms of your reactions when you walk into the house later, like all that stuff has to be recalibrated based on what you're doing. Right? But, but if you are going in and you kind of understand that this is basically a framework that you can use to kind of work through the prioritizing stuff. So. So that was just some stuff that I wanted to talk through. I didn't say this at the top. My bad. If anyone does have questions, if you guys want to ping Rachel on the back end and she can take a look at it and then kind of set you up on the stage or I guess honestly there's not that many people in here. I guess if somebody just wants to raise their hand and you have a question, that's fine. If not, that's cool too. You don't feel like you have to.

And let's see. I feel like there's maybe one more thing I was going to try to do. Let's see. So I covered all this. I covered all this. I'm looking at all my notes.

So there was another thing about test kits and stuff that came through which kind of fell into this. So let me just kind of get into that too. Like the difference of testing it was basically like, what's the difference in like having like an at home test kit versus having like a professional come to my house and do something? Right. That was kind of the second question that came in here. So there's kind of varying levels of that, right? So the first off, just the actual samples themselves, right. So the, you know, a mold plate, for example, I was just talking to a client about this the other day. She's like, we're, we're going out. I think we're doing their place today. I was doing our pre inspection sort of onboarding call with them yesterday. Like, hey, I have all these mold plate samples that we did. Do you want to see them? And I was like, honestly, no. Like they're, they're, in my opinion, they're pretty useless. So it's not super helpful. Right. So I would say the type of test that you're Doing, obviously, is part of this equation, right? If you're doing these, you know, petri dish tests and stuff in the house, like, listen, there, there's always a little mold floating around, right? I mean, you're not. You're never in, like, a net zero house, right? You're never in a net zero mold house. So to think that these petri dishes aren't going to grow something when something lands on is kind of nuts, right? Like, something is going to land on it most likely. Right? Like, that's going to happen. So, so then to look at and be like, oh, something's growing. I'm freaking out. Like, that's crazy. The other thing about petri dishes is that not everything grows on every dish because the kind of, like the gelatin stuff that's in there is called agar. It's like the food source. So not all of them, not all molds will grow on all agars, basically. So you could have different, like, petri dishes that support and don't support different mold types to grow. So then you get this other variable that gets thrown in there. And then, you know, the last thing is that those, those dishes are only accounting for what's called a viable spore. Right? Viable means that it's ready to grow. Most stuff that's flying around the house.

Meaning that even if it landed somewhere, it's not ready to grow right then. Right. So you're then missing out on all of that. Right? There's just a lot that you miss out on in those. So anyway, so that was, that was why. Right. So I guess the first, the first piece to that is. It kind of depends. Like, if you're doing a mole kit and your kit is. Is a petri dish thing, then the difference of testing with a mole kit versus a professional is. I'll just say me is I'm not using those. Right? So that's. That's one of the first things. So then let's. Let's get into.

The last couple episodes. I'm not really going to get into that. Hermes are easy to collect, so you could do that on your own. It's no different if you collect one versus, like, I collect it, right. Maybe where we collect it from is a little different, but the actual collection process is the same. It's analyzed the same way. And then if you did do an ERMI in your house, you know, I created the ERMI code, you can plug it into the ERMI code and kind of see what that means for your house, how many sources you can expect to Find in your house based on that and a bunch of other stuff. So that part. That part's pretty easy. Ermi's are really good screening tests. They're not good for knowing where the source is. You should not be doing an ERMI in every single room of your house. It's a waste of money. That's not the point of ermi. Right. The point of Burmi is to do a screening test. What's moving around? What am I being exposed to? How many potential sources are there moving through the house, and do I need to have an inspection? That's basically what the point of an urmia is. Right? So you can. You basically can do that. Right. I kind of want to give this analogy. I was talking to. Talking to my wife about.

Anatomy. Hasn't been actually. Is it still on? I actually don't even know if it's still on, but I haven't watched it. It's Anatomy. And we were talking about how, like, it would refer people to shepherd, who's, like, the best brain surgeon in the world or whatever. Right? And, like, some people were, like, kind of weirded out by that, I guess, because it was her husband. And then, like, the response is like, well, I could refer you to not the best brain surgeon in the world, and you could take your chances there. Right? And that was, like, kind of the response. And anyway, so we were, like, kind of talking about that, and it just. It just sort of made me think, like, like, not every brain surgeon is the same. Right? Like, Derek Shepard in the. In Grey's Anatomy is, like, the best surgeon ever in the world. And then you probably have the surgeon, you know, at the hospital in, I don't know, North Dakota somewhere, who. Maybe he's a brain surgeon, but he's probably not as good as Eric Shepard. Right. And so when this question came in, it just kind of brought that conversation up. We kind of set it as a joke when it. When we saw it. But.

Like, defining professional, right? Like, like, what is a professional? Just because somebody.

In this fictional analogy that I'm just making up on the spot. So you have Derek Shepard, and you have North Dakota brain surgeon. They both went to medical school, Right. They both have the same, you know, certification or qualification or degree or whatever. Right. They both have that. But one of them has done a lot more in terms of education and learning and has had more opportunities to work on more complex cases and blah, blah, blah than the other one has. Right. So are they actually the same level of professional? No. Right. They're not. And the Same thing goes in the mold industry, too, right? Like, so when someone asks, like, what's the difference of this versus a professional? I think the first thing we have to wrap our head around is that not all, quote, professionals are this same. Right? And so then the difference a lot of times is not me versus professional, but it's me versus certain level of professional versus top level of professional. Right? And there's like, it's more like three comparison points instead of two. Right? And so you know the difference if you're going from somebody who really, really knows who, like, from your own to someone who really knows what they're doing, the difference is actually understanding, like, where the mold is hiding that you can't see what test to use to actually figure that out and how to blend testing together in order to map the whole picture out so you can fix everything properly. Right? That's the difference between you and top level professional right now. The difference between you and kind of like most of your local inspectors. Right? So, like, that difference is.

Honestly, not a whole lot. Right, Right. Like, they have a moisture meter. You could get a moisture meter. They have an infrared camera. You can get an infrared camera, right? They come in and they can collect swab samples. You technically could call the lab and have them send you swab samples. Right? Now they have an air sampling pump, and they take air samples. It's more expensive to get. You're typically not buying one of those, but you could rent one from the lab for a day for, like, 30 or 40 bucks could do that.

And so the equipment and the tools aren't really the things that are separating you. Right? I mean, they have all of it. It's easier for them to have it. Right? But you could have all of that. Right? So then what's the difference? Right. The problem is, if they're coming in and they're just doing an air sample in the middle of your room, you know, you could do that.

Your room, and you could put a moisture meter around your toilets, and you could look at stuff with an infrared camera. Like, what's the big difference? The big separation point between you and whoever you bring in needs to be the process and the flow they follow to figure out where the source of the problem is coming from. That needs to be the big difference. Okay? And so it's not about the kits. It's not about the samples that they're collecting. It's not about any of that. It's not about, like, the tools and the analysis. It's not about that stuff. It's about the process and the framework and the flow and how and how they put it all together. And then the follow up consultation stuff, that's what it's about, right? So I see this question a lot, all the time, in varying ways of like, well, what can I test on myself? What, you know, what's the difference? Why should I do this, this, this, that or the other? It's, it's really about like what the end goal is and you got to look at like why you're investing. All right, so like you have these three tiers of people. You have you, who's the cheapest to do stuff. You have kind of mid tier local inspector who's going to be more expensive than you. But honestly the information they give you is probably not going to be that great. So like you spent extra money but like, was it kind of a waste because they did five air samples in the middle of your house and it told you nothing. Yet you still have hidden mold sources behind eight walls and they had no idea what was going on. Like, so I would actually argue I'd rather you do something than pay the 800 or thousand dollars for that guy to come in and do it. Right? Like, like do your own screening first and see what you can find first. Really wanted to get, you know, kind of hack it a little bit. Then instead of paying that inspector 800 or a thousand bucks, you can enroll in Wolfinders Method for basically the same cost and then you can actually learn like what I look for when I go through the house. And you can do it all on your own. Right. So that's, I would, I would be skipping local inspector completely. I honestly feel like that you could do all of it better than they can if you just get a little direction and training and not like crazy training. Like literally I made a program that teaches people to go through and do this. Right? So I think that you could do that and I wouldn't be spending the money on the mid tier stuff. Right. And then the last thing is obviously getting like, you know what, you know, some of the people that really know how to go through the house. And there's a big difference there, right? There's definitely a difference there. You're getting more, the consultation aspect of it. You're getting more interpretation that comes with it. There's, you know, there's a difference there. So that's kind of different. I would say it's not about the test that you're doing, it's about the people that you're surrounding yourself with and the consultants that you have and, you know, kind of, kind of the whole process in general. So that's kind of everything I had for today.

I mean, if no one in here has any questions or anything, that's cool, we could wrap it up and then we could jump on.

Next week and do it again. So I'll keep two or three seconds and if not, thank you everybody for listening. Appreciate it. If you guys like the pod, by the way, and wanted to leave a review or something, that would be pretty cool. So, you know, go ahead and do that, go ahead and do that when you're done listening, if you want to leave a quick review for us. So a couple hands popped up here. We got to do these relatively quick guys. Okay? So I'm gonna kind of bring you up and, and we'll do quick, quick kind of question and quick answer. So. Brian, come on up. Here we go.

Brian, what's up man?

You there?

Uh oh. Uh oh, Looks like Brian. Looks like Brian fell off. He's not here. I'm going to move you back into the audience and if, when you're ready, you can raise your hand again if we're still got time. So we'll Kira here real quick.

And she'll be ready.

Good morning.

Hey, Kira, what's up?

Hi, how are you? Hey. What you just said was the most perfect thing I've heard you say on any of your podcasts.

There's like 106 of them. This is the best thing. What was it?

What was, was the. So in my particular situation, we had a number of mid level inspectors who missed many, many things. And thanks to Mold Finders method, I became better than they were at this. So we. That was the most perfect thing that you said is that it's about the process and the framework and.

Oh, are you still there?

Yeah, I am.

Oh, sorry, we cut out for a second.

Yeah, you've been cutting out. You've been cutting out a little periodically throughout the whole presentation foundation.

Boo. All right. Yeah, I gotta, I gotta figure this out, but me switching to this has made my connection stuff a little finicky. So if that keeps happening, I'm gonna have to not do this anymore. But anyways. Well, good. I'm glad. I'm, I'm glad that that resonated and made sense and I'm glad that you were able to go through and, and put method to use. That's awesome. So I mean, maybe real quick, like what was like maybe the one or two, I don't know, kind of big things you took out of method that you kind of figured out before you used it.

Number one is.

Well, I did it two summers ago, so I'm doing this from recollection. Number one was just using my eyes. Bubbling, peeling, cracking. Actually, that could have. Is. What was the second program called?

The original, original one, which was like four years ago, was Mold Masterclass.

Okay. I've done both of them, actually. I purchased both of them. The first one was like, was really good. And that actually got me started. This last one was. Okay, I need to actually even pay more attention in terms of visuals. We need to look a little bit more at peeling, cracking, bubbling, really subtle stuff in our case, because we've taken care of the major stuff. So that was really good with a lot of your visuals.

Awesome. Yeah, that's great. I mean, that's like the toughest part, right? The toughest part.

But I do have one quick question.

Yeah.

Although I wanted to just say what you just said. The process and framework and structure and intelligence of said mold inspector is way more important than their tools.

And that's. That was really perfect. Actually. The question I have is this. You know, I've told you a couple times that I did Serial Hermes because I didn't feel like I had, as a DIYer, a whole lot of other tools. And I actually do know fair number of people on some of these. The better mold Facebook groups. Not. Not kind of just some of the ones where people freak out at everything. But, you know, people who are really trying to do inspection and testing and move on with their lives. Many people are doing it, are diying it with only a set of six plates, you know, as a tool. And I probably spent, I don't know, a thousand dollars in our first year putting them out, comparing them, just to get a sense of the score of the work. And what was the worst thing you said to me last week? That ermies are not a great post remediation tool. And you don't like the plates. And so you should probably know that there are people who, you know, either you're busy or, you know, they're not able to afford you at this time or a good inspector. But there's a lot of people doing DIY by cobbling together plates and ermies and visual inspection. And when you said just now you can call a lab possibly and rent a pump for a day or get swabs, that would be really cool if you actually elucidate on that just a little bit. Because I could have saved myself $1,500 by not doing serial Hermes, because I didn't have another option for DIY testing. And I actually did talk with Corey, you know, your business partner, and you guys were really slammed a couple summers ago, and so we didn't pursue that. And so that's how I got back to diying it. But there's a lot of people doing that.

Yeah, no, that's a good question and a good point. Yeah. I mean, here's the thing. Is that a lot of folks. Kira, would you mind muting for me or. Actually, we're gonna.

I would not.

Thank you. Thanks for the question and the comments, too. Appreciate it.

So, yeah, to that point, I know that Hermes and mold plates are, like, more easily accessible, right? So then.

Sorry, I think I cut out. So I know that mold plates and Hermes are more easily accessible. And so then that's what people are basically using to go throughout. Listen, the thing of Hermes, right, is that the airflow moves through the whole house. So, like, you could use them to try to narrow down specific rooms or different things like that. Like, it's not that it can't necessarily work that way. Like, and that's how a lot of people use them. It. It can be helpful to do it that way. Right. The thing is, it's just really expensive to do it that way. So when I say that, like, you shouldn't be doing them all over the house, it's honestly, the cost is just super expensive to do it that way. And the truth is, just from what Kira said, it's less about knowing what's settling on surfaces in a room and more about understanding the signs of where mold is hiding. Because that's what we're trying to get to, right? We're not just trying to get to cleaning the room. We're trying to find where the source is behind the wall or in the cab or wherever it is in the room. Right. And so that's kind of what Kira was talking about with Millfinder's method, and some of the things that it teaches you is that, like, that's where it gets to. Right? And in terms of, like, renting pumps and different things like that, I mean, labs don't typically have a whole lot of them available. It's not, like, a service. They're, like, promoting to people, you know, But I've definitely, like, we've been in a situation where we're like, oh, man, we need. We need another pump. You know, maybe it was a really big house. There's more going on. There's. We just needed an extra pump for whatever reason, you Know, we come with a number of them, but every now, you know, one of them, one of them dies or something while we're on the appointment. We need a second one, whatever. There are labs around. EMSL is a really big lab that has multiple locations. Pretty sure you could rent pumps from them, right? And you could do, like day rentals and different things like that. So, like, you could do that. You have to know how to use them, right? It's not just you do that and you're ready to go, right? But you could get access to this stuff. And so, you know, swab samples, you call the lab. So EMSL is a lab that you can use. AEML is another lab that you can use. And like the swabs, you can get them, right? The swabs, they're easy, they're easy to ship to you, they're easy to get. They last for, you know, for a very long time. And you can use them, right? And so if you go through, let's say. Let's say you are trying to do this on your own and you do go through molefinder's method, and you kind of learn how to use different samples and where they're collected from, because it breaks all that stuff down, then you could go that route if you wanted to do it that way, right? And it's just an alternative. So I guess, you know, to secure his point, like, there's other options out there other than using mold plates, which again, in my opinion are just a complete waste of time. And then. And then cereal, using Hermes, which is just really expensive, right? Like there's. And then you're not really using the ERMI for its true benefit anyway, right? You're. You're trying to, like, you're trying to glean into the information as best as you can, but it's really not. What it's meant to do is to isolate room to room to room to room, because at the end of the day, you still don't know where the problem is in that room. So even if your Ermie comes back in your bedroom and it's way worse than it is somewhere else, you know, what's the answer? Are you just gutting your whole bedroom because you don't know where it is? Right? Like, that's kind of the thing. So really good question, really good point. And so hopefully everybody got something out of that that you could take away from everything. So thanks everyone for listening. We're going to wrap up here. Appreciate you guys taking the time to listen to me ramble on and on. Every week and everywhere else that I ramble on. So thanks everyone. I hope I'm not cutting out more. Sounds like I'm cutting. I don't know. I hope I'm not cutting out. I hope this isn't super annoying for everyone to listen to, but if it is, hopefully you can get some of the good pieces of information. And in the meantime, I gotta try to figure this thing out with the with using Clubhouse here clearly. So thanks everyone. Have a good one. We will talk to you guys next week.

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