111: When a leak becomes a mold concern. It’s simple math…

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.

Hey, everyone, what is going on today? I'm going to talk a little bit about water events. Can things be dried? Can they not be dried? When should things be removed? When should they not be removed? This is kind of how it all works, right? And I think sometimes we kind of see. Skip the first step of it, and we go straight to the second step sometimes. So I kind of want to, like, connect the dots in this timeline from start to finish, basically. So, like, if you have. If you have a water issue, so you have a leak, you have a pipe issue, you have a dishwasher that overflows, you have whatever's going on, right? A lot of times the first thing that happens is that is we need to. We need to stop the water, right? You need to understand and kind of get this stuff dry. You don't want there to be continued water because we know that mold can grow as a result of that, right? So that's kind of the first step. But a lot of times we don't think about, like, how long it takes for something to dry and what can happen during that time frame and maybe when the leak first happened, and we're not, like, putting all those pieces together. And so just to talk timelines on stuff so we can understand things a little better, we know that mold can grow within one to two days, okay? So if you have a water leak that happens, and let's say it happened on a Monday, and you're like, oh, man, we have a water leak that happened, and you say, oh, we got to get somebody out here, a water restoration, a drying company to kind of handle this. And they come out maybe the next day. Maybe it takes them a day to get out, right? The timeline starts from the day that the water issue happened, right? So this is where the time, like the mold doesn't know that there's schedules for the dryer to get out there and that there's schedules for people to. It's not that smart. It doesn't know all that stuff, Right. All it knows is there's water here. Bam. This is an opportunity where I can grow if I am here, right? That's Basically, what's going on, right? So you have day one, you have a leak, let's say. Right? And then let's say it takes another day for the drying company to come out and actually do the drying and start the restoration water drying process. Okay? So let's say. So that's day two. And let's say it was a relatively significant leak. And let's say it took them three, three days to completely get everything dried out. So you have two, three, four days. Okay? You have four days here. Mold could have grown within day one, two or three. We know that already, right? So we can't just say, okay, everything is dry by day four. All's good. You can't do that because there could be mold that could have grown already, let alone bacteria that could grow within hours. Right? Like, that can happen too. Like, that's a whole separate conversation. So when we're thinking of this, you kind of have to start timeline from start to finish. Now, let's say the timeline's longer. Let's say you had a leak that happened two weeks ago and you didn't really know about it right away. And then you saw like, something came out somewhere, like, oh, man, there's a leak. I finally saw it. It was behind a wall or something. Comes to find out, you have a pinhole leak somewhere. They don't know how long it's been leaking. Right? The time period now is minimum two weeks ago, then that starts. But then it took two weeks for somebody to come out, and it took all this time. Right? So you have all this time for things to happen. Okay, so that's like the first thing that I wanted to talk about here. And that's gonna set the stage for kind of what I'm gonna look at here. I'm gonna be looking off my screen because I'm reading something here. Kind of going through some stuff with you guys. The timelines are so important, okay? And a lot of times the water restoration companies, they come in and they're just really focused on where our job is to dry stuff. But if mold or bacteriality grew drying, it doesn't do any good, Right? It's already there. And then as we know, when stuff gets dried out, it can actually spread and break apart and move through the house much more easily. So then that can even cause more of a dispersion problem after the fact. Right? So what I did is I actually pulled up the standard for professional water damage restoration. And I have a couple pages here and things highlighted here just to kind of explain, like, how this should be going. And if you guys have an issue like this to understand, like what the, what the industry standard is for, how things are handled and how you attack it. Right. So this is the IICRC S500 standard for professional water damage restoration.

And so I'm going to read a couple things here. So the first thing is a section that's about information gathering. Okay. And so I'm just going to read some stuff here. So it says the information gathering process begins with the initial contact between the restorer and the property owner or the authorized agent. Right. So this means, you know, occupant homeowner, if they're renting or something, whoever, just whoever's there, you start having a conversation with them. The restorer should gather information to allow for effective mobilization and response. Cool. We should ask some questions and know what's going on so we know how to handle it. Inaccurate or incomplete information can impact the ability of the restorer to take appropriate measures during the initial response. This information can include, but is not limited to. So these are the types of things that they should be thinking about. You shouldn't need to be thinking about this. They should be thinking about this. Okay, I'm not going to read every bullet point here, but a couple things to stand out here. Source, date and time of water intrusion. This is bullet point number two here. All right. Date and time of water intrusion. Why is that important? Why does it matter how long it's been happening? Because if it's been happening for a period of time, you have an increased potential for a mold or microbial issue. All right, there's other questions here. Size of the impacted area, history of previous water damage, the types of materials that have been impacted, and things like that. Okay. So these are the types of questions they should be asking. So now further down, following this, the restorer can make assumptions using the information above to mobilize a proper response. Like, cool, I've asked these questions. Now I can think through and decide what the best strategy is here. Okay. Once they arrive at the work site and perform an initial inspection, these assumptions can change. Cool. This is exactly how we go through. Right. We have a history gathering call. We get context with our client. Hey, what's going on? What's been happening? Do you have previous water issues, things like that? Right. This is exactly our flow. And we're not on a water restoration side, obviously. We're trying to, you know, find with mold hiding. Right. But this is, this is kind of step one, so that's it. And then step two, you get to the site, you do an inspection, your opinions can change, your assumptions can change. Totally makes sense, right? The information gathered helps to establish a moisture inspection strategy and evaluate the existence of moisture problems that have come caused or can lead to structural system or content damage or contamination. So this is the highlight here. Or contamination. Next, it says contaminants in parentheses. Fungal or bacterial can be visible or hidden. Yeah, ding, ding, ding. We know that most of it's hidden. Right? So this is all in here, too. Now, the next sentence here, where mold growth is discovered or suspected, refer to the current version of the IICRC S520, which is a different standard. And this is a standard for professional mold remediation. So I want to talk about this piece. Right. So basically what they're saying in here is if you have a water issue, you have a leak, you have something that needs to be handled, you're bringing in a water restoration company. It's their job to ask you questions about what's going on, how long has it been going on, where is it impacted, so on and so forth. Right. And then they have to think about that information. Okay. And it says.

Where mold growth is discovered or suspected, refer to mold remediation standards. Well, if the water issue has been there for more than a couple days, you should suspect the possibility of mold. It's how it works. Right. So in the actual standard and guideline for water restoration companies, it basically tells them you need to ask some questions. And if you think that there's the potential for a microbial issue, either molderback bacteria, then you need to refer now to.

Mold remediation standards. It's a different standard of how you do stuff. Right. So that's kind of the first thing here. Okay. And so.

I want to move down and look at a couple, at a second section down here, and then we can kind of get into some more of the info here. I had it. I had it pulled up right for you. Okay. Here. Here's the next part. Okay. So.

In many cases, an assessment by an iep, this is what's known as an indoor environmental professional. So that's I'm qualified or I'm categorized under that, what I do, what mold inspectors do, indoor hygienists, like all those people, kind of fall under IEPs, Indoor Environmental Professionals. In many cases, an assessment by an IEP on water damage restoration project is not necessary. Cool. Okay. However, if the inspection shows that one or more of the following elevated risk situations are present, then an IEP should be retained by one of the interested parties, these considerations can include, but are not limited to occupants that are high risk, individuals with health effects that are as a result of exposure to mold. All right, so if your occupant has a health issue, then you definitely need to be doing this. Says it right here, right?

If the occupant expresses a need that they want to understand that then it needs to be done, right. If contaminants are believed to have been aerosolized. Well, why would you believe that a contaminant is aerosolized?

Part of mold's metabolic process is aerosolizing spores. So inherently, if you suspect that there could be a mold issue, then that basically is a concern already. Right? Because that can happen.

Or if there's a need to determine that the water contains a cross contamination, this would be an example, the category of water. So if you had what's not a clean water leak, but a dirty water leak, they're called category one, two or three. Done a podcast on this in the past. You could do that. Now, keep in mind, the longer, even if you have a clean water leak, the longer it stays and it's not dried, it can transition into a dirty water situation. So I don't know if any of you guys have seen what's behind your walls. It's gross. Looks great now, but when you take this out, there's insulation back there. There's probably rodent droppings and insect fragments and dropping. It's gross back there. If there's water back there, even if it originated as a clean water leak, if it's sitting back behind a wall cavity area for this one to two to three days like we're talking about, you can make an assumption that there is actually a contamination in that water of a bacterial issue, right? So the point of me reading all of this is to kind of just talk through what the expectation should be. And a lot of times these restoration companies don't follow this stuff, right? They come in like, our job is to dry things. And they haven't read this. A lot of times the people on site haven't read this stuff, right? They're just told the, you know, whoever they work for is like, okay, this is what we do. We go in, we dry stuff. This is what we do. It's literally in the standard for how this is handled that if you suspect that there's a potential mold or bacteria issue, that you need to have an inspection from an IEP to understand if that actually exists. And if it does, then things get turned and transitioned into more of a Mold remediation situation, which is referencing a different standard than just coming in and saying, we're going to dry out all these walls that got wet from this little flood that happened. Right.

And so that's just something that I wanted to, like, kind of talk through with everyone today. The point of this is if you add a leak, you have a leak under a sink, you have a leak from your dishwasher, you have a leak from wherever, and you're not catching it within like a day and getting it dried out within a day, then you have to think about the possibility of there being a potential mole problem. And you need to test it right now. Is there always a mole problem when there's a water issue that's longer than a day or two or three? No, not always. Right. So we're not saying that every time you have a leak, you had to rip open every single piece of drywall and flooring and everything that was impacted because you're assuming there's a mole problem. That's not what we're saying. What we're saying, though, is that we have to understand how and why this stuff grows. It grows on the building material in our house because that's the food source. And water is the equivalent of watering a seed for a plant. And if you have water there for a period of time and it's not dried out in the building material, then there you go. There's your reasonable suspicion that there could be a problem. Right. And so you have to address it that way. You have to think of it that way. And this isn't just big floods. This is smaller things. This is, like I said, a leak under a sink. Man. You're like, oh, man, I pulled this thing out. There's been some drip coming from under my sink. I have no idea how long it's been happening, but I have a moisture meter and it's wet right now. Well, crap, that it's probably been wet for more than today because it wasn't this flood thing. It seems like it's a longer period thing. Right. So these are just some of the things to think about. Like, now, how do you go through. How do you identify areas where there might be water issues? Like, how do you even know to look for stuff? What moisture meter should you be getting? Like, all these things. This is all stuff that, you know, you need help with. Right. You need somebody to kind of coach you through this stuff. Right. It's not something that everyone's going to know. So, you know, if you guys are interested, we've Created a private consulting program to help people through this. It's not us coming out to your house and doing inspections, but it's us teaching you what to look for in a house. The signs of hidden mold, how to go through every room of your house, what moisture meter to get how to use the moisture meter, how you would test things to understand what's going on, how you would interpret those lab results, how would you create remediation plans off of all of that? How would you actually fix something properly? What's the order in which you should do everything? You have a specific question about a certain thing in your house that doesn't make complete sense. It's a private consulting group. There's access to ask questions. There's ways to get access in that way. A lot of people need this. They need this, right? A lot of people don't necessarily want to have a full inspection for whatever reason. Right. It could be cost prohibitive. It could be. You don't want to fly my team out to you across the country because you just feel like it's too much. Maybe your health symptoms aren't super incredibly bad, but you are noticing them a little bit. You don't think it's maybe needed to invest so heavily in it, but at the same time, where do you get the information to actually do it the right way? All of these different situations are why we created this program. It's mole finders method. Plus, you might have heard me talk about mole finders method at some point in time over the last year. That is the core bones of how to go through a house and find all of the signs of hidden water damage and in turn all the signs of hidden mole growth and where to look for them and what they look like and how you test them and all that stuff. And then recently what we did is because all the feedback we got from the program is like, man, this is awesome. This stuff is great. But I have a question about like this one area in this room, or I have a question about this one particular thing or just conceptually, like should I be testing particular rooms in different orders or things that you really just need more of a personal touch with. And so we heard you guys on that and so we created this private consulting group. And so it's a group. You have membership into the group. It's obviously an investment into a membership consulting program. No different than if you pay someone else to be your consultant somewhere else. Except instead of getting random social media people that have never inspected homes in their lives and they just happen to get sick at one point in time, and now they're telling you they know everything about it. You can actually access me directly and my team, who literally have done this for a very long time and actually do this for our primary living. So if that's something that's interesting to you guys and you want to do it, you could.

You can message me if you'd like. Just message me. Method. If you want to do that, just put method.

In the message that you send, and we'll follow up and we'll give you a link where you can schedule a talk to talk with one of our empowerment coaches about this and just figure out if this is a good fit for you, and if not, if there's any other way that we might be able to help you. All right, so that was just kind of a little tangent, but I was super excited about the program because all the feet feedback in the program is super awesome. People are engaged, people are asking questions. We're developing processes that are helping people. I just created relation. I just created a new relationship with a lab that we have that we can actually now get lab testing directly to our private students at discounted rates where you don't have to overpay some local inspector to come take samples when they don't even know what the hell they're doing in the first place. So we're really creating this entire ecosystem to help navigate you guys through this entire situation. And I'm super pumped about it, and it's been really, really cool. So anyways, I just wanted to kind of tell you some stuff we're doing on the back end there with that. Other than that, I think this is just kind of the mini lesson for today is what we talked about here. So the timing of when a water event happened, when we need to start thinking about testing, if you want to understand how to look for signs of this stuff, how to do moisture testing, which meter you should use, and all of that stuff. That's all part of our consulting program at this point, right? We answer questions. We have group consulting calls at least once a week, typically twice a week, where either myself or one of our senior consultants is literally in a live zoom room answering questions with our direct students and helping navigate these entire situation. For example, we had someone in one of our group calls this last week, and they said, hey, we went through just two rooms so far, and we found 13 different things between a bathroom and a bedroom that we had no idea that were there. We want to start working on getting this stuff tested. How can we do that. And I was like, well, we can do that. But I feel like that we really need to take a step back and we're getting too excited about what we're doing. Right. We need to, we should really get through the whole inspection component first and then let's talk about testing. Right? We could prioritize things, we could do whatever, but we want to go step by step. So this person wouldn't have had that feedback from me if they weren't part of the, of the group. Right. But because they came into a group consulting and coaching call with me with a, you know, with others that are here, they're able to ask a specific question about the flow of events and what the best situation is for them and how they should navigate. Navigate it. Right. These are the questions that you guys have a lot, right? I get so many questions and DMs and different things. I just literally can't answer everyone. Right. But doing things in this format allows me to focus my time, see everything in a single place, get my team involved when I need to, get my team involved and actually get you guys the answers and the direction and the guidance that you need to navigate this process. And if you decide that you want an inspection afterwards, we could work with you on that as well, if that's something that you need. Right. We're working out ways to help you guys inspect different situations. So anyways, that's what I got for you guys today. I know there's questions that came up. I'm on a time crunch today and like I said, a lot of the questions now moving forward, you know, are going to be part of what happens for our group members. I'm going to be prioritizing them because they're investing in me and allowing me to navigate and my team to help them navigate a situation. So I have to prioritize, you know, questions and directions stuff in that manner. So I will definitely, you know, look to try to answer questions where I can here or there. But if you really want access to us and really get, you know, our insight and our knowledge and our direction, that's what Moldfinders Method plus is all about. Plus it has a whole bunch of other teaching elements within the program too. So like I said, if you're interested, you could comment in this feed method, you could DM me, method, whatever you want to do. And we'll get you some, we'll get you on a call to talk with one of our teams, team and to see if it might be a good fit for you and if there's anything else that we could help you with, we'll be able to kind of navigate through all that stuff with you guys as well. So thanks so much for sitting tight. Remember the lesson of this, too, right? I know I just talked about the program that I'm really excited about, but remember the lesson piece of this at the beginning, okay? If you have water issue. A water issue. We speak proper English. You have a water issue, and it's been wet for more than a day. You got to think about mold testing it, right? You got to understand if there's been a mold issue that that's been created from that. If not, if you're just saying, ah, it'll dry out, I'll put a fan on it, whatever, right? If that's what you're doing, you have the possibility that you're going to end up with a mold issue that's in that area. Okay? So that's something that we need to think about in terms of just. Just how we handle our situations in our house, right? Stuff that we're never really taught. So this is something to help you guys with that. All right, everyone, thank you very much for listening, for joining, for watching. I will talk to you guys 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.