122: How To Prevent Mold in Your Heating and Air Conditioning Systems

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.

Mold and air conditioning systems. This is one of the biggest problems that we see in homes with people who are dealing with mold related illnesses. And it's one of the biggest problems, honestly, because you can't really see what's going on inside your air conditioning system very easily. So we have this whole out of sight, out of mind concept that occurs, but we really, really have to be cognizant and aware of what's going on in our air conditioning system because it acts as the lungs of our entire house. It sucks all the air in, right? It breathes it in just like you do in your lungs. It sucks it all in and then it spits it out. Except instead of spitting it out of just one mouth, it spits it out, literally, of every single supply vent in your entire house. And it can spread everywhere. And so that's why it's so important to be talking about mold and air conditioning systems to understand what we can do from a prevention perspective. Okay, but before we talk about prevention, what I want to cover real quick is how they get contaminated in the first place. So there's two ways that this happens, okay? The first is that it gets cross contaminated from other things in your house and it gets pulled into the system. So I just described how your system sucks all the air in, like lungs, breathing in, right? Well, if you have mold behind this wall and behind this wall and in your bathroom and in your kitchen and all these places, and it pulls that into the system. It can actually get into your air conditioning system, contaminate it, and then spread it all over the place, okay? So that's one way it happens on. The second way it happens is that your air conditioning unit itself becomes a source of a mold problem. So now it's not bringing it in and just kind of settling in there, which is what the first description was. But now the mold growth is actually occurring inside of your air conditioning system. And once that happens, it's almost impossible to salvage your system. So it's really, really, really important that we do preventative measures to stop that. Because if you have to replace an air conditioning system because it becomes, well, contaminated, you're talking tens of thousands of dollars to do that. All right? So that's why these two prevention tips that I'm about to talk about are so incredibly, incredibly important. Okay, so let's get into tip number one. So tip number one ties specifically to the first way that your system becomes contaminated, which is cross contamination. So if you have mold in different places of your house and it gets pulled into your system, then what we need to do is to stop it before it gets into the system. The best way to do this is through high grade medical grade filtration systems that are attached to your air conditioning system, where the air is coming into the system before it hits the unit. So if you can imagine this is your air conditioning unit. Let's say your air comes in this way and then it goes out this way. When it goes out this way, this is where it goes to all the different rooms and it cools your house, Right? So what you need to do is here, you need to put a very high grade filter that will stop and block all the particles that are coming in before they even get there. It's much, much easier to prevent mold from getting into your system than it is to try to clean it afterwards. Once it's in there, it's so hard to get rid of. So the thing we gotta try to do is stop it as much as we can from getting in there in the first place. Now, when I say high grade, medical grade filtration, what am I talking about? We're talking about the size of the particle that it filters. So it's really important to think about this. A lot of times when people think about mold, they think, oh, I'm looking at dark black stuff all over the place. The reality is, most mold is hidden, and most mold is very, very tiny particles that can penetrate. A lot of standard filter units that you could buy at like Lowe's and Home Depot and like all these places, even HEPA grade filters, you'll think that you're doing really well because we're getting a filter that's meant for smaller particle. And it's definitely better than those basic filters. But the problem with HEPA is it actually doesn't filter small enough to keep all these mole particles out. So to give you some context, HEPA filters to 0.3 microns. That's how small it goes to. So you don't need to know how small that actually is, but just understand comparison of numbers. 0.3 is what HEPA filters to. What we want to be filtering to is 0, 0, 0 7.003. We want to get that low. So that's a big difference.03 to 003. 007 is a huge magnitude of difference. If you are able to filter down to that smaller particle size, you're going to be stopping so much of these small particles from getting into your air conditioning system. We're talking mold. Not only mold spores, because those are bigger, but we're talking fragments that break off of mold colonies. We're talking mycotoxins that are sitting on the fragments that move into the system. All this stuff that's in your house and gets pulled into your air conditioning system. We want to try to stop as much of it as we can at the beginning. So the first way to do prevention is to stop it from coming in. And the way that we can do that is through high grade filtration units. So a couple that I like, Intellipure has one that's called the whole house air cleaner IQ Air has one that's called the Perfect 16. These are two really good units you could put on the front of your system. Okay, so that is number one. That is the first way that your system gets contaminated, right? It gets cross contaminated. Now let's switch gears to the second reason that there is mold in an air conditioning system. And that is because it is actually growing mold inside of the air conditioning system. All right, so from a prevention perspective here, there's two things we gotta think of. One is there's something happening inside of the mechanical unit that is allowing mold to grow. And then 2 or 1A and 1B, if you will, is there something happening immediately around the air conditioning unit that is a condition that would allow mold to grow? Now what does mold need to grow? It needs water. All right, so that's the big thing we gotta think about now. Inside of your air conditioning system, the place that water is created is in the coil area. And as the air moves through your system and hits this thing, that's called a coil. And the coil is what makes it cold. Okay? But when it does that, you have warm air hitting a cold coil and you get what's called condensation. The same way that if you have a cold glass of water and you go outside, you have warm air that hits the water and you get those water drops on the outside of your glass. It's the same exact thing that happens in an air conditioning system. There is no way to prevent this. It is literally science. If you're cooling air, that's going to happen. So then what we need to think about is how do we stop mold from growing as a result of water being created in our air conditioning conditioning system? Let me just tell you. It's possible. Okay? Not every air conditioning system has mold in it. All right, So a couple things you can do. One, you really need to make sure that the drainage out of the coil area is functioning properly. So when we're talking about what's one of the preventative things we could do here, it's getting your air conditioning system serviced regularly. I'm talking like a couple times a year. You want an H VAC technician to come in, open up your entire mechanical unit, look in the coil area, and make sure that there's no standing water in there, that everything is draining and moving the way it's supposed to. And one little quick tip here, too, that I've seen happen a lot. The drip line that takes the water out of that area, you want it to run outside of the house or in a drain somewhere that's not just dripping near the unit. And this goes to the second thing that I was mentioning, which is a water condition around where your air conditioning system lives. Okay, so we talked about inside of the air conditioning system, what you can do to prevent. Right. You want to make sure your drainage is moving out. And on a quick additional note, there, like I said, there is going to be moisture that gets into the air conditioning system. So the second thing that you can do is you could put a UV light in the area where the coil is. It doesn't go anywhere else. If you put a UV light anywhere else in your H vac system, it will not work. The only way that UV light works is if it has consistent and extended amount of contact time on the surface that you're trying to use it. If you put a UV light in your coil area and it's just shining in there nonstop, 24 hours a day, all the time, then UV can be used as a preventative measure for microbial growth, which is mold and bacteria, which is a huge thing. So by having a UV light in that section and then having drainage that's taking the water out as quickly as possible and getting it away from the unit, you're doing a lot to prevent mold growth from inside of your air conditioning unit. Okay, so that's the interior of the unit. Now let's talk about the outside of the unit. Okay? So first off, any drainage that's coming out, you want it to run out and away from your unit. You don't want water dripping from the drip line. That's coming from the coil area that we talked about right next to the unit. Even if it's dripping in a drain somewhere, because it's going to create moisture near the unit. And if you have mold that starts growing anywhere around where your unit lives, it's going to get sucked into the system and impact the interior of the system. So you want to make sure you're diverting water as far away from your unit as possible. Ideally, you're running it out of the house. You're running that drip line on the outside of the house. Is dripping somewhere outside is the ideal scenario for that. All right, so that's the first thing. And the second thing is where your unit lives and making sure that area just does not have a general mold problem. A lot of people have an air conditioning system that sits in a basement or in an attic. Basement and attics are very prone to mold problems for a couple reasons. One, basements are subgrade. Water's naturally going to go down there. Basements have so many mold problems as a result of that. If your air conditioner lives in a space that has a bunch of mold problems, then you are increasing the probability of mold to get into your system and grow inside of your system. It's super common for us to see mold inside of an air conditioning system. When we look at the basement and there's mold sources in the basement. It happens all the time. So part of prevention for mold in your air conditioning system is actually looking at the area that your air conditioning system lives, your basement, for example, and making sure that there's no mold or water intrusion issues there. So where it lives and the surrounding area that it's set up in is going to have an indirect effect or a really a direct effect on the interior of the air conditioning system because it pulls that air in. Okay, so those are a couple of things you could do for prevention. Again, to summarize this, the first and most important thing that we need to do is stop cross contamination into the system. Okay. That's done by using a high grade filtration unit that will stop a lot of those particles from even getting in. And the second thing is focusing on the unit itself. And when we're talking about that, we're talking about the coil area that creates moisture. And what do we do there? We put a UV light in there that's always shining, and we make sure that the water's dripping and draining properly. And then in addition to that, the immediate area surrounding your air conditioning system, which is if you're in your basement area, wherever that is, and to make sure there's no water sources or mold issues in those areas. If we can do those things, you're going to significantly decrease the chance of your air conditioning system having a mold problem. And if you are impacted by mold and your health is impacted from that type of exposure, then this is a huge thing that you can be doing for the long term benefit of you being able to live with your home harmoniously.

So that's it for today's show, everyone.

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