126: Why You Need 2 Outdoor Baseline Air Samples

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.

Let's talk about outside baseline air samples, why they're important and actually why you should be doing more than one of them. First off, they are very important. Every house is going to have a different outside airborne fungal ecology than somewhere else. So one question that I would get from clients sometimes when we talk about outside baseline samples is, why do we even need one? There's always going to be some level of mold inside of your house because the outdoors will always influence the inside. The baseline sample is meant to give us a comparison point. So what we want is that we want the counts inside of the house to be lower than the outside. And we also really don't want to be picking up any different mold types in inside than we are picking up outside. There are times where if we look at an outside baseline and we don't see a particular mold, but then on the inside we see it, we're like, why would this show up here if it's not outside? Could that mean that there's an actual mold colony of that type of growth inside this wall that we actually tested? But you wouldn't know that if you didn't have an outside baseline to compare it to. Okay. And so one reason that you have the baselines outside is, is just to look at the types of molds that are there. Am I seeing the same types of molds outside that I'm seeing inside? That's the first thing. Now, the second reason that you want your outside baselines is you look at the levels, the concentration, the amounts of the mold that are outside as compared to the inside. So you can have, let's say on the outside, there's cladosporium, which most times there is. And then let's say you do a test on the inside, and cladosporium is picked up. All right. Like, that's not out of the realm of possibility. It's outside. It could work its way inside. That happens. What is the amount of cladisphorium that we're seeing outside versus inside outside? Are we seeing the baseline be around 100 or 200 or 300 or even a thousand or 1500? Or where is the baseline for outside and then look at it inside. Inside. Let's say our baseline was 1500 inside. Are we picking up 4000? That's significantly higher than what's outside. So the idea here is, is that, yes, stuff can work its way inside from the outside, but it should always be less than what's outside because there's an extra layer of building material that any of the outside stuff would have to get into in the first place. And when I look at outside baselines, I look at them a couple ways. One.

The easy way, and the way that most people do it, the way that most inspectors do it, is they scroll all the way down to the report and they just look at the total spores at the bottom, and they'll look at your inside sample. You did. And they'll look at the outside sample and they'll say, ah, that outside sample is higher than your inside sample, meaning your ins side is lower, which is the expectation, meaning there's no problem. You shouldn't be concerned about anything that can work as a way to interpret it. But a lot of times it's. It actually misses things. So I actually don't really focus on the total spore level at the bottom. What I do is I'm actually looking at all the individual molds. Down mold to mold, compare, compare, compare. Right. What did I find in the baseline? What did I find in the house? And I do it all the way down mold. Specifically specific. And the reason I do that is you could have, let's say there's two molds that we're picking up just to make it easy, Cladosporium. And then you have Aspergillus or penicillium, one of those two together. Let's say the total in your baseline is a thousand, and let's say the total inside is 500. So if I look at those totals, I'll be like, oh, the inside is less than the outside. I'm cool. But now let's look at the molds individually. Let's say Aspergillus on the outside is 800. And then let's say the Cladosporium one is 200. And that's where we get our thousand outside baseline total. Now, let's just imagine this indoor sample shows that aspergillus penicillium is 200. And let's say that cladosporium is 300. Right. And that equals the five that I mentioned before. So you look at your total spore counts. You have a thousand on your baseline. Outside, you have 500 on your sample inside, you think everything is good. But then when you look at the individual molds, the inside sample for Aspergillus penicillium is lower than your baseline. That's good, great. But your cladosporium number is higher than your baseline outside, and that's where you see the red flags. So if I'm looking and I see Cladosporium is 100 count higher than what the outside baseline is, I interpret that as, that's an issue that needs to be looked at and needs to be opened up and addressed. Whereas a lot of inspectors are going to look at that and say, I, I don't care that much. The totals are lower. So when we're talking about how you analyze and you look at an outside baseline sample compared to the inside, it's not just looking at the total scores on the bottom, it's looking mold to mold specifically and making sure that, that they're basically all lower than the outside baseline from a line to line basis. So now let's throw a little curveball in here. Why do we collect two outside baselines instead of one? The reason is that your house isn't only the very front of your house in front of your front door, right? You have sides, you have the back of your house. And what's different? Your plant life is different, the ecology is different. Maybe the front of your house is near a road where there's more airflow because the cars are going back and forth, whereas the back of your house is maybe there's a little pond in the back of your house down the way or something that's going to encourage more mold growth. The samples at the back and the front of the house are, are likely going to be significantly different. And the reason that we need to know that is because if we're only doing, let's say, the sample at the front of the house in this scenario and the levels are lower, and then I go in and I do a wall cavity sample or I do something somewhere else and I see that levels are higher in that wall cavity sample, I'm going to say, oh, this is a problem, right? This is what I just described. But now what if I did an outside baseline sample on the back and the backyard baseline was like five times higher than the front yard baseline? Well, now when I'm looking at baselines, I'm not looking at a single number. Now I'm looking at two, and I'm kind of looking and averaging them as I go through. So now if I see an indoor sample that's elevated over the front baseline, but it's significantly lower than the, than the backyard baseline. Then I start to re question. I'm like, okay, do I really think this is a significant problem? Is this something that really needs to be opened up and remediated? When I see that in the backyard, the load of mold out there is just so much higher. It's quite, quite possible that that has just moved in to the house a little bit and that's what's accounting for the slightly higher level within a wall cavity. But if I didn't have the one from the backyard and all I had was the one from the front yard, then I would immediately say this is a problem. It's higher than our baseline that we have. We need to open it up and we need to remediate it. Honestly, it comes down to cost, it comes down to money, right? If I have one comparison point and compared to that one comparison, my indoor sample shows that it's higher, then I'm going to say, okay, my recommendation is to remediate this thing. Minimal remediation jobs, probably a couple thousand dollars. But what if I ran a second outside baseline sample at a much lower cost than a few thousand dollars Because a single sample is not anywhere near that. You run a second sample in the back, we now get two comparison points for the air that's surrounding your house. And we now have a little extra data to compare against. And, and we see that the outside in the back is significantly higher than the outside in the front. And I still do the same wall cavity sample. I get the same elevation over the front, but it's way lower than the outside baseline in the back. Then I might not be inclined to recommend that you need to remediate that wall and open that wall. And what did we do? We just saved you like $3,000, right? It's one of those things where it's kind of a no brainer when you understand the impact it can have on a future recommendation and what that recommendation can mean in the scope of money, inconvenience, time, all of that stuff. So that's why we do two. And we didn't always do two outside baseline samples. We used to only do one. I used to actually feel guilty to think that I could go to someone and say, hey, I want to do a second outside baseline. Because they had to pay for another sample. The lab doesn't care where you're collecting it from. The lab just says, oh, here's another sample. This is what it costs. So there's a cost to it. And I felt bad going to a client saying, hey, you need to pay for two outside baseline samples, right? Because I didn't really understand how to explain it. This is way early on. Why the purpose of doing. When we're talking like 10 years ago, then I go to a house and the house is actually pretty big. And it's kind of a scenario I described. I walk in the front yard. The front yard is a pretty normal looking house. I go in the backyard and there's like a pond in the backyard. So I'm like, I mean, this is significantly different. Like, pond is ecosystem for mold and bacteria and all this stuff. I really think that we need to do a second baseline in the backyard. And we did. And sure enough, it was way higher, way, way higher than what the front yard was. And it actually changed my interpretation of the results when they came in. And some things that I might have thought needed to be remediated based off of the front lower sample. I actually didn't recommend to get remediated because I had an understanding that there was more outside influence of more significant levels from other places. I always do a minimum of two when I go to someone's house, and then if the house is really, like really large, I might actually do three or four, depending on how large the house is. There are some very large houses of some very high name celebrities that I've done, and their houses are huge. And I've done like six baselines outside because their house is so big and they have variations in different places. The whole point of this is to figure out, is it a problem and does it need to be remediated because you want to get healthy, Right? Like, it all ties back to the part of I need to feel better. In order to feel better, I have to have a good understanding what's happening in my house. And I have to get a really solid remediation plan together for the house to make sure that I'm not leaving anything behind. In order to get that plan, you have to have the foundational comparison points to make a lot of those decisions. And that's where the baselines come into play. So that is a maybe quick, maybe not so quick, I don't know. That is an overview of outside baseline sampling, why you do it, how we look at it, and why having at least two of them is really important.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take.

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