131: How To Prevent Mold Growth In Living Rooms

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's going on? Got another episode of the Mole Finders Radio podcast coming at you today. A lot of what I talk about is about inspections, remediation. Like, after we know we have a problem, what do you do next? How do you handle it properly? How do you make sure that you're not getting, you know, screwed over by a remediator or bad testing or whatever it might be? Today I'm going to take a step even before that. Today is going to be all about prevention. So let's start with what I call finished rooms. These are kind of the basic room in. In any space of your house, a basic area in any space of your house. We call these finished rooms. Living rooms, dining rooms, family rooms, dens, hallways, like, whatever it is, they're all kind of the same thing. It's walls, ceiling, floor. There's nothing kind of unique and special about it. Like, a laundry room is a little unique. A bathroom's a little unique. Right? So these are just kind of like the base level of every room in your house. These are your base finished rooms. Let's talk windows. Windows is a really big thing where we see mold problems happen. Almost every house we go into, there's something going on with the windows. So there's two reasons that a window has a problem. The first is it's not sealed properly. There's a leak. There's something happening where water's just kind of coming in. The second is around condensation that forms on your windows. Both of those are water sources. All right? So even though condensation is not like a leak from the outside, condensation creates water. Water is a problem. Okay? So a lot of us dismiss this because we're like, oh, it's not a leak. My windows condense. It's a normal thing that happens where I live. It should never, ever, ever be a normal thing. And if it is a normal thing in your space, then you have a problem. So that's one thing to prevent. And I got to tell you guys, like, you know, years and years ago, I used to look at this the same way. You know, I continue to learn, too so, like, kind of towards more the beginning part of my. My career, I would go and I would look at windows and be like, oh, they look a little dirty. Oh, there's this or that, like, whatever. And I dismissed it. And why did I dismiss it? Because I saw it all the time. And this is the same thing that I've kind of had to train myself to come out of, is just because something happens all the time doesn't mean that it's okay, that it's normal, that it should be happening. But at the time, that's kind of how I saw stuff. I was still learning and kind of putting everything in my, like, brain database of what's right and what's not right in these spaces, right? Then one day I go into a house and looked a little more extreme, and I test it, and I do a swab test in the window. It ends up being literally the worst thing in the entire house, right? Like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of spore count on this sample of a window area. That really didn't look that bad. It looked like some dirt that was on the window, and it just kind of, like, opened my mind, and I started, like, looking through much more clearly and specifically and intentionally at windows in every house I went into after that. And most houses we go into now, we actually are sampling windows in some way. Sometimes it's a singular window. Sometimes it's a composite of multiple windows that look similar. But the problem. Let's start on the condensation side. If that water forms, that water sits around there, then you have dirt and dust and debris and all this other stuff around your house that's an organic food source, and mold will grow on that. And then the secondary thing is, if your window is like an older window and it's actually a wood trim on the window instead of one of the newer plastic, vinyl, or metal ones, then you actually get mold growing, like, completely in the entire window section, like the frames around the windows and all that stuff, right? So it could be, like, a pretty significant problem. Now the question is, well, why do we test that? Why not just clean the surface if that's the concern? If your window is condensing, we can see it condensing on the front end, but your window is made of the same stuff on the other side, right? Like, if you have a middle or a vinyl or a plastic window or something like that, it could be condensing on the other sides of the window that are kind of hidden by the trim in other places. We don't know that, right? That's why it's so important to know what's going on with those things. And if you think about windows, like, literally, just close your eyes, take two seconds, close your eyes, and imagine yourself walking through every single room of your house. What is the one consistent through line that you have in every single room of your house? It's windows. They are in every single room. So if you have a systemic window problem, because you have windows that have a condensation problem, which means they're either not insulated well, or you have some sort of misalignment with the relative humidity in your house as compared to the outside and what's going on. So you're not managing your internal humidity levels. And then it manifests on the windows. Whatever's happening, that becomes a systemic housewide problem. And every room you go into, you now have a source that's following you. Okay. This is one of the biggest, biggest things that happen in houses that I see that get overlooked, right? They get overlooked all the time. All the time. So what do you do on Prevention 1? Make sure there's no leaks around your windows. Right? You got to have your windows evaluated. You're going to need. And you're going to hear through line here. You're going to have to have people come out and look at your house. The whole point of prevention is that to prevent things, you have to find things before they happen. The only way that you find things before they happen is that you get things looked at before they happen. Right. The same way that you go in to the doctor and you get like preventative types of tests to try to make sure that nothing bad is starting or happening or whatever. Right. Like, it's the same concept. Like you need to have checkups for your house, and there are different people that need to be doing different pieces of the checkup. Some are you, some are experts that come in. Right. So for windows, you're probably looking at like a contractor or a window expert just to kind of come evaluate. I would do a one time start, evaluate everything, just kind of see where it's all at. And then you're going to have like a contractor probably come out and do some other things in terms of preventative and some of these other areas that we're talking about. So maybe you have them kind of take a second look at the windows when they come, and you build out the schedule over the course of the year. So that's the first thing. Make sure there's no leaks, anything coming around. Now, as far as the condensation there's really three reasons that it happens. First reason that the actual insulation of the window failed. Some windows are two pane windows. If you look at them in between both layers, you'll start seeing like condensation or buildup in there. If that's happening, the window's failing because the exterior insulation isn't, isn't like working, right? So you gotta get that looked at. You shouldn't have condensation forming in between window layers. That shouldn't be happening, right? So if you're seeing something like that, that means that the window itself is probably failing, needs to be replaced, needs to be looked at. The second is that the window is just an old window that isn't properly insulated, right? So the reason condensation happens because you have significant temperature changes in different surfaces. So think you take a cold glass of like lemonade outside. The glass has ice in it, right? It's cold. The air outside is hot and humid. What happens? Water starts building up on the outside of the glass. The same exact thing happens in the house. You are temperature controlling the inside of your house and then you have the exterior temperature on the other side. Newer windows have better insulation. There's actually something called a CF rating, which is a condensation factor rating on windows. So newer windows actually have ratings for condensation specifically. And it's all based around how well insulated it is and how it can adapt to relative humidity changes and avoid getting condensation. So if you live in these parts of the country that have extreme weather or extreme humidity, so you're talking east coast, you're talking the south, like places like that, you really need to make sure your windows are like on check, right? Because if you have old windows is the thing, like east coast houses, some of these older houses, that part of the country stuff is super old, right? I'm in a 70 year old house. My. I mean you go look at the windows, the windows look like they're 70 years old. If your window is 70 years old, 50 years old, 30 years old, this stuff didn't exist back then. They just installed single pane wood trim windows and that's all that they did. So you inherently are going to have windows that are not protecting you from this stuff in your house. It needs to be updated. You get in an old house, there are just things you have to do in old houses. This is one of those things. You're in an old house, you're an old, an old building, you're moving into an old place. You gotta know, I Have to look at my windows. I can't rely on a 50 year old window that doesn't have new technology in it. It doesn't help separate the interior temperature from the exterior temperature and create a condensation issue. Just something you have to do. Right? And if you don't do it, it's going to continue to happen and you're going to keep having mold problems on your windows and you're going to walk through every single room of your house and be exposed to it in every single room of your house. It's not like you have one source in your house at that point. I'm in my room right now. I got two windows in this room. I go in my daughter's room, there's two windows in her room. I go on my master bedroom, there's three windows in that room, there's a window in the bathroom. I mean, I add that up, I got 10 windows in just like two and a half rooms, basically. Right? So add up your whole house, every room you go. That's how many sources you now have in your house if this is what's happening. So you need to fix that stuff. Right? So that's a big prevention thing. It's getting the right type of window installed. It's understanding what type of window you need. You need a window expert to come in and help you evaluate this stuff. Right. And understanding something called condensation factor, that's a good thing. So I would educate yourself on. It's called the CF rating, the condensation factor rating on these windows. And based on where you live, you might need different ones. Right? So that's one big thing. Another big thing we're going to talk about for finished rooms is carpeting. All right, so prevention and carpeting. Let me talk about carpeting. Big picture.

Carpeting can be impacted in one of two ways. And this is actually similar for other areas of your house too. It could either be a source. So I call that a primary source or it becomes what I call a secondary source. Now, what's the difference? A primary source means that there's actually mold growth happening there. That is where the factory is located. That's where it's coming from. That's the source of it. Okay. A secondary source means that the growth isn't happening there, but because of the area of the house or whatever it is. So we're talking carpeting, right? Because it's carpeting any particles that float through your house. So it's dust, it's dirt, but then what's in that Stuff. It's mold spores, it's mycotoxins, it's bacterial fragments. All that stuff is going to settle down in the carpet. It gets into the carpet fibers, it gets under into the carpet padding. It's not that it's growing there, but it's collecting it and collecting it and collecting it. And now every time you take a step on your carpet, you're popping it up in the air. This concept is called the personal cloud effect. There's multiple research studies out about it, but it basically says as you walk through your house, you're creating little explosions, little clouds of particle that then pop up into your airspace. And it essentially is like this cloud that follows you everywhere you go in your house. Okay? So the visual on this, think of Charlie Brown. There was the one super dirty kid in Charlie Brown, and you saw like the cloud of dirt that literally followed this kid around everywhere that he walked in the cartoon. His name was Pigpen because, ew, gross, there's dirt following him around everywhere. That same thing happens to us every step that we take in our house, except it's not dirt. It's invisible dust particles and fragments and all these things I just talked about that pop up in the air. That's how we breathe it. That's how we get impacted. Okay? Now, in those circumstances, the carpet isn't where the mold is growing necessarily, but it's collected so much of it that it becomes a source. So carpeting just generally, guys like you shouldn't have carpeting in your house. And now I know that we can't always fix that. Like, I'm renting my house right now. Upstairs is carpeting. I can't fix it. Right? It is what it is. I can't fix it. I can't change it. It's not my house. My downstairs is solid flooring. And that's what it is. Okay? So the first thing in terms of prevention of secondary contamination in carpeting and how to prevent it. Well, get rid of it. That's the way to prevent it. If you have solid floors, it doesn't happen if you can't get rid of it. The one thing I don't want to get into is like, wet, damp cleaning your carpets, okay? Because if you're pumping water into your carpets and then you're like waiting for it to dry, you have layers of your carpeting and the water's going to get under the carpet padding and it's going to sit there and it's not going to dry out all the way, and you're going to start creating source moisture issues under your carpet. So I'm really not a big fan of like, carpet cleaning where they're coming in and using moisture and water to like deep clean your carpet because the water stays and like, oh, it'll dry out in a day. Cool. 24 hours. One is all that mold needs to grow, and that's only the top surface that you feel. What about all the other layers underneath that you don't actually feel? That stuff isn't probably dry yet. Right. It's just not worth the risk for me. So I wouldn't be cleaning that way. So what you could do is you could get a HEPA vacuum and it has a HEPA filter in it. So when it pulls all the stuff through, that HEPA filter will block out particles that are smaller than your traditional vacuum and not let that get redistributed and re aerosolized throughout the house. Keep in mind, HEPA is not nearly the size that we need to be concerned about as people who are concerned about mold. HEPA is.03 microns. When we're talking about the particles and spores or the breakoffs of the fragments and toxins and stuff, we're getting down to like 001-0007 microns. Like way lower than that. Okay. So HEPA is not the answer to fix all the problems, but it can help arrest some of those larger particles. Right. So from a cross contamination perspective, it's cleaning the carpets in terms of like vacuuming and trying to get as much dust and stuff out of as you can before it gets weighed down into the carpet where you can't get it out again. The secondary piece is air filtration units that do filter to these smaller levels that you put in these rooms that have carpeting in them. In my house, we have a little loft area upstairs at the top of the stairs. And in that space I have an air filter that filters down to 0.007 micron. I have one in my bedroom, have one in my daughter's bedroom, my son's bedroom. So there's four of them that we have upstairs, all upstairs. I only have one downstairs. They're all upstairs because one, the rooms where we sleep are upstairs, so that's really important. And two, this is where all the carpet is. Okay. So that's why I have them up there. If you could pull it out of the air before it settles down into the carpet, then it's not going to settle down into the carpet. If you walk on the carpet and pop it up in the air. It's airborne now. And if the filter can pull it out, it's not going to settle back down in the carpet. So you have kind of this like constant preventative thing that's going on there. When I open these things and like change the filters are freaking disgusting. Like, it's crazy how much crap these things pull in. And when you do it one time, you just wonder how I ever went through life without having filtered air in my house. What the hell have I been breathing my whole life? It's actually pretty crazy when you look at it. So from a prevention perspective on like, secondary impact, that's it. Now, if you're talking primary source. Right. Is there mold growing in my carpet? Usually this happens around exterior walls or like against walls that are shared with like a bathroom or something. Okay, and why does this happen? Because there's some sort of water intrusion that comes from those areas, and the carpet is right directly against the wall and the floor. And what it does is it creates a moisture barrier. So water comes through, it kind of stops. And if it can't continue to move, that's where mold is going to start to grow. Okay. So when carpeting is put down, it's put down and there's like these wood carpet tacks that have little nails that stick up out of them. And you put the carpet on top of those little wood strips with nails that stick out of them. That's how the carpet sits down. What's easy is that you could actually pull those up pretty easily. Literally, you could take like a Phillips head screwdriver, just kind of like dig it in your carpet a little bit, like right against where a wall is and just pull up. You could pull the carpet up. When you do that, you can see the carpet tacks. They should be wood colored. No rust, no black on them. If you pull it up and you see darkness on the tacks or you see rust around the nail heads, it's mold that's growing there. Okay, so why is it growing? Probably because you have some sort of exterior water issue that's kind of penetrating through. Now, it doesn't always have to be like a full blown leak. It could also be water vapor that's moving through a barrier. There's two main places that this happens. One is from the exterior walls. You see this a lot on exterior walls. And so what does that mean? It means that your waterproofing solution on the outside of your house is not working properly and that water is somehow penetrating through the building envelope and then getting into the Space and then getting trapped under the carpet. And then under the carpet, mold is growing. So the solution isn't just get the carpet out, replace the carpet. The solution is typically something with waterproofing. Now, the only time that I've seen it be something different is if there happens to be, like, a window right there, and the window is leaking down into the wall, then the source is the window. It's not necessarily waterproofing on the outside. Right. So you need somebody to come in and identify where the source of the issue is, like, why the water is penetrating through. But again, it doesn't have to be a leak coming through. It can be. When I say water vapor, think, like, steam, right? Think humidity. Think something like that. So when you have a leak from the outside, basically what happens is that the moisture kind of works its way through the building material, and it kind of puts out a mist. It's like steam almost, but it's not hot. That comes through these areas, and that's moisture working through. Humidity increases as a result of that, and then the mold starts growing because of the humidity. Right. So not because of, like, a. Like an actual water flood kind of leak coming in, but because humidity is getting pushed through the building materials and into where the carpet is. As far as prevention goes, you need to make sure that your exterior waterproofing is in place and it's functioning. Again, I see this. This all the time, and it's because on the outside of the house, we don't really think about it, but what happens on the outside of the house is so important to what's happening on the inside. If you think of what we're doing, if you think of what any sort of, like, home or shelter, anything is, you're literally building a box to protect yourself from everything that's going on outside. What are you protecting yourself from? Well, when we were cavemen, we're probably protecting ourselves from animals trying to kill us. Right. And then as, like, time moves on, sure. We're protecting ourselves from, now robbers coming in and taking all our stuff. We're protecting ourselves from the temperature. Right. I want to be somewhere where it's comfortable. If it's cold outside, I'm protecting myself from the temperature. I'm protecting myself from the rain. I'm protecting myself from other elements. That's why the house exists. Okay. So if that's the reason that the house exists, you got to make sure the house is actually protecting the inside. That's the whole purpose of the house, is to protect the inside from all the stuff that's going on on the outside, right? What we do is we go to a house, we see it, it's up there, we forget about the elements and we think more about modern day stuff. I got all my things, I got all my stuff. I want my temperature to feel nice. I want this. When people first built things to protect themselves, it was. Cause it was raining way back in the day. And they're like, shit, it's raining. I can't be wet. I need to build something to cover myself. You know what they didn't have way back then? They didn't have insulation, they didn't have air conditioning. That's what they all lived in. They live in tents to address their temperature and make themselves feel comfortable. Like they had tents because of it rained. They didn't want to get rained on, right? Like that's why they had tents. If it snowed, they needed to protect themselves from being snowed on. That is the purpose of our homes. That's the core, original, root purpose. Now we have all these other things. We have stuff, we have kit. I mean, of course there's other things now, but like we have to understand why they're here in the first place. If the house isn't protecting us from the elements, then it's going to cause the problems that we're concerned about, right? So one piece is general, your entire house. Because this ties into other areas of house, crawl spaces, basements, all that stuff. You have to make sure that your waterproofing solution is intact. What does that mean? One, the grading on the outside of your house. What does grading mean? Grading means the direction of the ground. If the ground is pointing towards your house, water will flow toward your house. You don't want water to flow towards your house. You want it to go away from your house. So if your grading is flat, flat and or tilted towards your house, that's a big problem. The grading needs to be slanted away from your house, your roof lines and your gutters. If you have water and you don't have gutters on your roof and water comes down the roof, it's going to fall down and land right next to your house. I just learned this the other day from one of my consultants on my team who had done this research. And I didn't even hear about it until I listened in on a call that he did and it was amazing. He said for every square foot of space on your roof, it can handle 0.4 gallons of water if it's raining, right? So you think about how many square feet there are on your roof. And each one of those roofs, let's just say, is a half a gallon of water that flows down if there's an inch of rain. And think about, like dumping 15,000 gallons down on the side of your house. And that's what you're doing. Based on the square footage of your roof and how much rain there is, that is a bunch of fricking water, right? 15,000 gallons of water. So if you're not redirecting the water off of your roof to not fall next to your house, then you're just asking for that water to come toward your house, even if you're graded properly. Because there's just so much of it, right? So you have to grade properly. You have to divert water from your roof and from other water sources away from the house. And in doing this, you're pushing it all away. And now the pressure on the building envelope and the structural waterproofing is. Is less, right? It doesn't have to. Like, you're not just putting so much pressure against that. Because listen, guys, over time, water deteriorates stuff just does it deteriorates everything. If you keep something in water for a long period of time, it starts breaking down. Just what happens, right? So our exterior waterproofing that's structurally built into the sides of our house and even dug down below our house to where the foundation goes and all that stuff, all of that waterproofing, one, it needs to be there. Older houses don't even have that. Some older homes, especially on the east coast, they didn't build and create waterproofing solutions that go down below the ground level. Cause they didn't know any better. If you have an older house and there is no waterproofing below grade, think about what happens if you have ground outside. Water soaks into the soil. It's going to get below the ground level. Water's going to soak down. It's going to then move toward the house. Water moves from wet to dry. It's looking for dry. It's always looking for dry. That's why, like an example, if you have like water on your counter and you just put like the edge of a paper towel, just tip the very corner of the paper towel and the water at the bottom, the water starts coming up, the towel starts climbing the towel, okay? It's called the capillary effect or capillary action. It basically means that water seeks dry. So if it's wet, it's going to go to dry. So if you're outside and it's raining and the rain's coming down. It's getting in the ground, it's getting in the dirt and the soil or whatever. The water's going to start traveling towards your house because that's where the dry is. Okay. Because all the water on the other side has been raining everywhere over there too. Right. So it's not going to go that way. So it's going to go to the dry that's going towards your house. Eventually hits the foundation of your house that is also dry. Now it starts penetrating through the foundation, and then it creates that water vapor concept that I was just talking about before. So having waterproofing down the side under the ground level of the house, when the water starts coming toward your house, it hits the waterproofing barrier and protects the house from. From it. Right. This is the kind of stuff that you need to have set up and that you need to evaluate in the house. And this is all prevention stuff. Right. This isn't like fixing a mold problem. This is preventing it. And I'm literally just talking about the main space of your house. I haven't gotten into other rooms yet. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to split this up over segments, and we'll do a couple other episodes where I go into different rooms and kind of talk through those. But for today, we did windows. We did carpets. Let's do the quick recap. Windows, make sure they're not leaking around the actual casing and enclosures. Second, make sure that they're not condensing. If they're condensing, it's a combination of, is the window insulated properly and does it have a high enough CF factor? And two, are you managing the humidity in your house and keeping it low enough? If your humidity's high, even if you have a high CF window, it's still gonna create condensation. Cause there's more moisture in your house. So you have to bring down the humidity in your house and get a window that can support more humidity and more temperature difference in Morris. And so. So that's what you look on the window front, on the carpet front. One, vacuum it. Do not clean it with water. Vacuum it. Two, put an air purifier filter system that filters the small particles down in rooms where there are carpeting, because it will start to arrest the particles that get popped up all the time from you walking around. Okay. And then as a source level, you want to make sure that any of the walls that. That are exterior walls or different rooms, there are no water sources coming in from those walls because if there are water issues on the opposite side of those walls, then you're gonna have mold that starts growing under your carpet. So that might mean your waterproofing solution on the exterior. Or let's say you're have a carpet against the bathroom. Is the tub leaking? Is the toilet leaking? Is the shower leaking? Is it against that wall? Is it coming through? And are you seeing mold underneath? So those are a couple quick things that you can do for prevention for the main living spaces of your house. So that was finished areas, other places that we're going to talk about in upcoming episodes, your kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms, attics, basements, laundry rooms, garages, kind of all the main spaces. Right. So you only have so many types of rooms in your house. I'm going to kind of do a quick overview on each one of them. All right, guys, thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next time.

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