134: Mold Minisode: Why You Need A Mold Inspection Before Remediation

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.

Why do you need an inspection before remediation? If you're looking at something and you're like, I'm going to remediate this, why do I need an inspection? Right. It's a pretty common question that comes up. There's a few reasons. Here's the first one. Remediators are not inspectors. Okay? So what they're going to do, if you say, I need this area remediated, they're going to come in and remediate that area, and that's all they're going to do. And if they can't see just super gross visible mold all over the place anywhere else, they're not even going to bother looking for it. Why is this a problem? Because typically when there is a source issue somewhere, it extends beyond what the visible eye can see very easily. I can't tell you how many times I've gone into a post remediation inspection and the protocol said to remove this wall. So and so amount. That's literally all they did. And I look one inch over to the left and they're still water staining. They're in and out as fast as they can. All right? So we have to be able to tell them everything they need to. And the only way you could do that is if you have an inspection. And in the inspection you're mapping out the extent of what's going on and how far the area is impacted and creating a protocol based on that. Another reason, does something even need to be remediated? You might look at something, be like, this needs to be done, but if you sample it and it comes back and maybe it shows that there actually isn't a problem, there's a percentage of time where there is a water damage issue and mold might not grow there. If we make the assumption that I had a leak, I'm going to just remediate this whole thing and deal with it. And we're not inspecting it to map out the path of the moisture, and we're also not testing it to even validate if it's a problem. You make that assumption. Remediating that area is a few thousand dollars off of an assumption when a basic source area test is, you know, 100, 150 bucks, depending on who you're talking to. Right? So there's a difference there. There's a reason that you should be looking at that and actually understanding how far it's spread and even testing to validate if it needs to be done. Here's another reason. You may find a lot of things in your place, right? Maybe there's seven things going on that need to be remediated. Okay, so then the question is, well, how do I know which one is the worst? What do I need to remediate? Where do I need to prioritize my remediation budget in order to do this and get the biggest bang for my buck? There's no way that you can know that without one, an inspection that even identifies those seven areas, two, testing of those areas. And when you test them, what does it do? It gives us data that we can look at, and we can start prioritizing and creating tiers based off of the information that comes in. So visibly. You know, the wall over here next to you might maybe have more staining, and maybe you think that's the area I have to remediate. When it turns out that maybe there's an area in your bathroom that's hidden behind a shower and it doesn't show up as visibly because there's tile, but that ends up being a massive, massive mold source in your house, and it might be the biggest mold source that there is. If we're not going through the inspection process, we're not able to identify these different things and the different variables that then have a direct impact on remediation. Because when you talk about priority, the whole reason we're even talking about priority is because we're trying to get the biggest impact for a particular budget that you have. So that means if I sample one wall and it's lower and I sample somewhere else and it's really high, if I remediate the area that's significantly higher, I'm removing a much larger contributor to the overall mold load in the house. A much larger factory. Not every factory is created equal. You have little tiny factories. You have big, massive factories, right? But the concept of the factories is saying we have a source that impacts the main living space, but the sizes of the factories can be very different. And that's why we have to go through the inspection process and test. Let me give you an example of why an inspection is needed. In an inspection I just did a couple days ago, they had a leak that happened in their main living area. Okay. Their main living area was, like, wood flooring. There was, like, a little planter box that was in there. The planter box leaked. There was also an air conditioner unit. The lead kind of fell on the same areas. A couple things that happened. We go in the living room area, and guess what? The wood floor is warped. Of course it is. Makes sense. Water hit the area, wood floors warm. So you could come into that and just be like, I need to remediate this floor. This is actually what the person in the house had told us. So, like, we know that we need to remediate and handle this floor. Like, okay, cool. So after that, we understand that you can't just look at that and make that decision. Right. So what we do is we track the path. We actually perform an inspection. Right. What's below this room? What's next to this room? What's adjacent to this area over here? Well, there was a basement that was below this area. We go down into the basement and put up the magic mold flashlight, which is hilarious. Still to this day, people ask us what magic mold flashlight we use. It's a regular flashlight. It's just the way that you point it at the walls helps cast shadows off of different things and makes them pop off the walls more. Okay. So it's literally like a little handheld flashlight that we buy on Amazon. It works. We get for the guys. So anyways, I'm in the basement. I'm using this flashlight, just kind of going up, and the back wall of the basement is kind of the edge of where the flooring met right above. And I start tracking up. I see, like, just a little staining on the wall. So I track it, and I see staining going all the way up to the ceiling of the basement, where it basically meets the floor of the area up above. What happened is that there was a water issue got under the flooring in the main level. It doesn't just stop there. It then went down into the basement. It impacted an entire wall in the basement to the point where then when I looked down the wall, I saw a whole bunch of bubbling paint on the baseboard. And I was able to track the water lines all the way up the wall, all the way up to the origination of the water source, which is a floor higher. If we had come in there and been like, oh, we don't need to inspect this. This is damaged. I can see that it's damaged, guys. This is what most inspectors do. And then it especially what most remediators do. But it's what most inspectors do, too. They'll walk in, they'll be like, oh, I see this area is damaged. This area just needs to be, you know, removed this year or whatever. Or sometimes they won't even say remove anything, right? And they'll just leave it. And they won't even, like, explore anywhere else that anything went off. It's crazy, right? And remediators are even worse. They come in like, here's my crew. It's almost like, wreck it, Ralph, what a remediator does. It's almost like they just come in, they're like, knock wall down, blah, blah, blah, and that's it. And there's like. Like very few remediators have strategy behind what they're doing. And so you see a warped, buckled floor, and just like, rip the floor out, we're all done, and you don' it down. If that's all that you do, then you miss the actual full extent of what that individual mold source was from that water source. Right? That's why it's so important. I talk a lot internally to our team as well as to clients about this concept of how we go through a house and almost imagine like, a dollhouse. You have, like, your little Barbie dream house or whatever, right? And you open up the house, and you can see all the. All the different floors, right? You can see it, like, almost like a blueprint. There's the upstairs. You just move your little Barbie up and down between the floors, and there's a little, you know, elevator or whatever, and they go up and down that stuff, right? That's how we have to think of our houses, right? We have to think of them in the visual of that dollhouse setup. And understand that just because something happened on the main floor doesn't mean it's not connected to the floor below it or the room to the left of it or the room to the right of it or whatever might be attached to it. So why do you need an inspection before remediation to just kind of like, wrap this up is because if you don't. One, you're not even validating the after remediate something in the first place. Okay. Two, if you do need to remediate it, how much do you need to remediate? You're not getting the full scope and the full impact of that area. So you'd spend money on remediation, and then you would have left this whole wall in the basement down as part of it. You would have spent all that money to remediate and Rip up all your floors and do all this stuff. You still have a massive mold source down in a basement, Right? And then three, it helps you prioritize what you're actually going to remediate. Right? I have X amount of dollars. I see the number of areas because I had an inspection and I validated and now I understand that there's, you know, five things, six things, whatever it is, I can afford three of them. What three do I need to do to get the biggest bang for my buck? The biggest reduction in overall exposure in my space? That's going to have the biggest impact on my health. That's why you have inspections. Okay? So I know sometimes we see things and we're just like, man, I got to get to this right away. I want to be on top of this. I listen to Brian. Brian says if water's around for a period of time, mold is going to grow. Yes, that's true. But if the water happened, it happened already. You're not gonna fix it, right? Like, take the extra couple days to really diagnose the problem to the full extent that you can. Because the last thing you wanna do is spend a bunch of money on fixing a problem, but you don't actually fix it because you rushed into it.

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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