157: A Parent's Guide to Water Damage Prevention

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, what's going on, everyone? I'm just going to start hammering out. Different questions came through. So first one, can a remediated house still smell musty, like mold? Yeah, let's think about that. All right. What does a remediated house mean? In theory, it means that you probably got rid of all the mold. Right? If you're still smelling a musty smell. That musty smell is a sign of active mold growth that is happening. If we know that, that's. That's kind of our indicator for that there's a mold issue going on. Listen, you're not always going to have a musty spell when there's a mole problem, but if you have a musty smell, it's like a big, big red flag. Okay? So if somebody came in and remediated and you come back in and it still smells musty, then there's still a problem. Okay. Either there's still a source that's going on that they didn't get to or. Or the whole house wasn't cleaned properly and you still have the MVOCs that are left over. So that smells actually microbial volatile organic compound. That's what that smell is. It could have soaked into things. So like part of a remediation has to be a full house wipe down on top of removing source. So hopefully that helps. So this is actually a really kind of connected question to what we just asked here. Hey, Brian. My house was remediated for mold. However, there's still a high count of Astrapillus penicillium in a certain area in the basement. The living quarter readings were clean. Okay, so that's very similar. Right. If you're seeing elevated council mold after a remediation, one of two things happened. One, they didn't actually remove all the sources, which means you have a source that's still pushing that stuff out there and it's still happening. So that's the first one. The second one is that the area wasn't cleaned after the remediation was done. So you could actually remove all the sources. I could get this wall out, get everything back, clean it, do all that stuff and if I don't actually clean up the areas around as well. Because if you think about it, like, mole doesn't just sit back here, right? Like, the way that we breathe it or the way that it hits us is through breathing. We don't stick our faces in the wall. Right? That's not what we're doing. We don't stick our noses back here and breathe this. What's happening is that spores are coming out from here, and we're breathing it here. If we're breathing it here, this far away, then you know that it's pushing and circulating all around and settling everywhere. So if we're not cleaning everything after we remove a source, then you may still have elevated counts. So it's one of the two things either didn't remove source or they didn't do a home cleanse properly after the case. Let's see mold prevention tips for homes here. Let's knock this one out. Okay. Mold needs three things to grow. Water temperature, food source. Okay? These are three things that it needs. We cannot control two of them. We can't control the temperature. We can't control what our house is built out of. Right. That's the food source. The one thing we can control is moisture. So we're talking about mold prevention tips. We really have to reframe it around. How do we prevent moisture buildup and unknown leaks and things like that in different areas to help prevent. Okay, so I'm gonna give you. I don't know, let's see if I can, three things off top of my head for you guys. Number one.

Think about areas where there is water sources. Those are gonna be more likely where you're gonna have source issues that occur just because there's moisture there. So the probability is higher. So where do those areas? Bathrooms, kitchens, sinks, anywhere where there's like, washing machines, water heaters, anywhere we have, like, plumbing lines and stuff. That's going to be a much higher probability area for a source area than something else. So how do we talk about preventing those things? I'm going to give you three things that we could do right now. Number one, pull everything out from under your sink cabinets. Every. Can I tell you every two weeks. Are you gonna do it? Probably not. Let's go with every month. If you could do every month. It's not that hard. And the reason that you want to do this. Okay. If you have a leak under your sink and you have all your stuff shoved under your sink cabinet, which all of us do, I have stuff under there too. Okay. Then if you're doing that, then you're not gonna be able to see what's going on. Okay. And if you can't see what's dripping and what's happening and what's soaking up, then bam, you're going to have mold problems that happen under there. I bet you this is all anecdotally. I bet you 8 out of every 10 houses that we go into has at least one sink cabinet with a source mold problem in it. So there's, number one, be on top of that. If you're on top of it, you can address them before they turn into problems. Second area, let's talk about showers. Let's talk about showers. That's another area. Okay. Big water source. Lots of questions came through about showers, grout cleaning, this, that, how do we handle showers? All right, not in the shower. We're going to talk about right outside of the shower. So if we're showering, we're doing all this stuff, right? And water gets out of the shower and it gets on the wall next to the shower and it starts hitting the walls and the baseboards and things like that. Then that becomes a water source that impacts food from. For mold. Right. Drywall, wood, you know, all that stuff. And you get mold growing either behind the baseboards or the wall that's over there. Okay. That is a super common area where these things happen is something we could so easily be on top of and prevent. Don't splash water outside of the shower or the tub. That's a very easy thing. Now all of you that have kids are going to say, brian, I have kids, what do I do? They do that.

Teach them not to do that. And I know that sounds, I get it. Listen, I can, I'm a parent. It's very hard to like give parenting advice and things like that. But just, just hear me out here, okay? I have a 4 year old about to turn 5 year old. I've taught her from, as soon as she can understand me that water stays in the tub. Water does not come out of the tub. The tub is meant for the water. The water's not meant to go somewhere else. If water gets out of the tub, bath time done, water's off, fun over. And I taught her that. And I taught her that when she was 2, when she was 3, and now that she's 4, about to turn 5, she understands stuff, right? We can have full on conversations and stuff now. And you know what happens if she accidentally splashes a little bit somewhere? She will look at me and she'll be like, oh, I'm sorry, Dad. I got water out. And she knows she wasn't supposed to. And you know what I say? Like, it's okay. It's okay. We all make mistakes. That's fine. We'll clean it up real quick. And just be careful not to do it again. Okay? It's not about punishing and stuff. Right. But it's about teaching somebody to be aware of that and if they become aware of it. Yeah, we all make mistakes here. There, things happen. Whatever, guys. If water splashes out of a tub when your kid is in there, just dry it off afterwards. Mold needs at least 24 hours to grow. So if they splash and they get out of the shower, and if you have to go in there because you have a teenager who's like, I give no Fs about anything. And. And you have to go in there and wipe down the wall and the shower and stuff and the floor after they shower, then that's something that either you need to do or you to make sure that they're doing it. If you could do that, you prevent the water getting in. You prevent the mold problems from happening. Right? So that's one thing. Let's see. All right, I paid $1,000 for an inspector to come in and only did air samples. All of you that have been following and listening know that. How I feel about that. Even after telling him we had three areas of water damage. Okay, so this person comes in. Oh, and let me finish. And I found mold under a bathroom sink. Not sure what to do next. Okay, you had an inspector come in. You told them the history of your house. You told them you had three areas of water damage, and they did air samples in the middle of the room. What does that tell you? It tells you they have no idea what they're doing. So first off, I'm sorry that you spent a thousand dollars on this, but you can't look at that at all. That thousand bucks kind of out the window. It's over. All right? What really needs to happen is that you need to test at the sources where you have these areas of water damage. Is it under a sink? You said you found mold under a bathroom sink. Then you test under the sink. Now, if you found mold already that, you know, we can talk about what has happened. But if you have water damage in a certain place, you have to test those areas at the source to see if there's a problem. Let me look through some more questions here.

How do I know what spore counts are considered safe? Spore counts are different for different sample types. So you're gonna have. We're gonna be talking about air samples. We're talking about swab samples. Okay. So we're talking about them both. Swap samples are easier. There is kind of a number tiering system for score counts. But what I will say first before we get into that is we sort of have like a priority, priority sort of look and framework internally that we use when we create priorities and provide them out down the road for people when remediation comes up. So the first thing if in a four sample. So you're talking air samples or swabs. Let's see the 1. If stachybotrys, ketomium, or fusarium, any of those three molds, stachybotrys, ketonium, or Fusarium are picked up in that sample, then that is an automatic top tier priority one issue. Okay. Those molds require more water. They require the most amount of water to grow, which means you likely have a more significant moisture issue that's occurred. And all three of them have toxic capabilities. Mycotoxin capabilities. Right. These are a lot of the bad news molds. If you start thinking internally. If you guys are running your mycotoxin test and you have like zero alone or trichophysy or catoglomicin or any of those, those are tied to those moles. So those are automatically top tier. Right. So I don't even care what the score count is on those. It could literally be one. I don't care if it's there. It's an issue we need to look at. Okay, so that's the first piece. All right, now the next piece. Let's talk swabs. There's four different rankings. So when you look at a swab sample and a result. I wish I had the screen up here, but we're talking through. Right? So if you have swab results, I'm giving you a quick little how to relab results. Mini training here. On the left side, you'll see raw score count. On the right side, you'll see count per meter squared. Count per meter squared is a kind of like creating a common denominator so you can get context for all the samples along the same denominator. The reason you have to create a common denominator is because the surface area that you swipe can change. You can say, I swipe 1 by 1 inch over here, I swipe 3 by 3 inches over here, whatever. And based on that, that can actually change your common denominator. So our standard practice is to do everything at a one by one inch measurement. So we, we understand kind of consistency on our end. It's a standard that we have internally to make sure all of our inspectors are collecting samples the right way. And we're doing everything so it's all consistent across the board. So we do everything one by one. Unless we're in a special circumstance like a post remediation or something like that, it would change. But for now we'll go one by one. So when I'm looking at these results, I'm not looking then as much at the raw count because all of ours are very standardized. So I'm looking at the count per meter square. And in the count per meter square you kind of have a few different areas. You have what's called rare or like very low, which is 10 or under. That'll be, that'll be rare. Then you have 10 to 100, that's called low. Then you have 100 to 1000, that's medium. And you have immediate or then you have a thousand plus and that's considered high. So the very easy way to look at this is if you're 100 or over, it's some sort of issue. It could either be a settlement issue or it could be a source growth issue. You can't get into all of that right now on the live. But when I'm looking at swabs, that's sort of how we generally look at it. So for you, if you're looking at swab, look at count per meter squared. If it's over 100, it warrants a question. Okay, that's on that side. Now on error testing, it's a little different because you have to use baselines to get sense for what's going on. Okay, so we do outside baseline in the front and the back of the house. Because you could have very different readings in the front and the back of the house, but that surrounds your house. And if you open a window in the back, then stuff comes in, or you open the front door, stuff comes in. So we do a baseline on both sides. Try to get a sense of kind of average that out when we're looking at it. And then when you're looking at air samples again, those three multiple Somium Fusarium Stachybotrys automatic problem, Tier 1. After that we're then looking to compare. I'm not necessarily comparing the total spore counts at the bottom. I'm comparing mold to mold. Meaning if I have Aspergillus penicillium in my baselines, and they average like 250. And then I do a wall cavity. My Aspergillus penicillium is like 400. For me, that's a flat. Even if the total score count at the bottom is less, like, let's say that wall cavity, the total spore count is 400. All that was found there was 400 in the wall for Aspen, and let's say the outside was like 1500, because there's a whole bunch of other molds present. But the Aspergillus penicillium average was like 200. I'm still likely going to flag that Aspergillus penicillium at 400 as an issue, even though the total spore count is less than your outside baseline. Because when you're going really targeted at a wall or a cabinet or in a ceiling, you're not getting all of the big airflow that's going on. You're in a really tight space. And so the odds of all of that airflow bringing that particular mole in that place and spiking it higher than what your big diluted average is, is incredibly low. And the other thing is that we're usually sampling that area because we think there's a water damage issue. Right. We know we sampled there for a reason, and we're seeing an elevated counter of a specific roll type. Then I would typically look at that as an issue. So hopefully that helps answer that question for you guys. I know there's a lot more to go into, but you would require a lot of examples, and we don't really have have a lot of that. So we'll keep going. Let me see. Oh, here's a quick question. What do I like for dehumidification for a whole house? So there's a company called Santa Fe, like Santa Fe, Mexico, that makes a whole lot of different dehumidifiers for different areas of your house, Specifically different sizes of homes, different spaces of areas. So if you're in a humid climate, you're trying to figure out, like, how do I manage these humidity component of things? You can look at them, at them at Santa Fe, and they have so many options over there. And I think you could probably call them. We get on the phone and kind of talk through it and try to create a thing that makes sense for you in terms of configuration. But that's where I would go if you're looking for options that you can use for dehumidification. So hopefully that helps. Okay, so I saw another question coming in. I talked about three things you could do to reduce your exposure load. In a house where you're trying to figure out things out, one of the things was opening windows for 10 to 15 minutes every day. Okay. The question that came in mostly was, well, if it's humid where I live, then if I open my windows, my humidity is going to go up. All right? 10 to 15 minutes of a quick air flush like that is not going to incredibly spike your humidity to these crazy levels. That's going to immediately cause problems. Okay? So keep in mind, mold needs 24 to 48 hours to grow. Okay. Especially the ones that grow on humidity. They actually need the less amount of time. They're going to lean more towards the 24, 48 hour timeline. As you start getting into the molds that need more water, like stachybotryx, plutomium fusarium, like I mentioned earlier, they actually need more time. They might need several days to a week or something for them to grow. So the more water that's there, the longer it takes for the mold to grow, the less water that's there. You know, in terms of moisture, then there are certain moles that can kind of thrive on that pretty quickly. So there are moles that just grow in high humidity areas. Okay? So the question is a fair question. I live in Florida and I'm going to open my windows and 70% humidity outside, I'm flooding in moisture. What am I doing? This doesn't make any sense, Brian. Why are you telling me to do things that don't make sense? Here's the thing. Like I said, opening a door in a window for 15 minutes is not going to spike your humidity so much that all of a sudden you're now going to start having mold growing all over the place. Place. Right. It's going to help dilute your air. All right? And then you're going to close your windows again after 10 or 15 minutes. And if you have your air conditioner running, which you probably do in Florida, your air conditioner pulls humidity out of here as it runs. That's part of what it does. So you're going to re establish that baseline. You're going to be cool and you're going to have diluted your air. All right? So I just want to give that, because I saw a lot of questions like that. All right, question. What if you can't find water damage and I am still sick? I'm gonna say this. I don't know the history of your house. I don't know what's going on. I don't know if you Just moved into a new place or if it's a place that you lived in historically or whatever. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna say that you've been here maybe for a little bit. Okay? If you're sick and your doctor is showing that they suspect a mold issue, I'm not even exaggerating. Every time a medical practitioner has referred someone to us, this is not an exaggeration. I'm gonna say it again. This is not an exaggeration. 100% of the time we have found hidden mold problems in the that house every single time. Okay? So if you're saying you can't find water damage and you're still having health symptoms and you've been in your place, you know, for a little bit, right. You just move somewhere new where maybe the problem was in your old house, then odds are you probably just, your eyes probably just don't really aren't trained to see it the way that ours are, which is fine. Right? That's why you go to doctors to read your labs. That's why you go to different places to figure out what's going on. That's why you go to us to help you figure this out. Right? So I would say odds are there are probably some water damage, source area issues that are going on in the house and we would just need to figure it out. So whether it's an in person inspection, the way we work it now, or whether it's going through lean, stack together, whatever it is, we'll tell you everything that's going on. Okay, I think I got time for, I got time for like one or two more and then we'll call it a day. I'm scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, trying to find the best last question. Isn't it the way like when you know you're about doing something. When I was a kid, I. So I was a very good bowler when I was a kid, I was nationally ranked. I was also a very good basketball player. And like before I would leave a practice session, I would like force myself to do the perfect last shot or the perfect last thing. And it sometimes made me end up staying for like an extra 15 or 20 minutes because it like wasn't good enough. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm trying to find the perfect last question. Let's talk about molded clothing and we can wrap on that. So this, this is a lot of times this is a big question. After you've done a remediation, you found a problem. My clothes are in the house. I'm wearing these clothes. Do I could throw out everything I own? What can I do? My immediate answer is no.

Not for most people. Some people are like way more sensitive. So for those of you watching my hands up, right, I'm kind of showing a scale. So the aggress, the amount of aggressiveness that you need to handle a problem needs to match your level of sensitivity. So if you're incredibly sensitive and you can't handle a whole lot, then you need to be a little more aggressive in what you do to remediate to, you know, handle context, different things like that. If you're just somewhat sensitive, then you don't have to be as aggressive in terms of throwing out all your things or whatever. You can kind of meet yourself where you are and do it that way. Now the other really cool thing is that you don't just have to throw everything out now, right? Let's say you're down here. So you could say, listen, I'm way down here. You know, I'm really sensitive. I have some things that are expensive, sentimental, I don't want to get rid of. Whatever cool. Put them in storage somewhere. Just leave them there for a while. Reduce your immediate hit that you're getting off of things. Keep those things somewhere else. Start working on your healing. As you work on your healing, what's amazing is that you'll actually become more resilient. As you become more resilient, you can actually start introducing some of those old things back and your body will be able to handle it as you found in equilibrium. Okay, so when it comes to clothes, I don't think you just have to throw everything out. The quick answer here. Go get my free guide because I'm now late for a meeting and my team's going to yell at me. Cleanmymoldystuff.com I have a whole thing about clothes in there. I have a case study that I did with a very wealthy family where they clean things certain different ways and all this stuff. And they actually found that mycotoxins were removed out of the clothing and they were able to wear them and they were fine. Okay, so go to cleanmyholystuff.com you can go get that. It talks about how to clean everything, not just clothes. So if you're concerned about cleaning any of your items and how to do it or anything like that, you can go get it there. And that's what I got. So thank you guys. I'm wrapping up. I will talk to you later. See ya.

So that's it. For today's show. Everyone, thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment, subscribe and give a rating wherever you get your podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most.