178: Post Remediation: Should I test right away?

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.

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Hello. Hello. Welcome back. Today we're talking about testing. After you do cleaning in your home or your house, how long should you wait to do that? There's a lot of different information and guidelines on you're supposed to wait six weeks, you're supposed to do it right away, you're supposed to wait six months, you're supposed to be whatever. And people get really confused on what you're supposed to do. And so I've been seeing that come in a lot. Again, we're taking topics for the show from my email community. It's we will email out, call for topics, things come in, and then if I see a cluster of topics that come in, we'll kind of spike those at the top and bam. Here we're talking about it. So if you want to be a part of that and be able to submit questions, you literally just reply to the email and just write your question. Whatever you're thinking of, you need to be on the email list. If you're not on our email list, you can get there@yesweinspect.com join yesweinspect.com join get on the list and you can send us questions and I may talk about it. So that's how it works. Okay, so how soon after cleaning your home do you do dust testing? Okay, so let me unpack this just like a little bit to get some context here. So what someone's talking about here is a version of like a fine particle cleaning in a way. Now, it might not be full fine particle. There's so many ways to go about doing that. And everybody has their own protocol on how to do fine particle cleans and whatever. Like, so I'm not going to get into that on this on this specific topic. I just want to talk more about the, the framework and philosophy about when you test and why you test and what the purpose of it is. Because I think that's where people get lost in this. And so that's what I want to talk about. So let's think about why we are testing. You clean an area, right? Let's say you clean your house. You had remediation done. So, so to set the stage, you probably remediated a couple areas in your house, a couple walls, let's say, or maybe did a bigger remediation, your house, whatever. So you did some source remediation. You got rid of that stuff. You also cleaned your home in addition to that. Because we know that mold travels throughout your space. That's how we're exposed to it. Right. So it's not like if you have mold behind the wall, it just stays behind the wall. If that was the case, it would be the best because nobody would ever be exposed to it. But that's not how it works. It comes out from the walls, we get exposed to it, we get sick. Right. So you could remove the wall and fix the source, which you need to do. But if you're not cleaning up your house also, then you're still going to be exposed to the residual that has already made its way out in your living space. So what we're talking about is how long after the cleaning of your house do you do follow up testing to see what's going on? So why are you doing the testing? Let's start there. If you're doing remediation, there's a concept called post remediation verification testing, which means I came in, I remediated, I did all the remediation of the sources and I cleaned the house. And the first thing you want to know is did that work? Right. This is the part that I think is missed a lot in this question because a lot of people are like, oh, just wait X amount of weeks or months until afterwards. But the reality is you just did a big intervention in your home right? Now in theory, what I would really love to do is that you want to have like a series of these tests so you could see progress. So in what's probably happens, you're doing a dust test before you even start remediation and you understand what your pre work baseline was before I did anything. My dust test, I'm just going to use the codes from the dust test just for context here. Um, just to make it easier. My dust test code was a four. Um, it's a range of one to five. Four is highest or on the higher end, four is a problem. Right, It's a four. Cool. We're going to go through, we then maybe do an inspection, you, you find some sources, you remediate the sources, you do a full home cleaning and you do another dust test. And let's say your dust test code goes down to a three or a two. Okay? That shows progress. Now when do you do that test? You do that test right after remediation is done. You're not waiting. The purpose of that test is not to allow things to accumulate again. The purpose of that test is to reestablish your baseline, right? The, the baseline that you created at the beginning of the process, before you did any intervention, any work that kind of doesn't matter anymore because you've done a bunch of work, right? It's the same as if you went into, you're looking to buy a house and you walk in the house and they've renovated the house. You're like, oh, it looks pretty. Like I kind of don't care what it looked like before. Like so before it looked like a 1970s house with dated everything and green carpet and all. Who cares? I walked in the house. Now this is my new normal. This is what the house looks like right now. This is where I am now in the timeline, right? So you want to do a dust test pretty much immediately after you're done with your remediation to see if the remediation worked. Because the purpose of remediation is to return everything to a normal fungal ecology. Like it's, it's to get to a clean slate as best as you can. You don't want to allow time for other things to build up. Because if you do that and you wait six weeks, let's say, and you read us test, then you know what's going to happen. You're like, oh, my dust test is still elevated. You go back to your remediator, they're going to be like, well, it's been six weeks. There could have been something else that happened somewhere, right? Like they don't warranty, you don't warranty mold remediation. Like it needs to be cleared at the time. Because one leak, one drip, one anything, mole can start again and you have a new source, right? So you're not going to get like some sort of long term guarantee. You have to be testing really close to when it's done to prove that whatever the remediator did either worked or didn't work. Right. So the first one that I would do is like right after you're done, like literally days after you're done, I would do the dust testing through the house, then see where you are in comparison. Can now if you want to wait a period of time. So. Well, hold on before I do that. So let's say that that one looks pretty good, right? And you've also post tested the source areas so, like, let's say they removed a wall, you did surface testing of the exposed framing, everything over there, to make sure that all the sources of the growth in those areas are gone. What you've now done is that you've established that the areas that I was aware of that had a mole problem in terms of sources, they have all been fixed. So those factories are no longer factories. Those are fine. And the whole house has been cleaned to a new baseline, which shows up in the dust test and say you're a code two or something at that point. Right. Like, cool. This is great. This is my new baseline. And I know everything that I at least knew about at that time in terms of potential sources of mold in the house. And they're all handled. And I've tested now. I know. Okay, so now why would you test later? Okay, so this is the question, how long do I wait before a test? Should I be waiting this long, that long? And the other. Why do you test later? You test later. Oh, hold on. I want to come back. Sorry. The argument on testing, I just thought of this and it'll come up and I just want to make sure that you guys have an answer to it. The argument that you'll get from a lot of people on testing right after is that you need time for the dust to settle in order to test it again. And because you need time, you have to wait a certain amount of time for gravity to bring these particles down. Yeah, you do that. If you don't remediate properly, you need time. If you're doing a real. If you're doing the home cleaning process the right way, you are including a fogging procedure to bring all the particles down to the surface so you can then wipe them away. If you're doing that, you've already. You've now forcefully moved all those particles. You've sped up the timeline. You're not relying on gravity to do it over the course of weeks or months or years. You're implementing a process that is going to speed that up and make that happen in a day, and then they're going to clean all of it. So now there shouldn't be anything else floating around at that point in time. So the argument that you'll hear a lot is like, oh, we clean. But you need all the time for everything to settle. If I need time for everything to settle, that means that you cleaned the house in a way that disturbed everything up into the air and you didn't bring it back down to wipe it down. That's a problem. On remediation, that's a remediation problem. So that has to be done. And assuming you're doing that so you basically, you go in, you fog everything, goes down to surface, and then you wipe all the surfaces. And that's how you're doing your, your cleaning, your house cleaning. If you do that, there's no need to wait. You don't need to wait. At that point, you can test right away. Okay. And so that's why I'm saying you do that right there and understand what's left. Now you know where you're at. Now let's say that you do want to test later. Okay. What's the purpose of testing later there? If you've done all of your proof and validation pretty close to when remediation ended? The reason you would test later is if maybe you suspect that there's more mold sources in the house that like, you weren't aware of, and because they weren't removed the first time, they're still contributing into the main living area. Spores, fragments, toxins, whatever, and they're still settling down in the dust. And then in theory, if you did a dust test again, it should elevate again off of that, if that's what's happening. Right. And so then why would you do another dust test again? To understand if you got all the sources or not. That's why you would do it. Right.

And that, that's, that's where I think the disconnect comes is why you test immediately after versus why you test six weeks after. The, like, industry through line of waiting six weeks to just let gravity bring the particles down. So then you can test it and see if the cleaning worked. Doesn't really make sense because you're allowing six weeks of time to go by for maybe there's two other sources in the house that you didn't know about. They're still going to be pumping their fragments and stuff into the space, and they're going to combine with whatever's been floating around and it's going to come down and that result's going to be pretty elevated. And then what are you going to say? Are you going to say the remediation didn't work? Maybe the remediation did work. Maybe the sources that were remediated were actually remediated. And maybe the cleaning process actually was effective, but because you didn't test it right at the time and you allowed six to eight weeks to occur, or maybe there's something else impacting the space, Maybe the crawl space is impacting, maybe there's something. Maybe the attic is impacting. Maybe there's a couple of the mold sources you don't know about that are impacting. And then you test then. Now you don't know where you're at. You don't know if the problem is because the remediation failed or because there's other things influencing the space that you need to address next. You don't know that. Right? So you have to test right afterwards and establish new baseline. And then if you want to test six to eight weeks later, you can and look at it like that. But my argument would be this, I'm not going to keep testing over and over again if I'm feeling good. Because, and we've always said this, there's always going to be mold in a house. You're never going to get rid of all of it. And the thing about dust testing is it's an accumulation over time. So as more particle and more swarm, more stuff gets into the dust, your numbers are ultimately going to get more. They're going to get higher. Right? And so, you know, for me, if I'm remediating, I go back to, why am I remediating? I'm not remediating because I'm just like, yes, I want to remediate my house. I woke up today and I was like, please rip all this stuff out and remediate my house. No, you're remediating because you're sick. Nobody else is doing it. Unless there's a cause to do it, there's a trigger to do it. Right? Your trigger is, I don't feel good. I need to remediate and get rid of the stuff I'm exposed to to feel better. Right? The goal is to feel better. The goal is not to run a bunch of tests to look at numbers to tell you if you should be feeling better. The goal is just to feel better. So your body and your feeling is your barometer. It's not the result on a test. Right? So for me, the purpose of testing is to validate that whatever intervention or action that we did had the effect that we wanted to, not the effect on the body, but it had the impact on the space that it was meant to have. We're proving that our remediation worked. Remediate test right after. Now, instead of just coming back and saying, I'm going to test six to eight weeks later, I'm probably just going to live in the house for six to eight weeks and see how I feel. And if I start, if I'm feeling Okay. I'm not gonna go on this manhunt for mold all the time. It's not psychologically healthy. And if your health is improving, then it's not even physiologically physically needed either. Right? So don't go on like a, like a wild goose chase to find it if you don't need to. You need to. If you are not feeling good, right. You need to. If the medical preventions that you are on are not progressing you the way that you need to right now, if that's happening, if you live in the space for another two to three months and you realize, I feel exactly the same way that I did or I'm not progressing or whatever it is, then, yeah, more power. Do it. Do it there. Right? But do it for a reason. Do it because the same reason you did at the beginning. I'm not feeling good. I did a test. I took an action. That action was remediation. And then to wrap that bow, I test it after remediation to prove that what the money I spent on remediation was effective. Done. That's like its own project. Then you start over, right? Don't think of it as the same thing. Think of it as like, that's done. I'm now starting over. I'm walking back into my house and I'm feeling a certain way. If I'm feeling good, you're never going to go down that road again, so why, why waste the money on it? Right? If you're not feeling good, then you start it again. I. I'm going to maybe dust test again. Oh, I see that my dust test has actually gone up from my, my post remediation verification 1. Okay. This is telling me that there's still some other influence in the house that's building up that we maybe didn't identify. Right. You're not going to argue that the cleaning didn't work because you tested at the front end. You know, the cleaning was. Was acceptable. Right. Because you said, okay, we're good with this. So it's not that they came in and they failed the first time. Whatever they did, they did effectively. And if you do a dust test again and it's rising again and you're not feeling good, right? And now you're triggering and you're seeing that's rising again, then the next thing is, all right, there's a likelihood that there's more going on here. And so we need to reevaluate the house. Did we, you know, did we look at the H Vac? Did we look at the crawl Space, you know, where did you look before? Was it isolated, was it not? Who came in, who did the inspection? Do they inspect the way that, you know, we inspect us, or do they inspect the way that local mold inspector X does? Right. And you know, those of you who listen to this know the difference to that. And this episode isn't around that. But you know how many sources were found, right? You know, you kind of go through it and then maybe you need to have a second evaluation of the house done and you kind of go through the process again. But don't start going through the process if you are feeling good, right? If you're feeling good and better, don't put yourself through it again. You're progressing. Not, you don't need to be around. This is the majority of people, not every single person, but the majority of people do not need to be in a zero mold exposure place. One, it's kind of impossible, and two, our bodies are meant to fight stuff off. It's meant to, you know, we're this really cool internal system that we have. Sometimes we get overwhelmed and that's when all the symptoms and the stuff comes on. But if you reduce the exposure, you're now being exposed to way less, so your body doesn't have to fight off as much. And then if you're doing medical interventions, right, you're doing detox protocols, you're doing methylation pathway improvement, you're doing things like that, then your body is actually getting better at removing it. You're introducing less of it now on a day to day basis. And all of a sudden your body might not need to be at zero exposure anymore. It just needed less coming in and it needed to become a little more resilient and effective on its own. And by balancing those two things out, you might now be living at a.

In a harmonious state with your home. Even though there might still be a little mold exposure left in the home. And that's really the ultimate goal for anyone going through this, is to be able to be exposed to mold at, you know, kind of normal minimal levels and not have your body freak out. And so if you're, if you did a remediation and you come through and you're progressing or you're feeling okay, don't open the rabbit's hole again for no reason like why don't do it, right? If you're not, then you do it and you continue to expand and you continue to investigate or you decide that you're kind of over and you want to look for something else. Which is totally fine too, if you want to go somewhere else. But that would be my process. So how soon after cleaning a room or house do you do dust testing? You do it immediately after assuming that at the end of the process, they fogged everything down and wiped all the surfaces. That way you don't have to wait for gravity to pull stuff down over weeks and months at a time. You do it right there and then you stop. And hopefully for you, I hope you never have to do it again. I hope you never have to do it again because you're feeling better, because you address things in your house and everything's going. But if your health is not progressing the way that you want to, then, you know, you can then do testing at that point. But, you know, talk to your doctors. Obviously you probably want to give your body a couple months. I would imagine that's more of a doctor question, but I feel like you're, you know, you're giving yourself some time to reestablish into a space to understand how you're going to feel there. And also you got to get your doctor's feedback too. Is the protocols that they're on going to trigger symptoms in you? Because it's mobilizing toxins in your body. So does that mean that it's the house that's triggering you? Does that mean that it's the, the treatment protocol that you're on that's triggering your symptoms? It's not always the house that's doing it afterwards. If you're going through, like, detox and, and, and, and you're mobilizing all these toxins, you have even more stuff infiltrating your immune system that has to come outta your body. And that can be what's triggering your symptoms, not the fact that you missed something in the house and there's more going on. So it really is a conversation with your health practitioner, too, is like, hey, the protocols that you have me on, should I expect my symptoms to be increasing? Because I'm noticing it. And I went through this process with the house, and we did post testing afterwards, and the sources were fixed and the, and the house cleaning was effective, where there was a reduction in mold in the house, where we were okay with it, but I'm feeling this way right now. So before I reopen the Is my house a problem issue, I want to talk to you, doctor, to understand if what you're putting, you know, the process that you have me going through on the treatment would be creating these symptomatic responses that I used to attribute to exposure. And if they're like, yeah, you know, that can be happening. Right. So what our plan here is that we're going to do X, Y and Z. Maybe we taper back the aggressiveness that we're doing on your protocols or whatever to try to reduce your symptoms and your, you know, your. Her reactions and that sort of thing. And let's say they do that, and then all of a sudden you're not feeling it anymore, then it means it wasn't the house, it was how they were treating you. Right. So you got to kind of look at both pieces. Why would you be feeling symptoms at the end? Sure. Is there more going on in the house? Maybe. Or you're working on your body. You're mobilizing toxins, you're detoxing, you're messing with your. I mean, you're doing so much stuff inside. You have to get all this stuff out. And, you know, getting it out can be a little messy. Right. And a lot of times, people on their way to feeling better feel worse because you're getting all this stuff out of your system. And if that's the case, then the problem isn't the house. The problem is maybe tweaking and dialing the aggressiveness of how the medical protocol is working with you. So hopefully that helps answer the question. It was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be, but hope you guys find it helpful. Talk to you next time.

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