181: Are You Confident in Your 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.

Hey everyone. So today's episode is inspired by another topic that was submitted by our community via an email submission. So we send these out a lot, we ask for topics. So. So that way I can help you guys with what you need help with. So this topic was asking the question of how do you know if your remediation was successful? You know, how do you feel good about the situation when it's done? And I've talked about this a few times, so I didn't want to like redo all of that again, especially because I have a really, really good episode that, that breaks down every single step in consideration you need to think of. That is episode 104, which is aptly titled how do you know if your remediation actually worked? So if you are in that mindset where you are about to go through the remediation process or you went through the remediation process, this episode is really helpful. It talks through the basic remediation principles, it talks through the proper post testing framework, how you should test, what tests you should use, what tests you shouldn't use, and everything you need to know kind of through all of that. So I just wanted to record this quick introduction for you, let you know what you're up for. We are now going to play episode 104 right behind this and hopefully you find this really helpful. It's one of our most popular episodes. I think you guys will find this helpful. Hey, what's going on here? We are very exciting stuff. So this is day, I don't want to say day. This is recording number two in the world of the the new live molefinders radio, which I'm really excited about. So just to set a few things up, as I see you guys starting to pop into the room here, I have in here with me Rachel, who's to my right on your screen up here. Rachel's our knowledge strategist here at We Inspect. She helps me figure out how to get the good word out to everybody in a way that makes sense. So she's very helpful on that front and is going to be helping me with, you know, with this sort of new Live podcast model. So here's how this thing is going to work. We have today's topic is how to know if remediation actually worked. So we're going to kind of talk through that a little bit at the end of the recording. We'll save some time for questions. Right, so if you guys have specific questions, that's kind of why I want to do this live, so we can interact with you guys a little bit. And.

In addition to that. Oh, geez, I just blanked. I have so much going on through my head. Oh, how this is going to work. Okay, so if you guys have questions the way that we're going to do this, you have this thing in the little bottom right corner on here. It's like a little paper airplane thing over here. That's like the messaging piece for Clubhouse. All right, so if you click that thing open, you want to basically create a new message thread with Rachel. Okay. And you could text your question or message your question to Rachel.

You.

She's gonna keep basically kind of like a running tab of what the questions are. And when it comes time to do questions, we'll basically call you up one by one, kind of take the question, go through that and come back down. Okay. So Rachel will kind of be managing that whole thing, and we'll do that maybe a little at the end. Actually, Rachel, I'm thinking what we do is we split this up into segments. At the beginning, we could talk about kind of the remediation process, and then we could do a couple questions, and then at the end we could talk about kind of like the post testing process. So that's kind of how I think we could do this. So we could splash some questions in the middle of this too. So.

All right, Rachel, you want to say hi real quick.

Hi, everybody.

Also.

That sounds good. I think that's going to be super helpful.

Cool. Awesome. So we'll try to bring a couple questions after each sort of subtopic in here. So, guys, just so we know to set up the day topic one, we're just going to talk about sort of remediation best practices. Basically, this is the first step to know if it worked. Did they actually do it in the right process? Right. If they went through and made a bunch of mistakes while they were going through, then there's no way that it worked. Right. So what I want to do is talk through a couple of the concepts with you. We're not gonna have time to talk through every single one of them today. Rachel, if you could throw up the remediation mistakes link up here in the chat so people could see it. And, and for those of you who are listening later for the other sort of remediation best practices that I don't get to cover, I created an ebook that sort of blows all of them out and explains them a little better for you. It's called 10 Most Common Remediation Mistakes. You could get it at remediationmistakes.com it's totally free. Just put it in your email and I'll send it to you. And the purpose of this, and that's kind of what the first part of this conversation today is going to be about, is just to know like how things are supposed to be done. I can't even tell you how many remediation companies come in and they just don't even do it right from the get go. So there's no way it's going to work. Right. So the idea behind creating this guide was to give you guys basically some checks and balances on these people that come in. Because what do you know, right? It's not your job to know all that stuff. So you can make sure before you hire them. Are they going to do this? Are they going to do that? You can check them during the process, maybe have them give you pictures of what they're doing in there so you can see it. Right? And you could kind of be on top of it. So that's the first piece. Then the second piece I'm going to talk about afterwards is going to be about the actual post remediation testing process. So this is also a massive problem with the way the general industry does this. It makes you feel like remediation works, but the reality is that they're testing in a way that if the test came back and for some reason it was bad, then that means they really effed it up, right? Like they're stacking the cards in their favor in the way that they test in here. Okay, so I'm going to kind of touch on both of those things today. So let's dive into some of the kind of main sort of mistakes that we see going through. Okay, so what I'm going to do, guys, actually I, I have this document that I referenced. So again it's@remediationmistakes.com I have it in front of me. I'm just going to scroll through and pick a couple of these out and I'm going to read through them and then maybe expand on them a little bit and then you guys can go download it, get the rest of it. Read through it a little bit more and get a feel for all that stuff, if you're interested. Okay. So there's 10 different.

Mistakes that I put in here. These are the 10 most common things that I see happen. I'm going to skip through and do a couple different ones as we go. So.

I think the first one that I'm going to do is actually number four on the list. And it's not removing building materials beyond suspect mold growth or water damage. This and two feet beyond, I should say, specifically, I skipped over that part. So here's the deal. Like, I. There's so many times we go and we do a pose. Well, let's say we do the inspection. Let's say there's a wall. Maybe it's under a window or something. We see that there's mold under the wall. Right. And so what the remediator will do is that they'll literally come in and they'll cut like a little 2 by 2 foot square or something under the window. They'll still leave drywall on the top and on the bottom. A lot of times they leave. They try to save your baseboard at the bottom of the wall. So they won't cut all the way down and they'll just remove like a patch in the middle. Guys, this is not how it works. All right? So these people are coming in, they're trying to win the job from you, right? They're trying to win the bid to come in and do the work. Now you have to think about what most of these remediation companies do and kind of their process and how they flow. Right. They are typically a volume type of business. Okay. They're more of a construction mindset. This is. Most remediation companies out there have more, this construction point of view on how they approach remediation, which means we get a lead in, we book them. The way that we book them is that we bid them as low as we can. Right. It's going to be the cheapest that it's going to be to work with us. Right. And in order for that to happen, they cut all these corners to make it seem like they're doing something as cheaply as they can. If it's actually a huge disservice for you guys when they do this. All right? So cheaper doesn't always mean better. More expensive doesn't always mean better either. Right. It's more about understanding the process and the flow and making sure things are done. Right. So in this example, let's just imagine you're looking at a wall, there's a window. Let's say there was a mole problem, you know, leak from the window or something, right? So here's the thing. Gravity is going to bring all this stuff down to the ground, all the way down to the bottom of the. Of the wall cavity, okay? So if they come in and they cut a little square out under your window, but they leave the baseboard. Because baseboards are expensive to replace and a hassle, and they don't want the. You know, they think it'll look better if they tell the client they don't have to do that, right? If they come to be like, hey, guys, we can handle this, and you don't even have to replace this baseboard. It's gonna be so easy for you, and we're gonna take care of it 100%. That remediation failed already. Okay? So the thing is, if there's a water damage issue or a mold issue.

Standard just general industry guideline, you have to remove building materials two feet beyond where the last visible staining or discoloration or wherever it is was, right? The space between the bottom of your window and the floor is maybe only two or three feet. So if there was an issue there, then you have to move two feet beyond, just by general industry standards. Guys, this isn't me being, you know, a little more conservative because we work with such a hypersensitive group of people, right? That's. That's not me. This is me literally taking from the book that everybody uses, right? Then it's literally impossible to only cut out a small patch under a window and actually have done it. Right? Okay. So that's the first. The first tip in here. Well, actually, it's tip number four, but it talks about removing two feet beyond building material. So here's what happens a lot. You go in, there was a leak somewhere. They cut out a little spot. They say, hey, we got the mold out. The mold was on this drywall. Apparently it didn't impact any of the other areas behind the wall. Apparently, the wood back there is magic wood that doesn't get wet in the framing. So that doesn't. There's no problem there. Like, none of this matters. This little piece of drywall, this was the problem. We got rid of it. You're welcome. That'll be 3,000 bucks and on with our day, right? Or whatever they charge you for that. It's going to fail because there's still going to be mold on the framing behind that area. Because if water impacted the drywall, you Better believe it impacted the framing materials that were behind it. There's going to be mold that was growing on the framing and there's going to be other things going on in that area. So if they only remove that little patch, they're not removing far enough. Right. So you think that they got everything. They didn't. You close it back up, you repaint the front of it. The front of it looks really nice. Now you're like, oh yeah, we had remediation done. There was a thing here, it's all painted, looks beautiful. Can't even tell. Looks like a brand new house. Except there's still a mole problem behind the wall. Right. And that's still going to come out and be impacting you. So that's one of the, that's one of the first things, you know, we're kind of talking through. And it's easy for you to check that too, right? Like hey, remediation company, send me pictures of what's going on inside. If you guys see any sort of discoloration or water staining anywhere on.

Like where the end of the removal stopped, right. Then you know that they didn't remove enough. And just tell them, guys, you got to remove further, you got to remove more than this. The cost of removing drywall is so minimal. Right. You always want to remove more drywall if you can. Right? It's so minimal to remove drywall. It's not expensive. The bulk of the cost of remediation is setting up the containments and getting the machines brought in there and kind of doing all the prep work. Like that's the bulk of the cost. Removing an extra 2, 4ft of drywall is not adding like thousands of dollars on your remediation bill. Right. But it could make all the thousands that you spent not actually work if you don't do it, if that makes sense. So that's one of the things that's a pretty common thing that we see.

And then this goes to number six. This kind of ties in that same scenario. So number six in the 10 most common remediation mistakes document. So again, it's remediationmistakes.com.

Let me try to pop it up here for, for you, for all of you in the room. So you can.

Go grab it if you're interested. So it's going to pop up on the link right now. Anyways. So number six is not removing mold growth from surfaces. So this same example that we talked about, okay, you can remove the drywall from an area.

But the mold isn't. That's not the only place that it is. Right. It's growing on the structural surfaces behind there. You have to make sure you're actually removing the mold from there. That means that you're wire brushing, you're possibly, possibly sanding, you're surface treating, you're extracting that off of the surfaces. Okay, so that's kind of the first piece of this concept. Now the next piece to this concept is really more around which the second topic we'll get into. But I'll tap into it a little here because it ties into this number. Into this. Number six is how most remediation post testing works. Right? I'm not going to get super into it because I want to have time to do it afterwards. But basically what most remediators will do, or inspectors even that come in, they'll come into your containment. You have this beautiful Dexter kill room that they've created for you. And you walk in there and they put an air sampling pump in the middle of the room and they collect a sample and it comes back and it says it's fine. Because it better say it's fine. They're scrubbing the air non stop in there. If it doesn't say it's fine, there's a massive problem going on.

And then they walk out and they say remediation was good. Here's the problem, guys. The point of remediation is to remove mold from sources where it was growing. It's to remove source mold growth from structural surfaces. That's the purpose of mold, right? If you look again in these guide books, right? The industry standard guide books. I'm not making this stuff up. This isn't crazy, me working with mold sensitive people, and I'm over the top. This is literally the point of remediation is to remove the source growth so you no longer have an abnormal mole condition. That's just, that's literally how it's written in the book. All right? So if they just, if they just come into the, to the containment, they take an air sample in the middle of the room and it shows that it's fine. But they didn't actually really remove the mold from the surfaces on the framing. And you say, brian, how could that possibly happen if we're doing an air test, guys, there's an air scrubber in this room. It is literally cleaning the air for days or weeks before you come in and take this air sample, right? That air sample better pass. If it doesn't pass, then you've got more massive problems going on in this space. It's going to pass. Most times you're literally cleaning the air second by second by second for days or weeks at a time. So if there are still mold sources growing on the framing and the structural components that they left behind, you're not going to find that in an air sample. And mold doesn't grow in the air, it grows on the surfaces. So if we're going to go and we're going to do post testing, we have to make sure we're incorporating the surfaces as part of that. I'll talk about that later on the second section of this. But in the meantime, we need to know as part of number six on most common remediation mistakes, what they the sixth most common mistake that I see is that they're not actually removing mold from the structural surfaces. Right. They're doing this process that basically allows them to pass an air sample clearance test. It reduces the amount of time that they need to come in and work. Right. Because again, if you're removing mold from surfaces, it takes a little more work, right? Take a little more elbow grease, a little more time. It's not going to happen as quickly. And what does that do? It adds more time to their job. Again, what are these guys doing? They're volume based contractors that just happen to say that they're mold remediators. And listen, not every mold remediator is the same. But I'll tell you what, most of them that I've come across are probably not doing it to the level that you want them to do it to. Okay? So you have to understand where they are, how their business works, how they're framing their profit margins, what their ultimate goals are, and then you back into, okay, so how does that mean that they would act in my house based off of all of their goals and what they're trying to do? Right. If I know their business is volume based and they're just trying to do as many of these things as they can and they're under bidding me to do less work so they could get in. And side note, they'll probably try to upsell you once they're in there on things that are going on, if that's what they're doing, then they want to spend as little time as they can and then they want to get out. Right? That's kind of how they want to do it. So that's where this number six item, number six and most common remediation mistakes comes in. Because they'll remove drywall, but they won't actually remove the source of the mold. That grew into the framing components in the different areas.

Kind of behind there on the surfaces. Okay, so, okay, so that's number. That's number six. I'll do maybe, like, one or two more of these on kind of the front end of this, which is more remediation process. Okay, let's go to item number eight in most common remediation mistakes. So this is encapsulating over wet building materials. Okay, so what does encapsulating mean? First off, encapsulating is basically spraying something. Usually it's either a white or a clear paint thing, basically that they spray over the framing components. Once they remove drywall or cabinets, whatever's getting removed. So they kind of spray over the structural components. They can spray it on framing, they can spray it on subfloor. They could put it on roof decking, like, wherever they're working. Right. Basically, the structural stuff behind there, and they spray it on there. And basically they tell you this seals all the mold in and nothing will get out. If you do this right. They kind of sell it to you on that. Again, kind of sounds like a shortcut, doesn't it? Keep talking about shortcuts to get them in and out faster. Doesn't it sound a lot faster to walk in with a big spray gun, basically, and just spray paint all over everything and then say that it's fixed than actually removing what was there and getting rid of it? So this is one of the issues now, encapsulating over materials that are still wet. Okay, so now this is this thing. This part's interesting. And if they don't do this right, they're actually creating more of a problem. So part of the surface treatment process, they'll sand, they'll wire brush. This is if they're doing it right, they'll sand the wire brush. They'll kind of wipe all the surfaces down, and then they do a damp wipe with, like, an antimicrobial cleaning solution. They kind of treat the wood afterwards. Okay. So they do kind of like a wet wipe on the wood. Okay. Now if they do that, which is fine, that's okay for them to do that. Part of the process, though, after they do that, is they should have dehumidifiers in the room that are sucking that moisture back out of the room and taking it out of those building materials. So it's okay as long as that's happening. Now, again, in the interest of time of these guys trying to get in and out of these jobs as fast as they can, man, it's going to take a Few hours for these. For these framing pieces to dry with the dehumidifiers that we just got wet with all of our treatments. You know what, guys? We got to get to this other job. We got people calling in, listen, let's just encapsulate it now. Let's just spray the sealant paint over it right now. We'll call it a day, and we'll get out of here. And they save themselves an hour or two. Well, what did we just do? What we just did is that we have wet framing, and then we put a sealant over the top of it. We trapped all the wet into the framing, and you better believe mold's going to grow back there again. Okay, so this is another one of the issues that you see. And again, it all ties back to the overall motivation of the companies and how they run right in and out as fast as we can. Construction mindset. And so if they're not drying out the building materials now, part of it is how they treat it. Part of it might be if there was just a leak. You know, let's say the window was leaking. Let's just say the framing was wet not because of how they treated it, but because it rained and the window leaked. Right. And so the framing was wet. That has to get dehumidified and dried out as well before they do any sort of encapsulating treatment. I'm not opposed to encapsulates. I know people out there are like, should never do them. It was kind of how I was initially taught. You should never do it. The reason that I was initially taught that way is because we knew that they were doing it as a way to cover things up and to make it go faster. So in an effort to make sure that never happened again, we just said, don't ever encapsulate stuff. And then you kind of took it off the table of people doing it the wrong way. As, you know, as time has passed, I'm actually open to encapsulating. I don't think there's a problem with it, and I actually think it could be beneficial. It makes a more porous surface a little less porous. Right. So it takes away some of the porosity of the surface, which is a good thing overall.

And it helps. You know, it helps as part of that process, but it can't be the only thing that you're doing. It has to be done at the right time, and it can't be done over materials that are currently wet. Okay. Because if you're doing any of those Things you're actually creating a larger problem. So. So that is number. Let me get back through here. So that's number eight, encapsulating over wet building materials. Okay. The last thing that I'm going to do is which number do I want to do here? So there's 10 of these guys, right? So I've just done two of these. I think the last one I'm going to do.

Is maybe number, I don't know, combination number nine and number ten. I'm just going to flow between a couple of these. So the last thing here, it's more about cleaning the overall containment and cleaning the area properly. Okay. So if you guys are listening to this, you're not like your base of people don't know anything about mold issues, most likely. Right. You're at least diving down the rabbit hole. It's not like Mold Finders Radio is like top five podcasts on all Apple podcasts. I get it. So you kind of have like a little bit of idea of what's going on here. So here's the thing. Throughout your house, let's talk about your. How you're exposed to mold throughout your house. And we'll tie it back into what's happening in a remediation space in your house. Many of you might have heard me say this a million times, so I'll try to like breeze through a little bit. But it kind of think of mold like a factory, right? Mold is behind the wall. It's wherever it is that mold is not directly what you're breathing. Okay? That mold is a factory that's creating a problem. The problem. Imagine a factory. If you drive by the street, there's a factory on the side of the street. You don't see what they're making inside. You have no idea. They could be making chemical weapons or they could be making little brackets that keep baby cribs together. You have no idea. Right? It's closed. But there's by. There's smoke that comes out of the top of, you know, the smokestacks. That's the byproduct of whatever they're making inside that gets into our air, okay? Creates air pollution. If you walked outside and you were near that factory, you would be breathing in air pollution. Okay? So what you're actually breathing is the air pollution. You're actually breathing the byproduct of what the factory has made. Now, the core root problem is the factory, right? There'd be no air pollution if there wasn't a factory. So that's the root problem that's how you have to fix it. But our actual exposure pathway is not that. Our face is inside the factory. That's not the exposure pathway. The exposure pathway is. It's creating a problem. It's moving throughout the house, and then we're breathing it in. And where does all this stuff settle? It settles in the dust reservoirs throughout the house. And this is for any of you who have heard of ERMI and have done ermi, Right. And collected an ERMI sample. It's a dust sample. Why is it a dust sample? Because particles and fragments settle in dust reservoirs. They settle in collections of dirt and dust and debris and things like that. And it's a reservoir where all of it collects. Okay, so if we know that that's our exposure pathway in the main normal living space of the house. Now let's think about our containment. Right. They just ripped out a bunch of drywall. What's floating around in this containment drywall? Dust debris from construction that was left behind the dry. All this stuff is still in there. Okay, so you could have done what I talked about earlier. You could have removed two feet beyond. Okay, so now there isn't any left. You didn't miss anything. You could have actually structurally cleaned the mold growth out of the surfaces that are behind those areas. Right. You wire brush, you sand, you do whatever you need to do on the framing components. You could have done all that. But while you're doing all of that, you're kind of creating a big disturbance in the space. Everything's getting aerosolized that you've basically knocked the walls down to the factory and everything inside is flying all over the place. Right. That's why you contain the space, is to keep that from getting out. But what's going to happen is that stuff's going to settle down on the surfaces. Okay. And not just the surfaces where the problem was. It's going to settle everywhere. Imagine you're in a room. You're in a bedroom. You know, your containment space probably has to be, I don't know, I'm standing in my bedroom, maybe, I don't know, maybe 8ft by 8ft or something. There has to be enough room for you to get in there to work, to demo stuff, to put things in the side. Like, it's not a teeny tiny room right around your window, Right? It's big enough for people to get in and work. When you're removing stuff, all of that dispersion is going to get all throughout that containment space. It's not just going to settle on top of the area where the mole problem was, which means that the particle and the spores and the fragments and the toxins, if they were present, they're going to settle throughout the entire containment area. They're not just going to settle where the problem was. Okay? So if that's the case, this brings us into. I think it's item number 10 on the most common remediation mistake checklist here is not cleaning the entire containment, okay? The entire containment has to be cleaned. And because you just set off a microbiological bomb in the containment, that impacted the whole thing, right? So you could have ripped out as much drywall as you needed to. You could have done that, right? You could have. You could have gotten the source removal out of all the wood and framing and all that stuff. You could have done that. Right? But if you don't come in and actually clean the rest of the containment, this means the ground that's eight feet away in the other corner of the containment needs to be wiped down. The walls need to be wiped down. All the surfaces need to be half a vacuum to wipe down. If they're not, then you're going to leave the byproduct left over and you're still going to have an issue. Right? And that stuff's not going to pick up in an air sample when you do an air sample, because they're literally doing air scrubbing at all times, which means anything that does aerosolize up anywhere near the air pump at the time of collection is going to get grabbed in this machine and get out. But it doesn't mean it's not still settled down on surfaces in other places. So that's. Those are some of the highlights, right? So when we're talking about the topic today, which is how to know if remediation actually worked, the first thing we need to know is how do you actually do it? Right? You can't know if it worked if you don't actually know how to do it in the first place. Right? So that is really what this first kind of portion of the talk is about. Again, I only talked about three or four of these number or these 10 common mistakes that I see. I put the link at the top of the clubhouse room right here. For those of you listening on the podcast later on the delay, it's remediationmistakes.com literally free. Just go get it. So you know what to talk to these remediators about and how you can interview them and vet them and make sure they're doing things the right way. You could do Checks and balances on them. You can ask them these questions. This is giving you the ammunition you need to be more empowered about understanding how to make sure the process is going right. Okay, so go download that right now. It's an awesome download. It looks really nice. I really like it. And there's some good information there. Anyways, so we'll stop there for the first half. So, I don't know, Rachel, have any questions come in yet, or do we move into the next?

Yeah, we have a few questions.

Okay, cool. So I guess do you want to. Whoever's first, go ahead and tell whoever's first that they're first, and then we'll invite them up on the stage.

Cool. First up, we have Alyssa.

All right, cool.

This is our first time doing this, everyone. Rachel, you invite her on.

And ask her to speak. Let's see if we can make this work, everyone. I'm so excited about this live interaction component to this stuff, but we haven't done it yet, so bear with us as we figure out the ins and outs of doing this.

So I think you have to make me an admin so I have that little green asterisk by my name, and then I can start moving people up.

Oh, yeah. Boom. Yes, I'm sure. Look at that green thing. Rachel's in charge now, people. We got it. All right, so let's go ahead and bring. Go ahead and bring Alyssa up now. We could do that.

Okay, Alyssa, I'm gonna invite you to speak now.

Guys, how are y'?

All? Hey, what's going on, Alyssa?

So my question may be more on the second half related to post testing, so feel free to have me wait if so. But particularly for areas that are non living spaces. Attics, crawl spaces. Do those post testing samples need to kind of have the same standards as living spaces? Our Hertz meet. We did a Hertz meat for the attic and crawl, wanting to focus on just a particular couple species of mold, and they were pretty high. So figuring out, you know, how far to beat that dead horse with same standards as living spaces with the stock effect, or does that look any different?

First off, great question.

You sound like, you know, you've been doing your research, so that's good. Okay. I think we could tap in this while going into the next. The next segment. This is more about how your whole home is a living system. Okay. So we could have a source of a mold issue in a bedroom. We could have seven other sources throughout the house. Something in the kitchen, something in, you know, wherever. Right. When we do remediation remediation happens in two phases. The first phase is that you actually have to address that source problem. That's kind of everything I was just talking about. The second piece then goes back to that analogy that we were talking about. If you have multiple factories in your house, they're all creating this air pollution. That air pollution is moving through your whole house. Now I joke around when I say this a lot, but your house doesn't know that you don't live in your attic and your house doesn't know that you don't live in your crawl space. Right. As far as your house is concerned, your master bedroom could literally be in the crawl space. It doesn't know. All it knows is that you have shared wall, ceilings, floors and all that stuff. And so the airflow is going to move through all of that. Right. So that's where stack effect comes in, which you mentioned. So there's, there's two things. If there are actually source problems in those spaces, right. You could have source issues in the crawl space, meaning there's actual mold growing, subfloor framing, even in the, on debris and the dirt, like whatever. So there could be source issue in the crawl space. There could also be source issue in the attic. Right. You can have mold growing on the framing, the decking, the trusses, all that stuff. Right. That would kind of fall into this initial conversation. So you would go through and you would post tests in the way that I'll talk about in a minute. But you would be doing it under the idea that you're trying to make sure that the factory has been removed. Right. So the flow remediation is factories have to get removed first. Then you have to clean up the mess that the factory's made. That's the air pollution, the smoke that's come out of these factory chimneys or smokestacks. Right. So if we're assuming the second piece, which there wasn't any source found in the attic, but we're still getting elevated levels, you know, on an Urmia Hertz me up there. So what's that telling me? It's telling me that there's other things that have gone on in the house. The stack effect has pushed it all the way up to the attic and that it's settled down on the surfaces in the attic. What's going to happen is that over time that's going to start pulling back down into the house. The attic is going to turn into a. I call it a secondary source because mold wasn't actually growing there in this scenario. Right. So you could Walk up there and not actually see mold up there, but because it's the end of the line on the stack effect. And just for those of you listening, stack effect basically means that the air in your house goes from the bottom of your house and pushes all the way up to the top of the house. That's what it means. So the crawl space, your basement, is the true bottom of your house. That's ground zero. That's where all the airflow basically starts moving, pushes all the way, all the way up throughout all those. So you've got one level house, two level house, eight level house. You're in a frickin 30 level apartment building. Whatever. Stack effect pushes all the way, all the way up. Okay. And then ends in the attic is the end of the line in a house. Right. Which means that if you have source issues in other areas of the house, the particle, the spores, the fragments, they can work their way up there, settle down on the surfaces in the insulation in the attic. Okay. And then as the airflow pulls it back down, because you kind of end up with a circular airflow pattern, this is kind of how all this works. It starts pulling that back down in the house and becomes again what I call a secondary source. Right. There's not mold growing in there necessarily, but it's collecting so much that it's now impacting down below. So this kind of goes into the second phase of cleaning. I think I did a podcast with Mike Rubino on this a while ago on how even if you're only remediating one or two areas in your house, you really need to be doing a full house cleanse afterwards for a variety of reasons. But the attic would be part of that. Right. So the, the quick. Not so quick. The summary answer to your question is you don't necessarily have to do everything I was talking about if there wasn't source level growth up there. But there is a second phase to remediation, which we're not going to dive a whole lot into today because this is more focused on kind of initial remediation and source level stuff. There is a second kind of cleaning process that needs to happen, and if you don't, then you're leaving kind of this accumulated source up there that could continue to impact the space. So hopefully that was helpful for you. Rachel, maybe let's do one more here, if there's one more. And then we could dive into the post testing piece. Okay, cool.

I have Brian, another Brian, who has an ermi related question.

Cool.

Let me bring him up.

All right.

Can you hear me?

Yeah, Brian, what's up man?

Hey, so had a kind of a, maybe a multi part Ermi question. Curious how you, you guys use pre inspection ermes that may be done by a client to, to guide your inspection and then kind of the other, the flip side of that I guess is how do you use your Hermes that you collect during your inspection to guide recommendations for next steps and remediation? And then one, one thing that I see a lot on Hermes, a lot of people talk about online, you know, is if you have Stachy or Kutomium or something, even at a one spore level, let's say, you know, that, that, that's too much. And so I'm just curious, you know, what your thought is on, you know, one spore versus five versus 50 versus 200 or whatever.

Great question. I'm going to talk about this in the second piece that we go into on that last portion of it. So I'll kind of dive into that how many is too much sort of thing.

The first couple pieces of your question how do we use client collected Hermes? So listen, it's not super complicated to collect an army, right? So if you went through, I'll just kind of ask like hey, where'd you collect it from? Right? If it's basically the pretty close to the way that we would do it and the result was really bad, then I won't necessarily duplicate that ermi in the house for someone, right? So there's, there's no reason for us to duplicate that. You could just share that with me and I'll kind of put that into the overall consideration set on what's going on. If you collected it in a way that maybe we wouldn't have collected it. Meaning that maybe you combined like air conditioning vents with the house, let's say I would probably want to separate them out because your air conditioning system is very different than the living spaces of the house. And if you combine them together, we don't actually know which one is driving more of the problem. And then it doesn't allow us to really understand how to address each one of them independently. So if they were collected in a manner like that, then I would probably want to separate them and do it myself, you know, do them ourselves when we come in. But you know, if you've done it in a way that that generally makes sense and the result is pretty clear, then I wouldn't necessarily say we have to come in and redo those.

The other thing, just on URMI interpretation in general, we did create recently, the URMI code, which is an interpretation tool for ermi. This kind of gets into a little bit of your question, although your question is more about post remediation, but there's a lot of similar questions on the front end. We did an ermi. What does this mean? Is one fragment of this too much? Right? Is one fragment of stack too much? Is one fragment of catomium too much? Should I. Should I run for the hills and burn the house down? It's tough because there's so much conflicting information out there. And honestly, I feel like a lot of it comes from people who don't really have enough data to be giving you the information.

So what I did is. And I've talked about this, I won't go, like, super into it, but we created the URMI code. I basically compiled three. Three years of inspection data and compared everything that we find in a house and tied it back to the ERMI that we actually collect in the house. We were there. So we're not so hung up on which mold species is showing up. That's not the ultimate goal of an Ermie, guys. The ultimate goal of an ermie is to just use it as a screening test to understand, is there a problem in here? And how significant is it? And kind of what should we be doing? That's the overall purpose of what an URMY really is, right? So when we get so hung up on individual mold species, it clouds the overall purpose of why we're using it in the first place. So what we did with Ermicode is we basically. I kind of pulled back on that whole, if this species is there, that species is there. It's this massive problem thing. And instead said, hey, listen, we've inspected all these homes over three years. We have 4,000 samples. We looked at with an ERMI that looks like yours. And we figured out kind of. It took us eight months to figure it out or seven or however long to figure out how to actually interpret these. And we ended up creating an algorithm that was able to go through these in a way that. That actually made contextual sense for what's happening in houses. But what we did is that okay for an ERMI that looks like yours. On average of all the homes we've inspected, we found, you know, X numbers of hidden mold sources in a house like that. So we found seven sources. We found 16 sources, whatever the number is. And that gives you some context for sort of what to expect in the house and sort of what maybe the size of the project might look like and what you're in for before you decide if it's something that you want to do and go down that road. So but, but that kind of helps. I went a little further, but in terms of just like how we use client collected samples, we'll use them if we can and if we feel like that weren't collected in a way that we can't, then we won't. And then as far as that last piece on kind of post remediation, Irmi, the last thing I want to do here and I have a hard out at 10, so I think I'm going to dive into this now. We're going to stop questions for now is talk through the post testing process and how ERMI kind of fits into that at the end and sort of its level of importance. So. Oops. So thanks, Brian. Appreciate. Appreciate the question.

Okay, so we're gonna dive into the second piece of this now. All right? So we talked about general best practices. If you want to get the rest of that, that list I was referring to, it's remediationmistakes.com youm could go get the list. Okay, so now here's the second piece. Remediation was done. You use remediation mistakes document. You were talking to remediators. You feel like they did a good job. The remediators think that they're the best. And there's nothing that you ever need to do and you don't even need to post test because we're so good at it. Guys, you need to post test, all right? You have to. The reason that you have to is that we're dealing. We're literally dealing with stuff you can't see. You're dealing with microbiological stuff. All right? For any remediator or any inspector or anybody to come in and be like, yep, there's no more mold there. I could see it.

Who the hell do they think they are? Right? Like check them. Do you have microscopes for eyes? Nope. Okay, cool. Then you have no concept for that. And you're actually being really irresponsible by saying that. Okay? So you can't just do it that way. You have to test stuff afterwards to make sure that it's gone because you literally can't see this stuff. So it's the only way you could do it. It's the same as if you were doing some sort of treatment on your body. And the doctor's like, well, you ate this and you took this supplement and you did this. You're all better. How do you know you're all Better. They would run another test and check your levels again and see if you made progress. Right. Like, like you think about it for your body and it's just like makes complete sense. Right? But then you do it for your house and it's like this whole other concept and it really isn't. It's the same concept. We're dealing with stuff we can't see. We're using a treatment process and protocol that we have proven that works over time. But at the end of the day, every house is different, every person is different. Right. The people executing the job are different. In every house you have to do checks and balances and make sure that it actually worked. So diving this a little bit, this is the piece, the post inspection piece. And honestly guys, I'm actually thinking of creating a whole training course on this that I'm going to sell later on down the road. But this is the framework for it. All right. So I'm just going to kind of give you everything I've been throwing around in my head about this and you guys can get it basically now when I'm talking about it. So I've been. Let's talk the basics. We're talking initially, how you go in the remediation is split into two phases. Phase one is we have to get rid of the factories. That's kind of the easier part. Right? The easier part in terms of post testing is that part phase two is getting rid of the mess that all those factories had made up until that point in time. Okay, so back to the analogy. You have the factories, you have the smoke coming out of the top of the factories. It's easy to bulldoze a factory. Just bulldoze it. It's gone. Not making any more smoke. It's a little harder to get all the smoke out of the air. How do you get it out? It's all over the place. Some of it's at different levels, some is floating really high, some of it's settled down on a surface. Like how do you get that stuff out? Right. So those are the two different phases. The cleaning process happens in phase one, phase two or the remediation process, I should say. So factories all have to be gone first. So we're going to focus on post testing for that right now. Okay, so post testing for that I mentioned earlier, I alluded to this. You could come into a containment, stick an air sample up in the middle of a room in a containment and almost every time it's going to pass because they literally have air scrubbing machines run Running for days or weeks in that containment. The air sample better freaking pass in that, in that scenario, they've literally been cleaning the air for. For days and days and days and days. If that air sample doesn't pass, there's a massive problem going on. But like I said before, the purpose of remediation isn't to clean the air around where a source was. That's not what the purpose of remediation is. That's not what your contract says with the remediator. The contract doesn't say, come in and just make sure the air around the spot where there was mold is clean. That's not what the contract says. The contract says we're going to remove the mold from the house. Right? House grows on house. Mold grows on surfaces, doesn't grow in the air. You can't just go into a remediated space, do an air sample and think that you are actually doing a post test. Yet this is what 99% of everyone does from inspectors or remediators. And why? Because it's super easy to pass. It's super easy to pass. So if they know it's really easy to pass, they say, cool, we could come in, we're going to do a couple air samples. Each air sample is X amount of dollars. We're going to do them in all these different rooms. They're going to get their paycheck for coming in and doing their job, charging you for all these air samples. And then they're all going to say that everything is fine, most likely, and they're going to walk out and be on their way. Here's the problem. A lot of people don't actually know what to tell you if the remediation fails. This is why they do it this way, right? If you came in and did this right, and it failed, you're then going to go to the inspector and the remediator and be like, yo, why did this not pass? We need to fix this. And a lot of times they don't know what to tell you. Right? That's why they're not testing at surface level. I've even gotten to the point where I've gotten in a verbal fight on the phone with a remediator when my client was on the other side because I went in and did surface testing all over the place after the remediation. So here's the story. They went in, they remediated, they basically did all the stuff I talked about, right? They didn't remove source from the, from the framing components. They sprayed stuff everywhere, thinking that it was just going to fix everything. I walked back in, I did swab samples of all of the supposed remediated framing components and they were all a massive disaster, which means that all the mold was still there. And then I get in this big fighting argument match on the phone with this person because they're basically saying, well, swab samples don't matter. It's only what's in the air, guys. What do you think you're breathing when it's in the air? You think it just freaking manifests out of nothing? It comes from the freaking sources. That's where it comes from. Right. And that's where this whole thing went. Right. So this is probably the biggest, biggest thing on post testing when you're doing source levels, is that they're not testing surfaces. So how do you do it? It's a swab test. If you have a wall and they basically open up the whole wall, you want to do a million swabs in there. Right. Basically the way that we do it is we go in and we do what's called a composite swab collection is going to take a little swab and we sort of run it over all of the remediated framing components. Okay. Even if it looks like there's nothing there, run it over all of them and. And then we send that in. And if that sample comes back and there's nothing on the surfaces, and then the air sample comes back and that's clean. Cool. Now we know that that level, that, that that source area has actually been cleaned. It's just adding another sample method in there. Right. It's understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the samples and why an air sample will be elevated anyway. An air sample is only elevated if there's a source that's elevating the air sample. Right. So you have to get to source. It's always about source. Everything we say source, source, source, source, source. I'm sure people are getting sick of me saying it all the time, but it truly is. It's really about the source of where the problem is coming from. So when you think of remediation, we talked about the phases, right? So the first phase is source removal, making sure the factories are gone. This is the first most important piece in remediation. Okay, so I'm going to break down. This is my framework that I'm putting together for kind of how to create like a post testing, testing plan, level of importance and where and where we should not be super hard on things versus not. Okay? So on source level testing. So let Me break down the three. So first is source level testing. So first is make sure that the sources are actually gone. Second, to make sure that the biotoxins in the house are actually gone. Okay? So if you have mycotoxins in the house or endotoxins in the house, that's then the second piece that has to make sure that it's gone. And then the third piece is the fragment load from molds. And mycotoxins need to be significantly, they need to be reduced. They're never going to be totally gone. Okay? You're never going to have fragment that's totally gone. So let me explain the different tests that fall into each one of these three phases. All right, so on the top level, make sure the source level stuff is gone. Here you're going to have air samples and surface samples. We just talked about this, right? You do need to do an air sample in a containment. You have to. Because if for some reason the air that got all disturbed in there, it has not been cleaned up from the air scrubbers that are in there, it needs to be. Otherwise when you take the containment down, it's going to spread all over the place. So you do have to do an air sample. I know, I've been bashing it for a while. It's important. It's just not the end all for what happens in a containment. So you do have to do it. So, so tier one, top tier is source. Source has been removed. There's no more factories in the house. That's the top tier. If there are factories left in the house, it does. Then the biotoxin level, which is level two, and the particle buildup level, which is level three, they're never going to be where you want because there are sources that still remain. So you have to kind of remove. You have to like look at this in order and the level of importance of them are in order as well. Well, okay, so tier one is source level stuff. So then we get to tier two. Now when you're talking about a remediation plan, we say, okay, we found these sources and maybe we found mycotoxins in the house, we found endotoxins in the house, Whatever it is, these are literal biotoxins, all right? This is the stuff that in the movies, they're wearing hazmat suits and they're walking around. That's what these are. These are biotoxins. Okay? This is very problematic. So the next most important thing that we need to get the biotoxins out, okay? So the Types of samples that we do for that would be recollecting mycotoxin and endotoxin samples. Not in each containment specifically, but throughout the entire house as a collection. Okay. Because this is part of the second phase of remediation. Again, I don't have time to go into how every little piece of remediation works today, but basically they remove the sources and you do a full house cleanse. The full house cleanse. The purpose of that cleanse is to address the biotoxin component and to address the particle. The particle component. Okay, so let me try to break this down visually again for you guys. You have three tiers. Tier one is source level removal.

Tier two is biotoxin removal. Tier three is remaining particle that is left. Those are your three tiers. Okay. So you're addressing them all in each order. Now in tier one, somebody asked if there's any stachybotrys or catastrophic like is that an immediate problem in tier one? That's a problem because that's source level issue. Okay. So even if you're finding one spore of stachybotrys, one spore of catomium, it's a problem. It's not done. It needs to be reclaimed. That doesn't necessarily the same when you get to tier three in an army. Okay. But it is the same up here at tier one. And I'll explain that in a minute. All right, so then tier two is the biotoxin piece. So tier two is where they're doing the full house cleanse and cleaning the whole house. This is a fine particle cleanse in addition to specific surface wipe downs. I've told the story a lot in other episodes. People could go back, but it took us two years and $3 million of all of our clients remediation budgets to figure out how to do this right. This piece of it. Okay, so that is the biotoxin piece, if we're talking. And I'll use the last minute here to kind of few minutes to sort of shape the thought process around this. And sorry that I'm bouncing around this, guys. It's literally a framework I've been working on. And so it's like bouncing around in my head. I hope that you're following. If not, we're going to make something more formal about this at some point in the future. But I had this theory because what was happening is that ermi samples always come back even after you do remediation. And there's still stuff on them. Right. And then people will think that their remediation doesn't work because there's still mold on their ERMI sample. It's literally impossible to get an ERMI sample with nothing on it. So every time it turns into this whole thing of like, well, it wasn't, the remediation wasn't good enough, or you have to go back in, clean it again, clean it again, clean it again. You don't necessarily have to do that. Right. And it was really hard for me to figure out how to explain that to someone until I sort of sat down and kind of wrapped my head around this, this larger framework of how remediation goes from start to finish. Okay, so, and with this, I asked a couple doctor friends of mine, I won't say their names because they didn't tell me that I could and may be controversial for them. So I'm not going to say anything. But I asked a couple doctor friends of mine about this theory that I had. And here's what I. Here's kind of how I posed the question. I was like, hey listen, doctor, so and so I was like, let me give you this scenario and you tell me what you think. If we know that in a house, let's say we found sources in a house. If we know that in a house, we've removed all of the sources that are there, so there's no more source level issue. Okay? Meaning that the walls, the frame, all the stuff we talked about, it's all gone. And like I said, we have zero tolerance for and stachybotrys in those cases because those are source factories potentially that are creating toxin. Right? You have to get the factories gone. So I said, let's say this. All the sources, we know through post testing that they're handled, okay? They're gone. We also know through post testing that all the biotoxins in the house are gone as well. There's no more mycotoxins, there's no more endotoxins that are in the house. So we know that too. Okay, so we know the factory that's making the problem is gone. We know the chemicals that are coming off of those factories are basically gone. Right? Then that leaves us with the ERMI that's left over. Okay, so what? An ERMI is. Guys, you're not looking for spores. That's not what ermi's doing. Ermi's looking for any fragment that's broken off of a mole colony with that same DNA signature. That does not mean that these are potentially factory creating things. These are literally just pieces that have broken off of these colonies they're not necessarily spores that could go somewhere else, get wet again, and start growing again, okay? This is the byproduct. This is the smoke that's coming out of the factories that we're dealing with here. And I think that's one misconception that happens all the time. We think that ermias spores, it's not. It's a fragmentation load. And those fragments are not necessarily alive or active or anything like that. They're just pieces that broke off the colony. Right? So I kind of set the stage with them, with the doctors, with that, with those two questions. Then I said this. I was like, okay, so let me ask you this. If we know there's no more sources and we know there's no more toxins, okay? And.

We have someone who is exposed to a fragment of Stachybotrys or fragment of Catomium, again, there's no toxin on it because we tested for it. So there's no mycotoxin there. And we know it's not a source level growth problem, Right? Because we handled that. So we know that's gone, right? It's literally just a fragment byproduct. Okay? If someone is exposed to that is being exposed to a random fragment of Stachybotrys that broke off of a colony that's since been removed and there's no toxins left, is being exposed to a fragment of that any different than being exposed to a fragment of a more common mold that most people think are, okay, Cladosporium, for example. Does our body see that any differently, or does our body just see it as this is a mold fragment? Is a mold fragment? Like, is our body that smart? Does our body DNA sequence the mold that's coming into our nose and then. And then freak out accordingly? The same way that we do with our brains when we look at a lab report? Is that how our body works? And so she had the two of them, they had a caveat, which was the same caveat, actually.

But then afterwards said this. So the caveat was this. The assumption has to be that the people that we're talking about have not had significant previous exposures to a particular type of mold. Right? Because your body does develop a memory and reactions. If you've been experiencing something in the past, it's kind of what autoimmune issues are, right? So your body has seen something, it freaks out. And now anytime it sees it, it freaks out again. Right? It's almost like you're training an attack dog to attack the front door when the DOORBELL rings Right. So if your body's been trained to see a stachybotryous fragment and freak the hell out, then it's going to do that. But it also could do that if it sees a fragment of Cladosporium. It's just if your body's been trained to do that from a previous exposure somewhere in life, typically. So we said, okay, let's. Let's take that piece off the equation. Let's just assume everybody is the same in terms of their history, their previous exposures, and that person is exposed to a fragment of Stachybotrys and a fragment of Cladosporium. Is their body reacting differently? Necessarily. And the answer was no. Okay. This is the problem with a lot of the folks that are out there saying stachybotrys is the worst thing ever in the world. You know, ketomia is the worst thing. Listen, guys, it's not good. I know that it's not good, but the is problem. Problem is if we don't understand the mechanism of how it's impacting our body. That's why we're doing all of this. We're not doing all of this because we just woke up one day, we're like, oh, hey, you know what? I want to see if there's mold in this house, and I want it to be perfect. You're only doing it if there's some sort of health issue that's driving you to do it. Right. So we have to keep that in mind throughout the whole process that every decision that you make is tied back to that ultimate goal. Okay? We have to know how this stuff impacts the body to then decide, like, when remediation is okay or it's not okay. Right. So then I kind of ran this framework by them. I said, okay, so if we know that all the sources are gone, we know that all the toxins are gone, and maybe there are a couple fragments of stachybotrys left, maybe there are a couple fragments of catomium left. Is it really the end of the world if we know that we got rid of the toxin that they create, we got rid of the factories that are continuing to create them. Is it really the end of the world if there's a fragment or two left over those things? Things especially if our body is not really going to differentiate them the way that our brains do. Right? Our brain is a lot, sometimes smarter and sometimes not as smart as our body, depending on what's going on. Right. Our body doesn't look at stuff the same way that Our brain does. It sees something that's a foreign invader, it reacts in the same way. Right now, your health situation is going to depend on what this means for you, right? If you're someone who said has mass cell activation syndrome, and even small, small fragmentation loads are gonna be a problem for you, again, it doesn't matter necessarily which fragment it is that you're exposed to, but your overall.

Amount that you can be exposed to might need to be lower than someone else, right? But this concept is what tied me back to the question that Brian had earlier, which I'm gonna answer here at the very end, and I think we're gonna have to wrap it up, which is.

When you're doing a poster me.

Does it matter if there's one or two fragments of sakibachi's in theirs? At the end of the world, do you make people come back and clean forever and ever and ever?

If I know that all the sources are gone, and I see that all the mycotoxins have been gone, and I see there's been a massive reduction in the ERMI score across the board, and there's a random fragment of stack or ketomium out there, it's not the end of the world to me, right? And I tell you right now, if anybody, if any of these other, you know, consultants around hear this, they're gonna immediately disagree and tell you that Brian doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. And, oh, my God, how could he ever say that any individual fragment of stachybotrys is okay?

I guess I would say, you know.

How many homes have you gone in and gone through this process with, right? And it's incredibly difficult. And then understanding the human body and the connection and saying, listen, our goal, and I always tell my clients this upfront, the goal is never a net zero mold situation. It's literally impossible. You're never gonna be in a house that has a net zero mold problem. So that can't be the goal. The goal on the post, ERMI is about the overall load of mold that's left in the house. And if it's been reduced enough significantly, just like the goal of an overall remediation process and the inspection process in this whole thing is reducing your overall exposure load. Okay? So a lot of us have heard of the immunofunnel analogy, right? Your immune system's like a funnel. You're exposed to stuff that gets poured in the top, and then at the bottom is how your body detoxes, right? So the goal is to pour less stuff in the top so your body can detox more efficiently. And then the clinical protocols you're on will open the hole at the bottom of your funnel to allow things to flow through even faster. Right. That's the ultimate overall goal here. So I don't want it to sound like I'm like, yeah, I don't care what your ERMI looks like, you know, whatever. That's not it. Right. But I do. And it's one of the big things I want to try to push this year is getting off a little bit on individual mold species and freaking out about individual mold species. I want to get off of that a little bit because that's not ultimately what this thing is about. It's about overall load of exposure and reducing overall load. Right. Now, if there was stachybotrys left on the ERMI and the mycotoxin sample came back and there's still trichothicines in the house, it's another story. Right. So it's not always, you know, you have to look at them together, but each one, these three tiers, I talked about source level biotoxin and then residual fragment load. That's the order of importance on how the remediation gets done. All right. And if we can address those things in that order and we. And we're checking them off in that order, then we know once we get down to tier three, which is residual fragment load, we know there's going to be a residual fragment load. There has to be. It's literally impossible for there not to be. So we can't be looking for a net zero mold result on that. All right.

So everyone, that's what I got for you.

I hope it was good. If you guys want to message Rachel and just let her know if this was helpful for you guys, that would be super cool. You can message me as well on here and let me know. I do have to run. I know I took a couple questions in the middle. I wanted to take more, but this is such a big topic. I just started unraveling while I was talking about it. And I feel like it's really important for us to understand general concepts and how to go through this and kind of get yourself set up to succeed. For when you are bringing in remediators, what you should be asking them, what the process looks like, what the post testing process looks like, how we're sampling different things. Right. So on the post testing side, you have air and surface samples inside of a containment. That's to make sure that two tier one. So make sure tier one source is removed. And then throughout the entire living spaces is where you sample for Tier 2 and Tier 3. Tier 2 will be your toxins. So that's where your mycotoxin, your endotoxin dust samples come into play. And then tier three is where your residual fragment samples come into play. That's your ERMI and your actinomycete bacteria fragment load samples. So that's how the samples work. Tier 2 and 3 are dust collections throughout larger spaces of area either throughout your whole living space. Sometimes we'll separate out the attic separately if you know, if there's maybe a known issue up there, because those are difficult areas to clean, just to make sure that nothing residual left in over there. But that's the flow, those are the samples. That's how you do it. That's the order in which everything is done. So I hope that this was super beneficial for you guys. Hey, guys, thank you all for staying. Basically everybody who came in here stayed here the whole time, so I really, really appreciate it. If you guys like this whole live thing that I'm trying to figure out, shoot me a text on the mole phone.

I actually forgot the number. Rachel, do you have the number in front of you on the mole phone?

Yeah, here, let me pull it up real quick.

And while she's doing that, just again, thank you guys for everything. The last episode that I recorded was kind of talking about our plans for 2022. Some of the mistakes that I think that I made in 2021 and how I'm trying to kind of fix that and remedy those things moving forward and some of the stuff we have coming out and on the horizon. So check that out if you guys are interested and to kind of see what we're putting together for you guys moving forward.

Awesome. The number for the mold phone, if you guys ask questions and want to just submit them there because you didn't get them answered, today is 949-528-8704.

Cool. So that's the number we can't look and answer every question, obviously. So the quicker that if you do have a question, the quicker you get in. We'll try to look over the next couple hours for those of you that are are here live much for staying. It's 10 o'. Clock. I have to run. I have to get on another call. But I appreciate all the time, everyone. Have a great one.

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