187: Mold Remediation (and more) Q&A: What Works, What Fails, and How to Get It Right

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.

I'll do some questions now. Anybody have a question? Fastest question goes 1, 2, 3, ask.

Let me see what I can see. Who did I go to for treatment? It's a long time ago for me. I'm in California. I went to a.

Practice here. It's called Restoration Healthcare there in Irvine in Orange County. And that's who I worked with a little myself. I actually didn't really need, like, treatment from my initial exposure when I was. Which is kind of like how I got started in this. But then I started doing inspections all the time, and I worked a lot with. With their patients, and I was basically exposing my house or myself to, like, terrible houses every single day.

And then after that, they kind of helped me with some of that. So it's crazy. Oh, that's not the treatment you're talking about. Okay. You're talking about after the remediation. All right. Do you do home inspection in Northern California? Absolutely.

Just go to my profile on the link tree and you can send over and fill out an information form and we'll set up a call with you. Okay. So the treatment after remediation. So there's two phases of remediation. So this is a big thing. So the first phase is source remediation. So if there's mold in this wall, you got to get rid of the source of the wall. Right. I use this analogy all the time when I'm kind of explaining our flow with people. Imagine there's an oil rig in the ocean, right? And then the oil rig leaks, okay? So now you have oil that's getting into your ocean. So you have all this black ocean now, right? All the oil's getting into the ocean. You have this oil leak. And so then you have all the little animals, the little ducks and everything, and they're all covered in oil, and they need dawn soap to clean them, right? And that's what you do. And I don't know how dawn ended up owning that market, but they did. And so that's kind of what happened. So in order to fix this problem for the fish and the ducks, the first thing you need to do is stop the Oil leak, okay? So you have to go to the rig and make it stop leaking. That's the equivalent of like remediating a wall or ceiling or something that might be impacted. But the next thing is, let's say you did that in the ocean. You fix the rig. Well, all the oil still in the ocean, the fish are still swimming in it, the ducks are still covered in it, and it's still not good for them, right? So now the next thing that you need to do is you need to clean the ocean. That's the second piece. Cleaning the ocean is the equivalent of the fine particle clean in your house, okay? So the rig, the oil rig, is your source in the wall, your source in the ceiling, your source in the H Vac, whatever it is. The ocean is the settled surfaces in your house, right? So particle settles down on surfaces. And as I sit in my chair or I bump something, it pops up in your face. That is actually your most direct pathway to exposure. That is your constant exposure path. So as you walk around your house, you're constantly resuspending subtle particle up into your face, and that's what you're breathing, right? It's not that you're sticking your face behind the wall. That's not what's happening. That's coming out, particle molds coming out, settling on surfaces, and then it keeps coming up. It's this idea that's called a human cloud. And there's research papers on it, there's studies on it, and so there's the human cloud effect. And as you walk around, you basically resuspend stuff up into your face all the time. So if you're not cleaning the house, the fine particle clean in the house afterwards, you're going to feel the same way when you walk back in, right? So the number one reason that remediation fails is that you don't actually finish the remediation. That's the number one reason. Even if you have the best remediator that's remediating your walls and ceilings and stuff, if you're not cleaning the entire house afterwards to get rid of all of the oil that leaked out of the rig before you remediated, then you're going to come right back into the house and it's all still going to be popping up in your face and you're still going to be triggering it. That is the number one reason that remediation fails is that you actually don't finish it. And a lot of companies don't even think about it, right? And so that's the deal. I want to work customer service for your company.

Hey, DM me.

Okay, so that's it. So what is the fine particle clean?

It took us a very long time to tweak it the way that we wanted it to be done. But effectively, I won't go through every step. But essentially what's happening is that if you have a particle floating in the air, you can't, like, get it right. It's all floating around. So what you need to do is you need to get it, grab it, and bring it down to the surfaces so then you can wipe it all away. That's ultimately what you're doing. So it's a combination of two things. It's a combination of a fog that happens, but the fog isn't meant to kill anything. Like, that's not the purpose of the fog. I don't care what you fog with. You can fog with water for all I care. I really, really don't care. Because the purpose of the fog isn't to kill or deactivate or any of that stuff. Right? Right. You should be removing source from where the problems are, and that is what's going to be handling that problem. The purpose of the fog is to attach to these really, really tiny particles that are floating around. They're so light in weight that gravity won't bring them down. So the fog attaches to them, adds weight to them, brings them down to surfaces. Then you have to wipe the surfaces away. That is kind of the very top line of what the fine particle clean is and how it looks, if that makes sense. My remediation company is stumped on how to remediate two crawl spaces in a California basement with effervescent wide stuff. So they don't know how to remediate the crawl space. Okay. So a couple things you have to do in a crawl space. First.

There'S kind of two things that are happening in a crawl. One is air. Mold is floating around down there. Bacteria is floating around down there. Mold and bacteria. Primary place where it wants to grow is in the dirt, like under your house. Like, that's where it wants to be. Right. So you've got, like, a couple things you got to do down there. That's a piece of it. The other piece is a lot of times there's mold growing on framing, on subfloor, on different things down there. So what needs to happen is you need to effectively, if there's any wet or damp soil that should be removed. Right. You want to get rid of all of that after that. You need to remediate the framing and the surfaces and stuff. So like abrasive, you know, sanding or wire brushing to get the mold growth out of the structural components. Then ideally what you do is then you cover up all of the dirt with a plastic, like a. What's the word I'm looking for? Why am I completely blanking?

I'm, I'm sick today, by the way, guys. So that's, that's why it's not working as well up here. But there's like a white, white plastic sheeting that you can put over your, over the dirt. Now the reason you want to do that is because that will stop particle from popping up in the air. Like as long as your dirt's exposed, there's. Yeah. Tarp. Yeah. Basically it's like. Yeah, white sheeting. It's like 6 mil plastic. You can get it like Home Depot or something like that and maybe even thicker plastic you could do too. But the purpose is to keep dirt from popping up in the air. Right. And because that's where mold and bacteria are going to grow all the time anyway. So like you want to cover that up so, so it doesn't continue to kind of push its way up the bottom of your house. Your, your house. The airflow in your house is always going from bottom to top. You have this upward air push, right? And so the bottom of your house is actually the crawl space. And so what you want to do is you. That becomes a really important space in your house because if there's issues in there, it keeps pushing them. Right. Now after you do that, you're going to have particle that's now like floating and settling down on the top of the plastic. So then going in there and doing a W while the plastic is something that you would want to do too. So those are like the highlights. There's more specifics, but those are kind of the highlights.

Can you do your own fogging? Would you always recommend a thorough company to do it? Fogging is not complicated. Like you could do the fogging, but fogging isn't the only thing that you do. Right. Like I said. So if you're fogging, you're then following it up with a, with a wipe down of all the surfaces. And I've, I've had clients who've done it themselves. Right. Like remediators sometimes charge a lot to do that because it's a very like labor intensive thing. Right. And so they might do the source remediation, but then they'll, you know, say, hey, here's how you can, you know, handle the house for the fine particle cleaning. So that could be something, you know, possibly that you could. Oh. So I actually have a pod coming out very soon. It's my next pod that's going to come out. And. And it was a really good pod with a doctor. His name is Dr. Paige Moncad. He's in Santa Monica in California, and he works. He's a pediatrician, like a functional integrated pediatrician. Been working with his patients for years. And, dude, this guy is so smart. And I learned so much on this about how pans and autism is triggered from mold exposure. And he actually dropped this line that I think I might title the podcast.

That autism is a brain allergy. And I was like. And then he explained what that meant. I was like, whoa. Like, this is crazy. So it was a really, really good pod. So anyways, that'll be coming out in like a week or so. His name is Dr. Pageman Kadurai. It's a difficult name. We call him Dr. K.

He's in Santa Monica in California. Here's a question. If a dust test comes back with a lot of species but not much is found in the inspection, where should we look next?

Well, I would argue that the inspection probably wasn't that great because if you have, like, a really high dust test, generally there's a lot of sources that are contributing to a high dust test. So if you're doing a dust test, that's like code four, code five, there's generally multiple sources in the house. So.

What I would say is that you probably need a different inspection would be my guess, because the worst thing about this, you go in and you do a dust test and it's high, and then you have somebody come in the house and.

They don't even have to be terrible. A lot of times I kind of.

It's K A, T, E, R A I, I think, is how you spell it.

And they're not even like the terrible inspectors that just do air tests here and there, right? But there's. There's this. You know, there's a need for testing. There's just a need for testing. And a lot of times an inspector is almost afraid to have that conversation with you because testing, you know, every test costs something, right? And it's like this balance of being able to explain the why behind a certain test and why it's required, how it influences a remediation protocol, how it influences a.

Priority document that gets created on how you run it stuff. So it's tough. But What I would say is generally if I'm looking at dust tests that are like code four, co five, like there's 10, 15, 20 things happening in the house. Like, it's not like one or two things now. They're all not like top tier, most severe, right. You might have I mentioned earlier in the last slide that we, we provide priority rankings of things, right? So we, we use letters but like tier A through E, right? So like if, if there was like 20 things that we thought might be a problem, you might end up with like let's say six things that are tier A or something like that, maybe, you know, another three or four or five or six that are tier B and then the rest falls in cde, right? And then it becomes this idea of it not being so much about like I have to remediate every single thing that I find. I used to think this, right? I, you know, so I've been doing this for a very long time now. And when I first started, and I feel like a lot of people kind of get that way too.

I kind of thought the same thing. A lot of the, you know, a lot of doctors do. It's like you either fix this or you don't. There's no middle ground. You're exposed, it's never going to get better. And I've learned over time that's not actually really true. There's a balance. So I literally do the same exact hand motion on every pre inspection call that I do with clients. So I'll say, you know, it's not about removing everything. So let's say that the most sensitive person in the house can handle this much mold exposure. And let's say the house is here. Okay. So do you need to go all the way to here for that person to start feeling better? Not necessarily. This is actually something I talk about in the new pod with Dr. K2. Really the goal is like, can we get to like here? Can we get to like here? What this does is it allows your body to breathe for a second, it allows your nervous system to take a breath, right? And then what happens is you work with your practitioner and what you're also doing is you're starting to build your resilience as well, right? So you get these two counteracting forces that are going on and it's, there's mold everywhere. It's true. Right. And you know, you mentioned it's so hard to know how far to go. This is why, you know, this is why the consultant calls on the back end are really helpful Right. Because we'll help talk through that with you. You know, it is important. It's important that you're doing enough. It's important to think about it. There's different ways that you could think about how you prioritize things and sort of where you stop and where you go. Right. Generally, when I talk about the prioritizing of stuff, what I generally like, first, it's concentration level. You know, A's, B, C is like, that's kind of your first ranking. Right. Then the next thing is the most sensitive person in the house, where do they spend the most time? So, like, how do you live in the house? Right. Meaning if one of the A's, it's like an isolated room on the other side of the house, let's say it's. Let's say like it's one of your kids that are. That are the primary driver of what's. Of who's sick. And let's say my office here, for example, is a place where there's a really significant problem going on. It's isolated, meaning that. Not that it can't move through the house. Obviously airflow moves through the house. Right. But it's not in a place that's going to have a mass impact naturally throughout the house. So an example of that in H vac system, mass impact throughout the house, crawl space, basement. Mass impact throughout the house because it's covering the whole square footage of the house and air pressure is pushing it up. Right. Attic mass impact on the house because you're covering the entire, you know, upstairs and air is going to get pushed back down. So those are like, like broader full home impact areas as opposed to, hey, I have something going on in this office or something going on here. Sure. Is it a problem? Yeah. You know, you don't want it there. Right. But as you're starting to think about, like, how do I prioritize? You say, okay, if my daughter, you know, doesn't come over there, Right. Then what I really need to be thinking about is how does she live in the house if she's the one that's impacted the most? And then I say, all right, well, she sleeps in her room, her bathroom, usually kitchen, living area, you know, kind of where they hang out, play area, H VAC system. And then if you have a crawl space or a basement, that's a White House contributor and attic's a White House contributor. So then you could kind of go through the A's and B's and work it that way and then overlay. Okay, how does this person live in the house? Right. So it's kind of like the second way that you add an additional sort of interpretation off of like what do I run out? Right. And then there's like a third piece to it. And the third piece is the cost. Right. So, you know, not everybody's independently wealthy and can just gut their whole house whenever they want to. Right. So now we have to think about, well, what does it cost to address, you know, X thing? And so the idea here is, can we do 80, 20 concept not only on where are we going to get the biggest reduction if we from a mole perspective, but also where can you get the biggest value from your dollar? Right. So let's say, for example, you have a layout where it's a tier A. It's, you know, in your daughter's bedroom. And let's say it's a wall, you know, by a window or something. Right. Well, that is not a super expensive thing to fix in the grand scheme of things. You're replacing a wall, you know, it's drywall, it's remediating is cleaning as compared to, let's say it's a tier A. It's trying to think of a really good example for this. It's in a shower that is not your daughter's shower. Okay, well, replacing a shower is the whole shower comes out new shower, bathroom. Right? So now that's a higher cost. Your daughter doesn't necessarily hang out in that more isolated space. If it's not a showed wall with her or something like that, then maybe even if it's an A, you tear it down a little bit in the way that you approach it. Right. Because of those things. And this is literally the conversation. Like when we do consulting on the back end, it's almost 95% this conversation. This is it. This is like most of what the conversation is. It's we found all the things or the things that we could. Right. Remember, say we could find everything. But you find everything you can. You have to test as much as you can so you can get the full layout of all the things that are going on. And then you can start creating the priorities. So that'll get, you know, you guys would see that in the reports and stuff. And then the bulk of the conversation on the back end is generally around, okay, what's the plan? How do we address this? How do we prioritize thing? Do I really need to do this or this or that or that? And that really becomes the part of the we have the data, we have the Information we have where the most severe things are. Now, how do we shape all of that around you in a way that makes more sense for you? Right? So hopefully that's helpful on the priority stuff. Do you recommend good air filters? Air doctors can be clean, taking an environment. Yeah, air doctors are good. Intellipures are good. IQ airs are good. You know, they all have little differences, but generally, you know, you want. You don't. You want something that's better than hepa. HEPA is not filtering down to a small enough particle size for people who are probably watching this video.

HEPA is. So here's another analogy for you guys to think through. So imagine a tree. And then the leaves on the tree are your mold spores. So leaves fall off the tree. Well, you sell the whole tree that's there. You have. You have branches, you have bark, you have roots, you have all the stuff. The trunk, like everything, right? So now imagine a gust of wind comes by and it blows the entire tree into a million teeny tiny little pieces. That's effectively what happens to mole colonies when they dry out and an air pressure change happens. That's how the particle gets out into the house. That's why there could be up to 500 times more particle from a mole colony when you compare it to a spore. Okay, so if you know that there can be 500 times more fine particle in relation to a spore, then I don't want a filter that's only focusing on the spore because I'm missing 500 times the amount of particle that I will be breathing. Now, the other problem with that is that the particle is so small that our body's natural filtration, which goes nose to throat and kind of down into the. Into the lungs, it can't filter out the stuff that's that small. Right. Because it's too small. So it gets through easier, it gets into our body easier, it triggers inflammatory responses easier. So those fine particles are really the goal and the target for the filtration. Not hepa, not. Not that stuff. Right? So when you're looking, you know, HEPA is trying to remember. I think it's 0.03 microns, I think, is what it is. So air doctors are 0.01.

Intellipures are 0.007. IQ errors are 0.003. So that gets way smaller. Right? So you're getting more of the particle that's floating around, that's coming up and triggering stuff. And that's the goal with filtration. Right? So those are a Couple options for you guys.

Okay. Anyone else? Anything else? Was this helpful? Is this cool?

Maybe? It's so weird, just like talking to yourself in there in a thing.

It's way better when you talk to other people. Is IQR 6000 fiber lock a band aid? Is it a health hazard? I don't know about the health hazard component because I. I don't know, like the materials and the stuff really quick. What I will say is it's a encapsulate. Right. And so thank you guys for the helpful stuff. Thank you. You don't want to encapsulate over mold, Right. Even the industry guidebooks tell you that you don't do that. Now, there are certain cases where you can, but generally it's more of a exception than a rule. And it's usually if you can't access the area properly or maybe it's like super expensive to fix. And so you could look at it as an alternative approach. Right. But if they aren't source remediating it, meaning, you know, you're sanding your wire brushing, you're getting the mold growth out of the wood out of the substrate that's back there, and they just cover it up with an encapsulate. It's. I've just seen it over and over not work. Right. So.

Vacuum recommendations.

HEPA vacuums make a difference.

Yeah. So I mean, you can get HEPA vacuums. They.

You know, the HEPA filter is kind of like what comes out after you vacuum stuff up. Right. So I mean, it's better to have that than nothing, Right.

I'll be honest, I'm not like, I've never gone too crazy about the, like, what vacuum do I have?

It's really more about like dust management. Right. So even in like standard protocols, even in the fine particle clean in the house, there isn't a vacuum that gets smaller than hepa. Right. So even if you're thinking in that process, you need to extract dirt and dust because that's what harbors the teeny tiny particles, Right. A HEPA vacuum is not going to do it. So, like even in the full house protocols, the HEPA vacuum is part of it, but it's only for the larger. You know, you see dirt and dust, you kind of do your HEPA vac, but then you have to wipe everything afterwards. Right. So I'm not as concerned about that. I do more of where I have like Swiffer cloths and I'll go and I'll wipe on top of my baseboards and I'll wipe you Know, in areas, under couches and under different things and try to get some of that subtle particle on top of door frames. Like, I'll do that every. Every month or so or something like that, you know, just to try to kind of manage the dust stuff. So.

How much do you charge and what's the process? So it's very specific, you know, to the individual. What I would say is, and probably more so for me to talk about on here, set up a call with my team, with my coaches, they'll walk you through the whole thing. The link is on our link tree on Instagram. Or you just go to yes, weinspect.com and click the Book a call button. They'll walk you through. There's some variables to it, so it's not always the same thing. So they'll kind of walk you through what it looks like, what the process is and see if it's a good fit for you and see if we're a good fit for you. Right. So we could do that.

And thank you for asking and I would love for you to go set that call up and have a chat with them. Is there a brand or model of washing machine that's resistant to forming mold or mildew? So I wouldn't say a brand and I wouldn't even say resistant because I think all of them have something in them at some point because they have components in it. But front loaders are the worst. Like, don't have a front loader. They're literally designed not to drain water. There's nothing you can do about it. I rent my house that I'm in, we had a front loader. I was drying out the rubber gasket, I was lifting it up and then drying the inside of it. I was opening the door, we were doing all these things to let it dry out and mold still ended up growing in there. And then finally we just told the, the landlords we need a top loader. So I'm sure top loaders have some stuff in them too. Right. Again, it's not a. It's. It's this thing, right. It's not about all the way to here, Right. It's what are the decisions I can make that will give me reductions that are most cost effective. Right. And swapping out a washing machine is an easy thing you can do. Right. And you know, from front loader to top loader, there's going to be, you know, it's not going to be as bad. Right. At least that's my opinion. It won't be as bad.

So. But they wanted to pass.

They source remediated the house, but they wanted to pass an indoor air test. This is like, so for post inspection guys, like, can I just go on my two minute post inspection rant and all these remediators and stuff. I feel like I'm doing like the highlights of like some of my podcast episodes right now. Because it's like all the same questions.

Posts, and a remediator's job is not to come in and remediate the air. That's not their job. Right. Their job is I mold in this wall. I need you to get rid of the mold that's growing on the wall and the framing and all this stuff. That's what they come in to do. They don't come in to clean your air. That's not their job. Right. That's not what you hire them for.

So if you understand that and then you come into the post inspection side of things and you say, we're going to do air tests to see if our remediation worked, does that make any sense? Why would I do air testing? That's not what I asked you to do. I asked you to remediate the stuff off of my surfaces. Why would I come in here and do air testing? It makes no sense. Right? And this is what they all do. And so here's what happens. So they put the air scrubbers in the room, they clean the air constantly, and then they come and they take an air sample in the room. It better freaking pass. You're literally cleaning the air.

Like all day, and then you put an air sample and they're like, it better freaking pass. If it doesn't pass, it's a bigger problem. Now, I'm not saying that you don't need to do air testing when you remediate. You know, let's say I rip this wall out. You know, you're obviously creating a disruption, so you're increasing more mold and particle into the airspace. Right? So you do need to do air testing to make sure that's fixed. But that can't be the only thing. That's like the secondary effect of what happened. You got to surface test the framing and the walls and, and all that stuff over there. And so that's a big piece of the remediation. If they're not surface testing and validating that they actually remediated what you paid them to remediate, then like, then what are we doing? Right? Our clothes salvageable. What do we clean it with? Go to my. Go to my profile one of the pinned posts is a post about cleaning your items and your belongings. Just comment on that one. And it's like an automated DM that'll send you. And there's an entire section in there on clothes. There's a story about a client, there's a case study with clothes, what you use, all that stuff. So if you're interested in that, I call it the how to clean your stuff. Very, very professional. How to clean your stuff. But anyways, you could go get that off of that post. It's on, it's. It's pinned on my, on my profile page.

Okay. Can I pivot to mycotoxins? I can. What.

What about. What do we want to talk about? Oh, God, it's 12:10.

Okay. Any more detail on the mycotoxin pivot from. From. Who was it? Julie Krug? You there?

Oh, thank you. About the excellent resources. I appreciate it. I actually just put out another one last week that I liked. It was, it was everywhere. It was like how to prevent mold in your kitchen. And it was like everywhere to look in your kitchen. There's like nine areas that like mold often happens in your kitchen.

And I break it all down in this download and, or maybe an email or something. I forget how I sent it out. I wrote it all up. And.

It'S actually about preventing, right? So like, it's not about testing and remediation. I was like, literally like, this is the stuff you could do to prevent these things. So, like, go check that out. That's. I don't think that one's pinned on my profile anymore. But I did it last week, so it's probably, probably only.

I don't know, four or five posts down is probably where it is. So you guys can find it there. And, and you can check that. And again, it's just like a comment might be kitchen or I don't know what the comment was, but you'll see it'll tell you in the, in the thing.

Okay. Thoughts on fogging ducting? Well, my thoughts on fogging rigid ducting is my same thoughts on fogging. Anything which is fogging alone doesn't do anything if the point is to kill something. So what? It's still there, right? Like, imagine I just drop dead right now. Dead. I'm gonna lay here for a while. I'm gonna start smelling. You know, my dog might come in here after a while and be like, oh, what's that smell? Like, oh, what's this dead thing in here? Oh my God, there's dad. Right? So what Happens to, like, so you kill the mole, it's just gonna stay there. And the thing about how we react to stuff, it's not about if it's alive or dead. Like, that's not the thing.

It's if it's there and it triggers an immune response. That's what the problem is. Most of the mold that we breathe in isn't, like, active. A lot of it is dormant at the time. And so that's the. That's kind of the. The big thing on needs to be cleaned. You need to wipe it. You need to clean it, right? So, like, you know, fogging is like this short cut that all these remediators do. They all do it, and they come in, they're like, I actually think they do it for, like, two reasons probably. One is they don't actually know where the mole problem is. So, like, they'll do an air test in your house, be like, oh, it's elevated. And then you will be like, okay, cool. How do I fix that? And then what's their answer going to be? Like, they don't know where it's coming from. So they then come in and say, oh, got this magic fog. It's incredible. It goes behind the walls. It kills everything. See, this idea of, like, killing, like, we think that killing gets rid of stuff, right? Like, it just sort of. That's like the association that you make with it, but, like, kill anything and it stays there. Kill a weed, it stays there. Kill a person, it stays there. Kill an animal, it stays there. Like, it all stays there. It doesn't go anywhere until you actually take it away, right? Like, the. The corner has to come take the body away, right? So if you're not doing that, you're just going to have dead things all over the place. And that's no better either, you know? So it's kind of a general thought. That's what I got for you. I'm gonna run. If you guys have more questions, you can set a call with my coaches and they'll answer stuff for you, right? So, like, that's the point of having coaches, right? So it's on our site, yesmeinspect.com there's a big yellow button. It says, book a call with a coach. Just book a call with them. Talk to them, right? And they can help. That's why they're there. So. All right, guys, we'll talk to you later. See ya.

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