21: Q&A Day! #1 Reason Remediation Fails / Off Gassing in a new home

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 we are doing another Q and A day, which is exciting. I got so many questions from the last few times that I asked for submissions that I'm just going to go through some of those and we're going to answer some more of them. So I'm just going to jump right in. So this first question is from Healing Laura. The question is, what can I do to off gas my new home before I move in? So it's a really good question. So for those of you that don't know what that means, basically new building materials, paint, new furniture, structural components, glues, adhesives, a lot of that stuff off gas is what are called VOCs, which are volatile organic compounds. So those of us who are sensitive to mold oftentimes end up with a sensitivity to chemicals and VOCs as well. So that's why she's asking this question.

Here's the tough thing about this, is that when things are structural and in the house, you don't have a whole lot of control over them. And you know when they're built in and they're permanent. That's why when I talk about in previous episodes what my ideal new home purchase or rental would look like, it's something that's at least two years old to allow time for some of this off gassing to occur naturally. That way, when you come in, a big chunk of that has already happened.

Really, the primary way to make off gassing happen faster is by controlling temperature. So the hotter an area is, the faster the off gassing is going to happen. So there are people who have basically hotboxed their houses.

Not in the way that you might have heard of hot boxing before, but literally just like heat up the house in an effort to try to speed up the off gassing. And that can help some, but if the. If the VOC loads are too high in there, you know, it's probably not going to help as much as maybe you're wanting to. The other thing to keep in mind, there's two different types of VOCs. There's regular VOCs, and then there's semi volatile organic compounds, which are SV, VOCs the SVOCs will be off gassing for much, much, much longer than VOCs will like. It could take years and years for SVOCs to off gas. An example of something that would be off gassing SVOCs is like that spray foam insulation type of stuff. That stuff, you know, I'm sure every material is a little different, but generally that's a, that can introduce a semi volatile organic compound that could take a lot longer to off gas. But other things like paint and adhesives and things like that fall under the VOC category. So you can try heat treatments and heating different things. If you have more individual items versus like your entire house being painted, for example, you can, you know, try to take those out and heat them maybe somewhere else or try to do that separately and maybe that can speed it up. Another thing to consider, so if, if there is a VOC problem and you're worried about off gassing, one thing you could do is introduce air treatment technology that includes carbon filtration. I did an episode a while back, I'm going to try to scan for it while we're talking here, but I did one all about air filters and technology. Like looks like it is episode four. So if you go listen to episode four, I talk about all the different types of our treatment technology, kind of what they're good for and how they work, and I talk about chemicals and VOCs. The Cliff notes version is that you want something with carbon filtration specifically built in. There are units that are actually kind of made more for VOCs. Like IQAir, for example, has their basic unit, which is the HealthPro Plus. And then they have another unit that is the. Is called the multigas. And the multi gas is still a filtration unit, but it's meant with a focus on VOCs. So that is something that might be able to help that as well. One thing that's tough with VOCs, just like mold, is you can't see it, right? So something I definitely recommend doing is testing for VOCs, because there's a lot of different types of EOCs that are, that are present, right? There's so many different areas they could be coming from. They're from different types of building materials, maybe from personal items that you have. And there are tests out there that can actually.

Kind of place them in categories and show you where they're coming from. However, it might not just be VOCs, it could also be formaldehyde. Right? So formaldehyde is going to have an off gassing effect the same way. But It's a completely different type of chemical. It's typically not picked up in a general VOC test. You have to do a separate test for formaldehyde. But formaldehyde is a carcinogenic chemical, right? So if you have high formaldehyde loads in the house.

You know, it's gonna be difficult to. To one to handle them because. Well, let me get to that in a second. But you're gonna have a chemical is floating around that, you know, essentially can create. Create cancer, which is a problem. So formaldehyde is typically from wood and wood glues and adhesives is kind of the primary areas that formaldehyde comes from. So what I was about to say is that sometimes dealing with high formaldehyde levels is more difficult because now the source of the formaldehyde might not just be paint on a wall or some items you brought in a house or even carpeting, but. But maybe it is all of your cabinetry or it's your wood flooring or it's the glue that's keeping all that stuff together. Right? And so if you're going to try to address that, the only way to truly address it and get rid of it is to remove the source of it, which means removing the cabinets or the floors or wherever the source is coming from. So dealing with formaldehyde is a little more difficult from a cost perspective because the types of materials that are typically creating it are more structural in the house. But formaldehyde, you know, adds an added layer of kind of concern because, you know, it's not just a chemical you're reacting to, but it's more of a carcinogen. And that's a problem too. So, yeah, hopefully that's helpful. The other thing that, you know, you could always do is try to, you know, air, you know, open windows and kind of dilute the air in your house. But that's not going to truly help off gas anything. You're just trying to dilute the air. Basically. Basically, if you're stuck in a situation where you can't leave or you can't fix certain things, then you'd be really trying to figure out a combination of diluting your air and air filtration. But the reason that I talk about testing and why it's important is because you need to know the levels. The levels are super, super high. You know, the filtration is going to help some. The, you know, diluting the air is going to help some, but you're dealing just with this massive source basically that you're just constantly trying to fight. Whereas if the levels are lower and they're just, like, maybe moderate and they're not super high, then maybe it's just something that you can wait out for a little bit. The technology pieces can help counteract the effects that they have, and then over time, it'll go away, and maybe it'll be easier for you.

To manage during that time period. So thanks for that question. Hope that was helpful.

All right, our next question is from what My Kids Don't Eat, which is a really funny name, actually. And here's the question. Is it possible to clear a house of mold? We've discovered mold in our forever home that we own.

Yeah, it is, right? And. And I do it a lot with folks. I think there's a couple things that we need to keep in mind. First off.

This is a concept that I was first shown by Dr. Jill Carnahan at a medical conference that she was giving a presentation at, and she was talking about.

Your immune system and how it's designed kind of like a funnel. The concept of your immune system is like a funnel. And so at the top of the funnel is all of the exterior and environmental contaminants that are coming into your immune system, into your body. As the funnel narrows down, that's your body basically trying to detox everything. And then what comes out of the bottom of the funnel is essentially what your body has actually been able to detox, right? So everybody's. The size of everyone's funnel is different. The speed in which things move through the funnel is different. So if you have a healthy immune system and you're able to detox things quickly, the bottom hole of your funnel will be bigger, right?

But if you're being exposed to a whole lot of things, then there's a whole lot more coming in the top of your funnel. So that's the concept. So really, what we need to do is we need to address both sides of it on the top. We need to limit our exposure as much as possible, right? So if we're getting exposed to less toxins and less mold and environmental triggers, then the load of that funnel isn't going to build up as fast. So imagine if you pour water in a funnel too fast, right? It comes up higher, higher, higher, and then it overflows out of the top of the funnel, and then that's when our immune system and our body goes haywire and you get those chronic inflammatory responses, right? So the idea is that if you pour water in the funnel slower, right? Meaning that less mold, less toxins coming into your funnel that it gives your body more time to do its detoxing process, and you can process it faster the other side. So I help with the top side. So the bottom side is where your doctors help with the different supplements you're on, the different treatments you're on. And the whole purpose of that is to open the bottom of your funnel, right? And so at the end of the day, you ideally want to, like, flip the funnel, right? You want less stuff coming in the top and more coming at the bottom. But it's the process of managing both sides of that funnel that's going to help you get to a point where you're not going to react as much. Right? Now, here's the thing, and I'm going to be totally honest with you guys. There's no way to completely eliminate mold from your house. It's impossible. Okay? I don't care. The absolute top, best mold inspector in the world is never going to find every single thing that is happening in your house. It's just the not realistic. And I think that you guys know that, right? I think that we're all smart enough to know that. The goal, though, is to basically focus on areas, you know, where. Where we know where the triggers of mold will be happening, which is water damage areas, and ultimately want to decrease the load going in the top of our funnel. So if we were able to decrease your exposure load going in the top of your funnel by 60, 70, 80%, then don't you think that that would have a positive effect on how your body is reacting? The answer is yes, of course it would. Right. And that's ultimately the goal. Right? The goal is to really limit what's coming in from the top, and then for the doctors to help maximize what comes out the bottom. And that's how you get to a better place. So that's the ultimate goal for that. So, you know, when we talk about this question, is there a way to remove all the mold from our new house? We have a process that works, and people have been able to get better when they're back in these environments. It's a better healing environment. But just understand, it's not about removing every single, you know, spore and fragment of mole, because it's not a possibility. Now, here's. Here's the thing there. There's really one big reason why remediation doesn't work, all right? And it's that you haven't really looked at the house as a holistic.

System. So a lot of times what remediators do is that they come in and they only focus on like one piece of the problem. But the truth is, is that your house is really split into like three levels. So go through this with me. So the top level would be your heating and ventilation system. If that is contaminated with mold, then it's going to continuously spread it around the house. And even if you remediate all the walls and the ceilings, where the sources are coming from, and even if you clean your whole house, the air conditioner is going to continue to spread that all around, right? So you have to look at that. The second level is the structure of your house. And that's really where the mold most of the time is growing in the walls, in the ceilings and the cabinets. Those are the factories creating the problem. If you don't get rid of those, you'll never stop the exposure to mold because it's going to continue to get created. Right. So that's the second step. The third level is what we call the settlement. And this is basically where the spores and the fragments, gravity brings them down to the surfaces and it settles on the ground, around on your coffee table, on different things. And then as you move around the house, your just kind of natural flow of being human and taking steps and sitting on stuff is going to pop that back up in your breathing zone and you're going to get re exposed to it. So there's three levels to the house. If you don't address every single level, then remediation won't work. Okay? And so the number one reason that remediation doesn't work is because the remediators don't look at it that way. They come in and they say, we're just going to clean your house and that's going to fix everything. Or we're just going to remediate this wall and the ceiling that were impacted and that's going to fix everything. And then we come back in the house and we still don't feel good and we're like, what the hell? Like, I still feel like crap, right? This doesn't work. And then you start seeing the different comments in Facebook and on these different support groups that say remediation is impossible. I spent all this money on remediation and it didn't work. Right. Truth is, remediation is not impossible. The problem is that it just wasn't done the right way. Right? And so then we get this feeling that it's impossible and we go down this, this never ending journey of trying to find the perfect place. And that's going to be A very stressful, frustrating journey for you. Okay. So yes, it can be done. Now on our end, we've been able to build out a protocol that has proven that it works, right? And not just for mold, but for mycotoxins and even endotoxins that we're able to extract all that stuff. But it's difficult, you know, at the beginning. And there's still. There really is no guidebook on how to do this. The industry standards that are out there are all geared around what we call the mainstream population, right? Which is funny because legitimately, 40% of the entire population is mold sensitive. It's just a lot of us don't know it yet and it's not recognized really by the government or anyone else. So really the quote, mainstream population, which are like the, the healthy people, if you will, you know, that's where all the standards are built around. Because that's the bulk of the people that need, you know, that, that represent the population. So they build all the standards around those people. But you know what, the guidelines were built like 30 years ago. Like they're all old. And there's been so much research has come out since then about how mold moves through a house, how it's created, you know, how different toxins move, where they settle all that stuff that isn't included in any of these guidelines and these guidebooks. And so most of the remediators out there are basically just trying to execute what they read in a guidebook that is dated and isn't up to date on what we're dealing with right now. And so that's a really big challenge. What we were able to do is that we were noticing that a bunch of our clients were sick and they were asking us questions, and we couldn't really answer the questions. And so we kind of went on this, really, on this long journey. We read every single environmental science research research paper we could find. We read the medical research papers we could find. You know, there's only like a handful of consultants across the country that even really work and specialize with hypersensitive and mold sensitive people. So we started talking to them and asked them, what are you doing? What are you doing to clear mycotoxins out of house? What are you doing to make sure the H VAC system is not getting contaminated? We kind of figured out what everyone was doing and then we started testing stuff. And this process took about two years and literally over $3 million of our clients money in figuring out what the process looks like. It's almost as if we were some big corporation with it, with a two year grant and a three million dollar research and development fund, I mean, that's really how it worked. And we tried all these different things and we, you know, we told our clients, we're like, listen, we don't necessarily have the answer yet, but we have things that we're going to try and we think, think that we could reduce it a lot. And they were all thankful. And so they luckily were our guinea pigs as we were working through this. The benefit for everyone that we work with now is that they don't have to go through that. We just give them what works now, because we know that it works. So that's the benefit of working with our team specifically is this process that we've created for remediation. All of this is actually also included in Mold Masterclass, by the way. So if you are looking for this, I've given the entire protocols in moldmaster class class, which is a huge value in that course if you ask me. But that's the process and that's how we build it out. And the remediation process really focuses. It's two phases. The first phase is you have to remove the source. The source is the factory that's creating the problem. So that means is there mold in a wall? Is there mold in a ceiling? Is there mold in a cabinet? Most of it's going to be hidden. So the only way to remove the source is to actually find them. Which is why a thorough inspection. Inspection is very, very important. Right. The remediators are not inspectors. They're not going to go in and look for problems. They're just going to go fix whatever you tell them to. So we have to know where the problems are. So step one is a very thorough inspection. We have to figure out where all the mold is hiding. Step two then is that you have to remove the actual source, the factory that's continuously creating the exposure problems. Once we do that, then there's a secondary phase which is called what we call a home cleanse. But. But it's basically a specific process of cleaning your entire house. Okay. So now we've handled the sources and then we've also handled so sources was level two. We talked about the three levels. Source was level two. That's your walls, ceilings, floors, cabinets. Level three is the settlement. That's everything that settled down on the floor and has been popping back up in the breathing zone. So now you'll be asking, what about level one? Right. We didn't talk about that. So level one actually happens at the very beginning. So that's the first thing you do. So oddly, the levels are the same order as how you handle stuff, right? So level one is your H VAC system. So you handle that first. Now, when it comes to handling the H vac, you start the process at the beginning and then you finish the process at the end. That's how the order of the events go. So you would basically remove or clean your H VAC system, whichever option is, is recommended based off the testing, what everything looks like. And then you seal it all up. You seal all the registers. You see all the lines where the ducts would be moving. Even if you take them out, you seal all those holes up. You don't want anything moving through those cavities anymore. So, and the reason we do all this at the beginning is because when you clean an H vac or when you remove it, there's going to be some particle and some debris that falls into the house. So we want the next two phases of the remediation to pick up on that and be able to get rid of, rid of all that stuff. So that's why that happens at the first. So first you handle the H vac, which is level one. Second you do all the structure. So this is the source. Now this is removing the sources that are creating the problem. And then third, you do a full home cleanse. And this handles the third layer, which is a settlement. This is how you create a holistic remediation plan. And this is how it actually works. If you're not addressing all three of these areas, then it's not going to work. And then you're, there's still going to be exposure issues in the house. You're going to start reading on Facebook that remediation is impossible and you just need to burn your house down. And it's because the people that are saying this, again, the reason this is happening is because the remediators they were using, they skip steps. And so if you skip steps, there's still going to be leftover stuff. So is it possible to remediate the mold in your dream home? Yeah, it's possible. Right. It just needs to be handled the right way. So I would highly recommend for you to go to Mold Masterclass, enroll in the course moldmasterclass.com it's going to talk about all the different types of, well, talks about all the different types of testing. It talks about how to read lab results. It'll help you guide an inspector to try to get the information you need. So then you can use the remediation protocols that I've included in the program and give that to a remediator and have them execute that plan. Right. So, you know, I would recommend that you look into that. I think that that would be helpful for you. So thank you for the question.

All right, so that's going to wrap up today's episode. So thank you for the questions again. I had some more that I had received through submissions that I went ahead and answered today. You know, I do these two or three times a week, these Q and A episodes. So when I ask for questions and if you have them, submit them. Because even if I don't get to them the first time, I may come back and look at them the next time. The other thing I just want to mention real quick. So I haven't really talked about Mold Masterclass too much on this podcast, but it is a training course that I put together a couple years ago now. It's now spread to five different continents. There's people all over the world that have gone through this course and have found it really helpful. It is like the definitive core concept course of mold and mycotoxins for anyone who's mold sensitive or hypersensitive talks about why it's created, how it moves through the house, how it settles how, how you test for it, how you screen for an inspector to do the testing, how you interpret the lab results because you don't want to rely on an inspector to interpret them because they won't know how, because you interpret things differently for people that are mold sensitive.

It talks about the remediation protocols and what you should be doing in order to clean things. There's a whole section on cleaning your contents and what you should think of cleaning versus not cleaning. So there's a whole lot of information in this course and you can access it very easily. Right? So I would encourage you guys, if you're interested in that, if you've been listening to the episodes, if you're following me on Instagram, you know that the Mold Masterclass is literally the deep dive inside my brain of most everything that I know about this stuff. So if you've enjoyed this stuff, then, then please go check that out, take a look. It's definitely worth the investment for you guys if you're trying to navigate this mold situation, you know. So again, it's moldmasterclass.com Go check it out if you have some time and if you have gone through it, I would love to hear what you think. So message me on Instagram if you've gone through Mold Masterclass and tell me what you think. All right, have a good 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.