36: HVAC Remediation and Post Testing

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. Happy Friday. We're here at the end of the week. I gotta tell you, I am super pumped that it is Friday. This has been a week for me. I don't know if it's been that way for anyone else. But the good news is today's the end. So.

I have been answering questions over the course of the week. I mentioned earlier in one of the episodes, we got a lot of submissions. There's a lot of good questions this week. So I wanted to spend the time to make sure I was answering them. And so it turned into, obviously, two full episodes this week of Q and A. And this particular question that I'm going to answer here in a moment, I was actually going to put in yesterday's episode. It was the plan while I was recording it. And then I looked down at the clock when I was recording it, and I'd been talking for like 18 minutes. I was like, oh, that's almost a whole episode. So I decided to split that out separately from yesterday, and I'm going to put it into its own thing today. So that's what you're going to get here in a second. But before I switch over to that, I just wanted to, you know, let you guys know. Some of you may know this, some of you may not. So I send emails out to people who are on the mold finder email list at least three, four times a week. So.

I'm spending our. I probably spend on Monday about three hours writing out emails for the week that. That I'm gonna send out to you guys that's gonna have all kinds of information about stuff that I am either dealing with, with clients and I think would be helpful for you guys to hear or things that I'm seeing or anything else that. That is kind of in the same realm of things I talk about all the time. I was looking back at the kind of the interaction rates and everything with these emails, and.

So many of them are getting opened. Like, when you look at industry benchmarks of how many people actually open emails, if you're getting 20% of people to open emails, you're doing a great job. People opening These emails, it's like triple that. So it's pretty amazing.

It's exciting to know that the stuff that I'm sharing is at least drawing your attention. You guys are engaged and wanting to see what's being shared. And hopefully that means to me that the information is valuable. At the end of the day, I look at that stuff and I want to see, am I sharing stuff that people are interested in? And if they're interested, they're going to open it up and they're going to look at it.

If you want to see what these are, because these emails are only going out to those on the list. If you guys have noticed, on my Instagram, I've kind of slowed down a little bit on the, on the posting with the really long descriptions and all that stuff, because I kind of want to save that for you guys that are actually mold finders. It takes a lot of time to do all that stuff, and so I want to share that with the people that have shown some interest, you know what I mean? So I've been putting basically that stuff into my emails instead. And the stuff that I put out on Instagram currently is, you know, more kind of like teasers of what's going on the show and like, quick little things. But I'm trying not to. I only have so much time, so I'm trying to reallocate my time to a place to the people that are really interested in showing interest in what I'm sharing and getting value out of it. So anyways, that's, that's what the mold finder, you know, email platform is for me. If you want to get on there, all you got to do is I just need to get your email address and you go on there. It's that easy. So, so if you go to moldcleaningproduct.com I know you've heard me talk about.

Does give you my favorite product that I like for cleaning your stuff, which is cool. But the other thing that it does is it gets you onto this list. So then you'll start getting these emails as I send them out. Like I said, I'm sending out three to five a week for the last two months. So that's been kind of my focus on this stuff. If you're interested again, just go to moldcleaningproduct.com, put your name, your email address in there. You'll get an immediate email within a couple minutes of what I like for cleaning your stuff, and also what I don't like for cleaning your stuff. So that could be beneficial for you in its own right. And then on top of that, you'll start getting all these emails that I sent out or that I send out during the week. For example, the email today is titled Avoid this Remediation Scam. And it's basically talking about what remediation companies try to do to shortcut the process that makes it so the remediation doesn't work. And so if that sounds like something you'd want to read about, then that comes out in the mold finder's emails. Another one that came out the day before is titled Is Old Mold a Problem? And this one actually talks about a quote that I heard from a client and it kind of triggered me to want to share what their thought process was and basically.

How I answer them. So these are like the real answers that I give to people in the field, like my actual clients. And so these are breakdowns of all this stuff. So again, if you think that any of this stuff would be helpful for you guys, just go to moldcleaningproduct.com, give me your or just put in your name and your email address. I'll send you the actual breakdown of the cleaning product that I like for your stuff, like I talked about. And then you'll be on all these emails that I'm sending out every week. So I just wanted to start the show off with that. And now that that's out of the way, I'm going to share with you what I recorded yesterday regarding heating and air conditioning systems, how to clean them, how to remediate them, how to test them afterwards. So there you go.

All right, our next question is from Critter W. And it is how do I retest my home after remediation, specifically the H Vac system remediation and not walls. So basically we're talking about you're having your air conditioning cleaned and you want to know if it worked, right? That's basically what we're trying to figure out. So it's a good question.

We've talked about air conditioning systems before. The quick overview is that if you have a significant mold or toxin issue in your H Vac system, the truth is it's never going to be able to be fully cleaned. And I talked, I think, even just an episode or two ago about how they try to clean the H Vac system and how you can't really get all of it. Listen back to that one. So I don't go over all of that again very soon after we did it the first time. But Basically, the method that they have for cleaning.

It's impossible to completely clean an H vac system. So if you're having a significant mold or toxin issue, or even a bacterial issue in the H vac system, you just have to know that by cleaning the system, you're not going to get all of it out. And it's just, you know, it is what it is. Right. So the purpose of retesting here, if you're trying to retest, then is not so much to see if it was all removed, but more so probably to see, like, how significant is the issue still. So think about this. So you have two different components of your heating and air conditioning system. You have the air handler unit, which is the mechanical unit, where all the ductwork attaches to, and then you have all of the ductwork. Okay. Now, when I first test the system, I usually just test the air handler unit, which is that mechanical unit, because that's the central hub of the entire system, and all the airflow is coming through there. Right. So instead of splitting things out and testing duct lines separate from this, from the air handler unit, I usually combine it all together because you could get a good look, excuse me, at what is moving through the entire system there. However, when you're talking about remediation, cleaning ductwork and cleaning the mechanical unit are two completely different things. The mechanical unit can actually be removed. It can be disassembled. You. You can try to clean in some of the tight compartments, and you could do things that way. It's a lot easier to clean the mechanical unit than it is to clean the ductwork. It's still hard to get everything out of the mechanical unit, but it's easier to do because you're not. Because you can actually reach everything. The challenge with trying to clean ductwork is that there's literally no way to reach it all in terms of being able to wipe everything down and actually extract everything. The best they're doing is like sticking really long brushes through all your duct line and trying to disrupt everything. Then put a vacuum on the other end of the duct line and try to suck it all through. But you're not going to get everything that's wedged in the grooves and the crevices of the duct line that way in an air handler unit, because you can actually reach the whole thing. If someone's actually doing a really thorough job, it is possible to try to clean an air conditioning or the air handler unit. Again, if you're dealing with a heavy load of mold or toxins, it may not be the best option, because even still in the coil, you're not going to be able to get every little particle that's moved into the coil section of the air handler unit. But maybe if you replace the coil and then they disassemble, like the blower fan and some of the other compartments, then maybe, yeah, you could clean that potentially. So if I'm doing a post test on a H Vac system, I may have only tested one section of it on the initial test, which is that actual air handler unit. And again, it's because all the airflow has been moving through all the ducts and that unit continuously. And it's kind of a representation of what's going on. But when you're talking about remediation, the remediation that happens in that unit and the remediation that happens in the duct lines are very different. They're done differently. The effectiveness can be very different. And. And so by just testing one, you're not actually understanding what's happening in your whole system. So what that means is that maybe they did a great job at cleaning your actual air handler unit. Right. The actual mechanical unit, but there might still be problems left over in the ductwork. So if you only test the unit and you're not testing the ductwork, then you may be missing out on the fact that there still could be an exposure problem and how effective it actually could have been. And on the flip side, if you test them all together and the ductwork could potentially skew the results and say that everything failed. Right. So the truth is, is that if you're going to do retesting on this, you actually should be testing the air handle unit separately than the duct lines. And so the way that you do it is that you do dust testing throughout the system. It's the same way that we would test it up front at the beginning, and the dust testing would be ERMI for mold. And again, it's not about the Ermes score. Everyone I know, people get caught up on their score. And if there's another.

Inspector or environmental professional listening to this, they're going to start flipping their lid about the fact that I'm telling you to do ERMI's in your H VAC system. It's not about the score. It's about the mold types that you're picking up. It's about comparing it to the first time that you did the testing. How effective was the cleaning? How many mold types were there the first time versus this time. What are the loads of the mold types that are there now versus the first time and to see what the difference is. Right. So that's it. But you use the ERMI for mold. You can do mycotoxin testing the same way via dust collection. And if you were getting into more of a deep dive and doing bacterial and actinomycete testing as well as endotoxin testing, all of that could be done through dust testing. So you do all of that testing in an H vac system, doing an air test. I've seen air conditioning cleaning companies like, or even other inspectors, usually the cleaning companies don't even recommend this because they don't understand mold. So usually it's like other inspectors that come in to do, like local guys that come in to do posts or whatever. They'll put like an air sampling pump at the end of a duck line and they'll be like, all right, turn your air conditioning on and we're gonna take an air sample when it's running, guys, that doesn't work. So it's just not the way it's. It's not the most effective use of it. Again, most times mold issues in air conditioning systems are not because there's actually growth in the system. It's because they've become cross contaminated. What does that mean? Is that it's not a heavy spore issue. It's more of a heavy mold fragment issue and even mycotoxin load and different things that are living on tiny particles. Air samples don't analyze fragmentation at all. They only look for spores. So if we know that most times air conditioning systems aren't impacted by spores. And then we're trying to do testing on an H vac system that's only looking at spores. Like, you do the math, right? Like, that doesn't make any sense, right? Are we getting it? So you have to do the test type that is going to be most accurate for what the common issue is that's causing the problem in the system. The cool thing about doing dust testing is that it also accounts for spores, too. So you're getting all of it lumped in instead of only getting like maybe 5% of it lumped in. So that's why we do the dust testing and that's why you don't stick an air pump at the end of a duck line and think it's going to tell you anything that's going on, because it's not going to. So. So anyways, if you're going to post test. So basically you do the dust testing that we just talked about and whatever of Those microbes and contaminants and toxins you're interested in, that's what you test for, right? Typically, whatever I tested for on the front end, meaning on the initial inspection, I will do the same testing on the back end because I have comparison points for all those different data pieces. Right. So what does the mold test look like, which was the ermi, what does the endotoxin test look like? What does the bacterial test look like? The mycotoxin test? What do they all look like?

You do one in the air handler unit, which is the mechanical unit, and then you do a separate set of those tests on the ductwork. So now this is where it can add up, right? Because now we think, well, there's multiple duct lines, so what if they cleaned one better than they cleaned the other ones? Right. I don't start by doing all the ducts separately, but I've had a client that went really deep down this road. So I'm going to tell you what we did with them and then you can decide what makes the most sense for you. So we split the air handler unit and the ductwork. Right? They did not want to rip out all their ductwork. Ductwork. They kind of had this custom built situation. It was going to require them ripping out basically anywhere that a duct was located. They were ripping out walls and ceilings and they weren't trying to do that. So they wanted to try to clean everything the best that they could. So they, they had me test the air handler unit separately. That was fine. It looked good. And then they had me test. They wanted to test the ductwork. And I said, listen, before I start testing individual duct lines, and this really starts skyrocketing, the cost of retesting, because, guys, it's going to skyrocket the cost of ret. You have to think about it like, you know, hundreds of dollars per sample, like to do this. Right? And if you're doing multiple sets of those, that's going to add up really, really quick. And so if you're testing multiple duct lines and you're testing the air handler unit, I mean, you're thousands and thousands of dollars on post testing at that point to really figure out if it's actually working. If you're testing every duck individually at the beginning. So what I did with them is like, okay, we're going to test just all the ducts at once. We're going to do a composite and actually in their house because it was a larger home. So I did it per system. Right? So they had a couple different H VAC systems. So the way that I did is I did a composite of all the duct lines that were attached to system one and then a composite of all the duct lines that were attached to system two. Right. And that's how we did the initial testing. And then we came back and they were elevated. And so he had a suspicion that he thought it was certain duct lines that were causing the problem. So still, instead of replacing all the ductwork. And let me just say at the beginning that my recommendation at the beginning was to replace all of the ductwork. And so he didn't want to do that. He wanted to continue to keep testing.

To try to figure out if he actually had to replace all of the duct work, if it was very specific duct lines. Right. So then we went back into each system because both of them, the testing on the duct portion of it failed. Then we went back into each one of the systems, and we split out sections of the duct lines that attach to each system. So think of it this way. You had system A and system A had duct lines, let's just say 1, 2, and 3. So for system A, we did a composite of duck lines 1, 2, and 3 on the first round of post testing. So we did a set of dust testing in the actual unit, which is unit A. So that was one set of testing we did. And then we did a separate composite set of testing and duck lines 1, 2, and 3. And so we. That's how we tested system A. So we had two sets of tests for system A. We did the same exact thing for system B. So we did one set of tests in actual the unit B. And then we did one set of tests that was a composite of duck lines 4, 5, and 6, which connects it to unit B. So think of it in your head. You have unit A and duck line 1, 2, and 3 is connected to unit A. And then you had unit B and duck line 1, 2, and 3 is connected to unit B. So we did unit A separate unit B separate. Ducts one through three separate as a composite. Ducts four through six separate as a composite. So we had four sets of tests that we did for that. Okay? So that's how we set it up. And we came back and we got the results back, and all of the ductwork came back. It was still an issue, and.

There were still mold issues in the H Vac systems. But he was okay with it. It was enough for him to feel like he didn't have to replace it. So he said, okay, we're not going to Test the H VAC anymore. It was a significant improvement. And when I say that, I mean, like, the unit A. Unit B, right. The actual mechanical units. He's like, but I want to focus on the duct work. Now. I think in system A, which had unit A, you know, I. I suspect that maybe, you know, I'm giving a fake number of ducts here, but the idea was that a certain number of ducts were a problem. So let's just say I think that that duct one and duct two is the problem and not duct three. So I want you to go back in and test duct one separately and. And duct two separately. And then for unit B, I want you to do the same thing. So we basically went in and then tested four individual duct lines because he had a suspicion of it. So it was another four sets of tests because we tested duct one and duct two, which is connected to system A. And then we tested duck three and duck four, which is connected to system B. We came back, and there were still issues in all of them, right? Like, one of them was a little worse than the other ones. But at the end of the day, there were still problems. And my recommendation every time was like, listen, you're not going to be able to fully clean these things, right? You need to replace them. And ultimately, we got to the point where he stopped. He stopped diving deeper in the testing, and we were still finding issues in the duck line. Here's the problem with duct testing, right? The limitation I have in testing a duck line as well, we have to think about that. The way that I could test the duck line is I can only reach my arm in as far as I can get into the duck line, okay? So think of it. You have your air conditioning unit, right? The air handler unit is in your attic, or it's in your basement or wherever it's located. And it runs duck lines all the way through that space, all the way through the walls of your house into a bedroom or into your living room or wherever it is. And so how do I test it? I open the vent in the living room or the bedroom where the air comes out of, and I reach my arm up into that vent and I wipe dust from up in that area. You know, my arm is only. Maybe. I don't know. How long is someone's arm? Three feet long? Maybe two feet long? I don't know. I don't know if three feet is, like, massive, aggressive basketball player length or if that's normal human length. It's kind of hard. But anyways, your arm's a couple feet long. Right. So I'm reaching in, let's say two feet into a duck line. There's probably a hundred feet of that duck line, if not more. Right. So I'm only testing two feet of it. Well, when you think about how they're cleaning it, they're going to be able to clean the area that's closer to them more effectively than they're going to be able to clean the area that's further away from them just because of how close it is, the same way that I can reach the area closer to me than I can reach the area that's farther away from me. So, I mean, just keep that in mind. So we're doing testing of a small percentage of the space, and there's so much more that could be going on in there that we can't even reach. And if we can't reach it to test it, then you obviously know they can't reach it to clean it. So is it going to be worse than what I'm seeing in the area that's closest to me? Probably. Right. I mean, I don't know 100%, because I've never been able to get in there and fully reach a Go Go Gadget arm all the way into the duck line to test it. Right. But you have to think that concept through on, like, how it's being cleaned, how it's being tested, how far I can reach, how far they can reach, you know. But at the end of the day, here's what I'm going to tell you. If you have a heavy mold load or you have any sort of toxins in your system or in your H Vac system, the recommendation is going to be replace the whole thing. And it's because it's just impossible to clean the whole thing if you're going to try to clean it, which is fine. Right. I understand. So let's say that the mold load is not significant. You're not finding multiple mold types. You're not finding some of the more significant.

Red flag molds like Stachybotrys and Catalina and Eulogladium and Trichoderma and some of these other mold types that are more red flag issues, and even some of the Aspergillus species that produce mycotoxins. This is a whole other conversation on how you can interpret these results is if you've done mycotoxin testing in your body and you know that you have, let's say, high levels of mycophenolic acid. Ding, ding, ding. That's what? I have one of them. And then you do an ERMI test, and you see that maybe you have only five. I literally just did this with a client the other day. They actually had otratoxin A and mycophenolic acid in their body, which are two of the things that I have.

And we did the testing in a system, and the actual number of molds in the system were pretty low. I think there's only 6 or 7 of the water damage molds in the system, which is pretty low on when you're looking at, like, number of. Because there's 26 of them. So usually it's pretty low if you're seeing that. And the overall loads of everything wasn't really high except when you looked at otratoxin or, excuse me, when you looked at Aspergillus otris and Penicillium brevicompactam, which were both 10 times higher than the actual study averages that were conducted for the ermi. So looking at this report, it basically is showing not a whole significant mold issue except for these two mold types. And, hey, by the way, those two mold types are two of the same mycotoxins that the client had in their body. That's why I ask people what their testing has been. Some people don't want to share it with me, and that's okay, but it just helps us to interpret stuff. So now I'm looking at this. I may have talked about possibly cleaning that system as an option just because it wasn't a huge mold load in there, but because I know that their body is dealing with otratoxin A and mycophenolic acid, which are two of the mycotoxins that are being produced by the two molds that were at higher levels in the H Vac system. I told them I think they should replace it, and we had the conversation about it, right? Like, if you know that these two molds that are elevated to this length in your H Vac system are actually the molds that are responsible for creating the toxins that are in your body. I mean, it could be a coincidence, right? But ultimately, it's. What's your goal? Right? Why did you have me out? What are you trying to do? And if the goal is obviously most people, it's, you know, they want to be healthy again. I mean, that's the goal. And we see, like, a direct correlation of mold type to the toxins that you have in your body. You know, that's. That's pretty compelling. And so anyways, that was that was a way that I looked at interpreting that for them. I don't totally remember how I got on that tangent, but anyways, point of the story. Cleaning H vac systems is very difficult. You can do the testing. You should be testing the air handler unit as one piece and then testing the duck lines as a second piece. In terms of your post testing to understand the effectiveness of what's going on. If you're only testing one, then you're missing out on a piece of the equation. And if you're combining them together, then you could be skewing the results and you could actually be not seeing the true effectiveness of what areas were cleaned. So that's a very long answer. I hope that you found that one pretty helpful. It's a really good thought process of how I go through an entire.

Explanation of why we're doing this with my clients. So yeah, hopefully you found that one helpful. Thank you for that question. It's a good question.

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.