38: Why air samples suck / When to use ERMI / Basement mold prevention

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, guys. So I want to give you a little scenario that I saw in a Facebook group somewhere and then talk about what's happening. So there was a thread in here, and part of the thread says our in home air test came back lower than the outside air test. But I've heard that air tests are no good. Could you advise and we'll talk about that in a second. We've talked about that a little bit, but I'll go back into that some more. And then there was a follow up where she said there was an inspection at the same time and they found a fair bit of mold in the bathrooms.

Also, I lifted up the carpet in the laundry room basement and the floor is covered. It's strange that air tests don't detect this unless outdoor sources are more prevalent. You know, it's interesting. I get asked this a lot when people are looking at, like, air results, you know, because we do air testing in houses, but it's not. It's not in the ambient space. Right. And I'll talk about why in a minute. But it's more directed at source. It's trying to figure out where the location is. And that's really where the strength of air testing is. It's finding hidden areas of mold where there isn't visible growth, but there are signs of water damage, which are really the big indicators that there could be a hidden mold problem that's hiding somewhere. So basically, air samples are good for finding hidden mold. They're terrible for finding what's actually floating around in your house. And they give you false negatives all the time. So when the one thing I wanted to get at first before we dive in the air sample stuff is just one simple thing in her statement that I think we just need to talk about real quick. I lifted up the carpet in the laundry room basement and the floor is covered. Okay. We should never have carpet in a basement.

A basement is subgrade. It's very similar to crawl spaces. As we all know, I hate basements and crawl spaces. So you're below grade, which means you're below ground. So that means that any moisture that gets into the ground is gravity's working against you at that point, right? Because water's hitting the ground and it's going to go down and down is where the basement and the crawl space is. So you're fighting like these natural forces.

And basically you have to implement like man made solutions to try to combat those, but it's constantly fighting these natural forces.

Examples of that solution are fixing the grading in your house, possibly excavating around your house and creating a French drain system that's going to move water that gets down into the ground away from the home. Implementing sump pumps, working on your waterproofing. There's a lot of things that you need to do to protect the underground of your house, which is what your basement, your crawl space is. So if we know that moisture is just a thing that we're always going to have to be combating and fighting.

The last thing we want to do.

Is put carpet on the floor down there. Because if moisture gets into the ground right under the house and that moisture starts to push upward through hydrostatic pressure, then it's going to hit the carpet and it's going to be a moisture barrier and then you're going to get mold that grows all under your carpet. And it's super common. So I just wanted to point that out. You know, if you have a basement, you definitely don't want to have carpeting down there. On a side note, with carpeting, I was just working on a report for an inspection I did like a week ago, and there were multiple rooms in this house where there was carpeting in the bathrooms and also wallpaper in the bathrooms. So I've thrown a couple posts out about this on Instagram. I don't know if I really talked about it, but it's kind of similar concept. It's not that you're fighting nature here at this point, but things. The environment in a bathroom is a very moist, wet environment. You're taking showers all the time, you're steaming the thing up, you're stepping out of the shower and water is dripping off of you and then that's going to drip onto the carpet, that's going to soak under there. You basically have barriers on your walls and your floor that are going to trap moisture. So over time, what's going to happen is that the wallpaper starts peeling, you start getting discoloration in the wallpaper.

Next thing you know, you start getting.

Mold growing behind the wallpaper because moisture is getting back there. And then with the carpeting, the same thing, you' out of the shower, you're dripping water on the carpet, it's soaking into the carpet. Underneath your carpet is wood, subfloor, usually. And then you're, you're getting mold that's growing on the subfloor below it. So you're kind of just asking for problems in a really wet environment to have carpeting and wallpaper. So while bathrooms and basements, you're not dealing with the same reason that there's moisture problems. They inherently both have just kind of built in water issues that go on. And so having wallpaper or carpeting in either of those spaces, as far as I'm concerned, is a big no no. So that means no wallpaper in the basement either. Right? Because again, if moisture is coming through the walls, potentially from drainage, that's not working properly, and then you put wallpaper directly against the walls, then you're creating a moisture barrier that is going to trap that in. So, you know, then the question is, okay, well, if moisture is coming in and I don't have wallpaper there, that's still a problem. What do I do about it? And you're right, that's totally still a problem. But the good thing about not having.

The wallpaper there is that you still.

Have a little space kind of.

In.

The area in the basement that you could try to deal with it a little bit. Right. So here's what happens. So moisture penetrates through the walls of a basement, it's going to increase the humidity in the basement. And then you're dealing with a humidity issue. So now when you have elevated humidity, you can start getting, you'll. It gets trapped down there and you can start getting mold growing on multiple surfaces throughout the basement. Okay. So the thing is, if you're having moisture that's coming through the walls, step.

One, you have to stop it from coming through.

Right.

There's no band aid fix that's going to continue to be a foolproof plan forever.

But.

It'S important to have methods in place to combat that because it may happen. And so you need to be on top of it. But the thing is, not all of us are on top of it right away. It might take you months to figure it out, or even longer than that potentially. And if that's happening, you want to have some sort of.

Backup solution in place that's going to help manage that. So the thing that does that is if you're in a finished basement, let's say, or an unfinished basement, I guess, but it's having dehumidification in the basement. So there's like multiple components in the basement that need to go on. And I don't know how this just turned into a basement conversation when I was talking about air samples, but I'll.

Get back to it.

For the basement, first off, your drainage has to be good, both from the outs, from the sides of the house and under the house. Your waterproofing has to be good, so something needs to be looked at. Second, you don't want wallpaper directly against the walls. You also don't want your drywall built directly against a foundation wall.

I've seen this a lot where you.

Have your, like, you know, your concrete foundation wall, and you put drywall straight up against it. That's the same exact thing as putting wallpaper directly against the wall. It's a moisture barrier. You're giving your building no room to breathe. So as soon as moisture comes in through, which is just going to be like water vapor that comes in through that wall, it's going to hit the drywall directly against the wall, and mold is going to grow behind it. So the same goes for, like, insulated foam sometimes that goes against basement walls down there. Anything that you're putting directly against a wall like that in a basement, you don't want to do. You want to leave space. You want to frame off the wall. Right? The same way you would frame a house. That way you're putting space in between the wall and in the wall cavity, and there's some room for the air to breathe and to move. And then no carpeting on the floor. Right? You definitely don't want carpeting just like what we talked about. And then you want a dehumidifier in the basement to help combat any moisture that does come through. That way, if there is some elevated moisture that gets into the space, you're not pumping up the humidity to the point where you're going to get mold growing all over, like the ceilings if they're finished, or the subfloor if they're not finished, or your contents and your belongings. Different things. I've seen this happen where you go into a basement, there's mold growing on everything. It's because the humidity down there is spiking so high, which is ultimately because there's a water intrusion problem from your waterproofing, but that's what happens. And then the basement is the true bottom of your house. And your airflow in a house typically moves from bottom to top. And I said it before, I'll keep saying it. Your house doesn't know that you don't live in the basement. And so it thinks that it's the true bottom of the house. And so it starts pulling that air upward through the house. And then the basement or the crawl space become a major source of what is impacting the living spaces of the house. So it's like this big vicious cycle that happens with the basement in a crawl space. But in terms of where I kind of started on this carpeting in basement, let's not do it. And extending on that a little bit wallpaper on walls and basement, let's not do it.

Drywall directly against concrete foundation wall, let's not do that. And then let's bring in dehumidifier in the basement.

And let's have your drainage evaluated by.

An expert, foundation expert drainage expert. They need to look at the ground, the groundwater, right. What's under the house as well as what is surrounding the house. So those are some things with basements. Not that I went off on that major tangent. Let me get back to this post, which is where I was starting. This happens to me sometimes, right? You guys notice. I'm like, alright, we're gonna talk about this. And like 10 minutes goes by and I haven't even talked about it yet.

So where are we at?

Yeah, that's where we are, about 10 minutes. All right, so we're back to this post here. We're talking about air samples.

Basically, they were saying they had an air test in a home that looked good, but they found mold in their basement. So let's talk about air samples again. All right, so air samples are like the biggest false sense of security ever when it comes to mold issues. And it's because taking an air sample in the middle of a room, and let's be clear about this, we're talking about ambient air samples. That means putting up an air sampling pump in the middle of a room, not close to anything, and taking an air sample for five minutes and thinking.

That that's going to show you everything that's going on.

I know, theoretically it kind of makes sense, right? Like if we're just thinking about it, oh, let's see what's floating around. But it just doesn't. In practice, it doesn't work that way. And this is from taking thousands and thousands of air samples. So.

This is from knowing. This is from seeing it happen. This isn't like theory or reading research papers. This is me literally taking a bajillion air samples and looking at them all the time. So that's where this is coming from.

All right.

So they asked why it doesn't happen.

So let's look at this.

So I wrote an article a couple years ago.

That was three ways that mold air samples are lying to you. It is on the yesweinspect.com website. I literally just searched three ways mold lie and it popped up. It's the first thing that popped up. So if you're interested in reading this.

Whole article, it's here.

I'm going to summarize this for you a little bit. So here's three reasons that mold air samples lie to you. The first one is that, you know, ambient air samples are just a snapshot in time. That's all it is. So you're running an air test for five minutes. Some people do them for 10, most people do them for five. I do them for five. And you're seeing what happens to be floating around during the course of five minutes, right? So, you know, we know that the air changes throughout the house, right? We know that air conditions change. You know, just think about, like, being outside, how if the wind blows, you're going to have a whole different gust of air that comes by you than was there previously. Well, wind blows in your house, too. It just doesn't blow as hard. This is why there are times where you'll notice maybe a door might, like, slam shut by itself somewhere. Usually when you turn on your air conditioner or if you have other windows open, you'll see this happening. It's because there's an air pressure.

Change going on in the house, and there's basically wind blowing in your house. It's just not as hard as it would be outside. And it's what's slamming the door shut when you do that, when your air conditioner turns on or when you have windows open and you try to shut a door so you have constant change in air consistently. I know we can't see it, and we're not seeing things blowing back and forth. And that's what makes this stuff really hard to wrap our head around sometime. But the reality is, if you're standing in the middle of your room, just think that while you're standing there, you have air just blowing around you all the time. It's not stagnant. It doesn't just stay there. It's going to move. And because of that.

It'S like you're.

Fishing and you put your hook in the water, but you're in a boat that's moving, right? And you're trying to catch this fish that's down there, but you're moving away from it. And then you're like, oh, well, maybe there's another fish I'm going to grab. And then the boat's moving, and then.

The hook misses it.

And then there's no way to get.

That fish again because you drove by that fish.

And then your boat keeps moving, your hook keeps going by all these fish, but it can't hook any of them because it needs some time, right? Needs some time to do that. And there's movement. And so it's not happening. And that's a little. I don't know if that analogy worked. I literally just made it up. But it's just kind of a way to explain that. You have this constant movement around you. It's like this invisible movement that's going on in the house. And you're not going to be able to grab everything that's happening in five minutes. Now, think of it this way. If you're in a room that hasn't really been occupied for a period of time, and I'm not talking like months and years, I'm talking you haven't been in there, like in an hour or something, right? You haven't walked around, you haven't sat down on anything, you haven't opened a door, you haven't done any of that stuff, then the airflow is going to be a little less than it would be if you had human activity in the room. So there are studies out there that study what's called the human cloud effect. And basically what it says is that as we, as people move throughout our homes, we create human cloud. Remember that character in Charlie Brown, Peanut or not Peanuts?

What's his name? Pig Pen. Yeah, that's his name, Pig Pen. The little kid that just had like a cloud of dirt around him all the time. So that actually happens to us when we walk through our house. It's just not dirt and you just can't see it. But every time we move, we're creating a cloud of particles that are popping up all around us all the time. And that's what's called the human cloud effect. And that's why you get this constant resuspension of things that have settled, settled on the ground that pop up into the air all the time. So when you do an air sample, you're getting a snapshot in time. You're missing out really kind of on that human cloud effect that follows you around everywhere. And even if you do, you're farther away from a source of where a potential problem is going to be anyway.

So that's the first reason is that you're Kind of.

You'Re getting just this split second view of what's going on and it gets misleading when you're doing that. It's like you look at something for a second, then you look away and you think you know everything that's happening there when you, when you don't know anything is happening there. Right. Unless you have a photographic memory. And it's kind of the same idea.

So that's the first reason.

The second reason is that air samples, they only look for spores. So we've all heard of a mold spore probably, if we're listening to this podcast, right? And so here's the basic idea.

So mold is growing.

It creates a spore. The spore gets released off of the colony and then it basically.

In a way to grow.

Right?

So the spore is like a seed and then it hopefully land somewhere else that has conditions that are suitable for it to grow. And that's how it grow and that's how it spreads. So it's like it's reproductive path.

When mold stops growing, it stops producing spores. So there's a couple things with this one I've talked many, many times that historical mold growth that is not currently growing, that is dry, is a very big problem. Well, if you have a mold colony that stopped growing currently because the moisture, the water conditions have, have changed, that means it's not creating spores at the time. That means they're not sending them out into the air as easily. And so you're going to have less of a spore load that's moving around in the air because it's not creating as many. So that's one thing. The second thing is.

Spores are just kind of one piece of the equation that we're looking for at all. So we're talking about like, are they getting made or are they not getting made?

The reality is that spores themselves are.

Really not the big concern about what's going on. So there's been multiple studies to talk about fragmentation that breaks off a mole colonies and how the fragments that break off of the colonies can be anywhere from 2 to 500 times the amount of spores that would have been produced. All right, so let's say that you had a space that had a thousand spores that were found, right. Which is elevated. It's. It's not normal to find 1,000 spores somewhere. Well, the fragmentation that breaks off of that could be 500 times that. So it's 500 times 1,000. It's 500,000. Right? So you have 1,000 versus 500,000. Now think if you had some testing done and you find a place that might have, like 10,000 spores, or it might have even more than that, or maybe it's, you know, 6,000 or 8,000 or whatever. Multiply that times 500, and that's your potential fragment load that's moving around the house. So if you're looking at 1, 500.

Of the picture, which is what looking.

At mold spores only is doing, I don't even know what that percentage is. Let's see. Let's see if I can figure out real quick. 1%. 1 of 100 is 1%. Divide that by 5. So 0.2%. How do you like that? 0.2% of your.

Mold fragment exposure, your total mold exposure. 0.2% of that is mold spores. All right, so does that help? Does that help, like, kind of put it together, that means the other 99.8% of what you're being exposed to, just in terms of the mole colonies, we're not even talking about toxins and stuff. We're just talking about the mole colonies themselves. That is not being picked up in an air sample. I like that.

That's a good number.

I'm going to start using that number. If you guys like that, tell me. I like that. So, again, 0.2% of your potential exposure in the house from a mole colony is actually represented by the spore. 99.8% of that is not represented by a spore, and it's not detected in an air sample. Okay, so hopefully those numbers really help you show the difference in air samples and why we can't look at them to understand exposure. What are we breathing? What's floating around? It's such a small piece of what we're actually potentially being exposed to. And again, we didn't even talk about toxins yet.

Right.

We're just talking about the mole colonies and their byproduct, or in their. Not their byproducts, the mole colonies and kind of the pieces of the colony that are breaking off. So the mycotoxins are a byproduct of that. Maybe. I'll talk about that in a second. So then here's the last piece of it. So, air samples, they can be easily misread. And the reason is that they're being analyzed by a human that is counting spore. Literally.

Picture this.

So you have a person in a room. They're wearing their white coat, and they got their cool goggles on. And in today's time, they're probably wearing a mask and they're, you know all that's happening too. And they're sitting there and they get this little slide that comes in. So the slide is inside of the air sampling media cassette. So when you take an air sample, you put it on an air pump, it sucks air into this little round cassette thing. That thing has a slide in it. So if you, if you remember being in school and you would take like a little slide out and look at it under a microscope, it's the same thing, right? So they take that slide out, they look at it under a microscope, then you literally have a person that is counting the number of spores that they see. That is the depth of analysis that's happening here. And we all know that human error is a real thing. And so, you know, are they counting all of them? Are they missing any of them? Here's the other thing is that air samples don't just pick up mold. They pick up all kinds of stuff that's floating around. They pick up pollen, they pick up insect fragments, they pick up skin fragments.

They pick up hair, they pick up.

If you're doing samples in wall cavities, they pick up pieces of the drywall dust that's floating around. They pick up pieces of the insulation that's back there, the dirt that's back there. All this stuff gets pulled into an air sample. And so you've got this lab technician that's looking at this cassette and they're.

Looking at it under their microscope. And in addition to mold spores, they.

Got like 10 other things that are on there and they're trying to count just the spores out of it. Now it's got to be hard, right? Like, and it's not knocking any, anything.

That they're doing or not doing.

I mean, I don't know enough to be a lab technician and understand what I'm looking at.

But here's the thing is that I.

Do know that when you have multiple influences that are getting in the way of what you're trying to do, that it can cause a problem. And then I also know we, as just people, we kind of mess stuff up. It's just kind of what we do sometimes. And so we're relying on this like human activity of somebody physically counting stuff. And we're putting all of our eggs into that basket. When we think back a second and say, oh man, I mean, this is only counting, this is only really like 0.2% of our problem anyway. And we're using that and tying that then to a process that's 100% driven by human, which there is going to be human error on that. We're putting all this together, and we're putting all of our faith into that, and it's hard. This is why air samples give you false negatives all the time. And so here's the last thing on air, on air sampling.

For a year.

I wanted to show everything that I just talked about, right? So I know I said earlier, I've done thousands of these samples. I know that when you take an air sample in the middle of a room, that it's not really accurate, but it's not really published anywhere in the way that I wanted to say it. So I did my own study on it myself. And for a year, we kind of picked out select houses that we were out, and we did air sampling, ambient air sampling, you know, three to five feet away from where we knew a source was going to be. So, you know, there are times when I'm looking at something, I feel pretty confident that I'm going to be right, that there's going to be a source there. Now.

I looked back at our stats on this, too. 75% of the time, I'm right. 25% of the time, it ends up.

Not being an issue.

I feel like those are pretty good odds. If I was a baseball player, I'd be the best baseball player on earth if I was batting 7,500.

So that's what it is. So 75% of the time, whenever I see something, I think that there's a hidden mold problem, it's right. So what I was doing is I was wanting to kind of show this. So I took an ambient air sample 3, 4, 5ft away from a space that I thought that there was going to be mold problem, which 75% of the time there was. So in the times where there was actually a hidden mold problem, the air sample that I took a few feet away, 80% of the time that air sample came back with a negative, with a false negative, meaning that the results said everything was normal. So you have a source that's hidden three, four feet away. There's actual mole growth that's happening behind a wall or in a cabinet or something. And I take an air sample 3, 4ft away, and that sample comes back and says there's no problem at all. Okay? These are all the challenges with air samples, right? They're a snapshot in time. They're only a very small piece of the overall equation of what we need to be looking for anyway. There's human error, right? All of that stuff is problems with air Samples. And that's why you can't really rely on air samples in this way. And so I get back to this Facebook post that I saw here in one of the mold Facebook groups, and it says, hey, our air test came back lower than the outside.

But I heard air tests are no good.

Can you advise? So here's why they're no good. So you got that?

And then the follow up was talking about the basement and things, and so we talked about that, and she says.

You know, it's strange that air tests.

Don'T detect this unless the outdoor sources are more prevalent.

So she's talking about the carpet in.

Her basement that we talked about earlier. Now we know why air tests aren't detecting it. Right. It's not that the outdoor sources are more prevalent. That's not what it is. It's not like your comparison point is so bad outside that it's making everything inside look good. That's not what it is.

It's that your air samples are just.

Not meant to be used in that way. All right, so here's the last piece.

Of this, and then we'll wrap it up.

So what do you do to figure out what you're being exposed to? Right? Like.

Oh, man, I dropped you guys.

Sorry.

All right, so what do we do? So we know we're not going to do air samples to figure out what we're being exposed to.

Air samples, though, are great for figuring.

Out where the source is located. So the closer you are to the.

Problem, the more accurate they're going to be.

This is why we go into walls, we go into cabinets, we go into ceilings where there's water damage, there's discoloration, there's buckling, there's bubbling, there's painting or there's chipping paint, all this stuff, right? This is where we're looking for the hidden sources. This is where sampling is great, because most of the time, you can't see mold. It's hidden. And so we got to figure out a way to find it. But figuring out the way to find it is not just, hey, let's just rip the whole house open and see what we find. We want to be strategic about it, and so that's why we do the testing in these different places. So that's where the air testing should be used. But in terms of, like, what's floating around in your air and what you're being exposed to. Well, remember when I talked about Pigpen and the human cloud effect and how stuff just gets popped up in your breathing zone all the time as you're.

Walking around, gravity then pulls it back.

Down on the surface. Then as you walk around, it pops back up in the air. And then gravity pulls it back down on the surface. And then tied into that, you have like this internal wind that's happening that we talked about, right? This is why doors slam shut on their own in your house. And so you have air movement going throughout the house at all times. And then as you're walking around, you're.

Popping stuff up in your breathing zone.

All these particles are moving all over the place. An air sample can't find them. But guess what can find them. The ERMI sample can find them. And the reason it can find them is because the analysis that is used. So we talked about how an air sample is analyzed. Let's talk about how an ERMI sample is analyzed and how different it is and why it's more accurate.

But because of that, so it's not.

Counted by a person. Okay, so first off, the collection for an ERMI is a dust collection. So you're not. So just from collection perspective and then we'll go through the whole process.

You're not getting a snapshot in time like you are with an air sample. Air sample's up in the air, it's floating around. Whatever's floating in there. You're going to grab an ERMI test. You're doing dust collection. Dust is settled on surfaces, so you're getting settlement. That means that gravity has pulled it.

Down to the surfaces.

That means that it's probably been there.

For a longer period of time.

You're getting a more historic view of what's gone on. So that's the first reason that we look at that instead. And so that's just sheerly how it's collected and where you're getting the information from that you're even sending to the lab. So the information gathering point is better.

Then we look about how it's analyzed.

So we talked about how air samples are looked at under a microscope. Well, ERMI tests are actually analyzed using.

It'S DNA formatting. The technical term is called mold specific polymer chain reaction. Msqpcr. That's the scientific term. It's basically DNA formatting. So what happens is they take your dust that you send them and then they run it through a machine. And I don't know the specifics of the machine. So there's only so far I know about what's happening in the lab. I've done lab tours, I've seen their setups, I've talked to them about their processes, how they prevent cross contaminating all that stuff. But there's definitely a cutoff to where the lab geniuses are doing their thing.

However, there are machines where you put.

These samples into and the machine processes the sample. It takes the human element out of it.

Right?

There's not a person counting stuff now. The machine is processing it and then running it through an analysis process. And then that's what's bringing out the data that's shown on the sample. So now.

You'Re not getting the human error piece now, right? The human error piece is really going to be on the collection side at that point. And we didn't talk about that. But there's human error on the collection side and there's potential human error on the analysis side. So when you looking at error samples, you got two sides for human error. If the inspector collects the sample wrong, then that's a problem. And then if the lab miscounts it, then that's a problem. Right. On the ERMI side, there's technically human error on both sides. The collector side, the human error is a lot less. Basically, real quickly, you can't, if you collect drywall on the sample, it's going to mess up the sample. It's not going to be read properly. It's called an inhibitor. It's going to ruin up the chemical process in the analysis. The same goes for rust. You don't want to get rust in there either. And you really want to try to avoid, like a lot of wood shavings and chips, too. So those are kind of the things on the collection front. But it's a lot easier to do that. You just kind of avoid spaces like that, so it's easier to do that. So anyways, on the analysis side, there really isn't a human error issue on that point. Right? So the sample goes in the analysis. There's kind of like this, this chemical agent that goes into the machine and creates the. The reading and the analysis on how it does its thing. And then the numbers come out, right? So you're eliminating a lot of the human error. You're eliminating a lot of the snapshot in timepiece because.

You'Re getting dust to settle on surfaces, and that's where the fragments go. You're actually addressing for all the mold fragments. So we Talked about the 0.2% of issue that an air sample picks up. Well, you're getting the other 99.8% because you're not just looking for spores, you're looking for any piece of A mold structure that has that DNA signature. You're getting all of it, right? And that's what we're being exposed to. That's the majority of what we're being exposed to anyway. So you're getting all of that, too. So this is why using. You know, a lot of us here. Oh, we got to do ermi. Air samples suck. We don't know why.

Right?

These are all the reasons why. This is why air samples suck. This is why using the ERMI is better.

Right?

And hopefully that helps you figure it out. Now, you do need to use air samples when you're looking for source. Like I said before, you can't do dust testing to figure out where hidden problems are located. It's just showing you what's moving through the house. So it's showing you your exposure. It's showing you the byproduct of the colonies that are there and what's getting into the space, but it's not showing you where it's coming from. That's why it's so important to have a really good inspection. Then also have a sampling plan that uses a combination of different sampling methods that's going to show the whole picture of the house. Think of your house like a puzzle, right? You got to put the whole puzzle together. The ERMI is like the middle of the puzzle, you know, where you start seeing, like, the actual images that were on the puzzle. But none of that makes any sense unless you have all the edges of the puzzle put together. And that's usually where a lot of us start, right? When you get a puzzle, you're like, I gotta start. I gotta find the corners.

Start there.

That's the foundation. The foundation of a home assessment is, where's the problem coming from? The foundation's the inspection, okay? So you have to do that first.

You have to figure out where the.

Sources are, and then you start putting together the middle of the puzzle. And that comes from doing the ermi, mycotoxin testing, actinomycetes, endotoxins, all the other stuff that we're concerned about in house. So that's a lot. All right, guys, we're gonna end it there for today. I hope you guys found this helpful. I have a feeling this is going to be like the episode for understanding air sampling and understanding ERMI sampling and the comparison. And if you guys think that and if you're ever seeing people that are asking the question or why do. Why do air samples suck?

And why are.

Why should I be doing ermi? And what's the benefit. And what's the not point them to this episode, because I have a feeling that this is just going to be one of those episodes that I'm going to refer back to a lot with my clients. And so, you know, bookmark it, save it, because you might want to refer back to it yourself as well.

So that's it for today's show, everyone.

Thanks so much for tuning in.

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