55: The biggest problem in the mold industry... / Why mold is still growing on your “stuff”

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.

All right, so I want to tell you about my weekend. So those of you that listened to the last episode heard me kind of cut it off abruptly, because I saw this massive spider that was in my backyard.

So the background of that. The reason that I kind of reacted the way that I did is because we had had our monthly pest control guy come out, and he had looked around, and he found that we had brown widows and a bunch of them in our yard. And it's interesting. Our neighborhood, if you walk out of just kind of where the houses are and get onto just the main street that's right behind all the houses. There's a lot of trees and bushes and stuff. There's. And there's this one strip of sidewalk that walks where you have, like, trees on one side, bushes on the other side, and there are just these massive spiders that are connecting all the way across this sidewalk. I'd never seen anything like it before. I've never lived in, like, a wooded place. I'm from Las Vegas. So this. It's, like, all new to me to have all this stuff around. And we're, like, afraid to walk on that sidewalk. We won't even walk there. You look, and the spiders are, like, as big as, like, 50 cent pieces. It's insane how big they are. And. And so we. We had seen that before, but it's not, like, right by our house. And we're like, well, you know. Okay. Well, it looks like they've breached the invisible barrier between the street behind our house and our house, because they're all here now. And so. So we started noticing that these webs and stuff were back there.

And. And then the pest control guy came, and he pointed out what they were. And so we start kind of freaking out. We're like, brown widows. These sound bad. Black widows, right? We all know those. Or at least I knew what a black widow was. So for those of you who don't know what a brown widow is, here's what I've learned. A brown widow has venom and poison that's just as potent as a black widow. They just can't release as much of it when they bite you, basically. So it doesn't impact you as much. Not because the poison isn't as significant, but because they can't release as much when, well, I'm a full grown person. My toddler is not a full grown person. And so if you have poison that's that potent and she's, you know, a third of or a fifth of the size of me, then maybe that's a huge problem for her, right? So we were really kind of freaking out about it because, you know, who knows? They come up and they bite you and you're done. And my wife had clearly gotten bit. Now that we understood what was back there, she had clearly gotten bit a couple times. So.

Pest control guy comes, just so you know, I'm telling you all this story. It's going to relate back to something that's going to make sense for you guys. So pest control guy comes, he tells us we have this problem, okay? So then he's like, okay, so I'm going to, you know, we have to, you know, kind of stop this from happening, right? And so I'm just going to spray everywhere, right? Here's the first clue one of you heard. I'm just going to spray everywhere and everything gets fixed. So.

So that's what he does. And we don't really know anything at the time, right? At the time we don't know because we haven't educated ourself on this. Again, how does this sound familiar? Think about your situation, the path that you've gone down. And if you've had a mold inspector come in the house and they tell you that they're just going to fog your house and everything's going to be fine, and that you don't know any better because you haven't done any research really yet and you don't know that's where we were. Okay? So the guy says, okay, I'm gonna spray everything. He's at the house for, I don't know, 20 minutes. Spraying around the outside of the house.

Sounds very similar to staying at your house and doing air samples in every room for 20 or 30 minutes, right? Is this like all making sense? Are you kind of seeing where I'm going with this? And. And that's that. Okay? So then I see this in the morning on Saturday when I'm recording the last episode, I cut off the episode and I kind of start freaking out and. And I go, and. So in that time, so the guy had come Thursday, I saw the Saturday. So my wife now does a bunch of research between Thursday and Saturday and learns all kinds of interesting things about brown widows, including where they like to live. They actually like to be in lower locations than higher locations, which is interesting. So, like, think under your patio furniture and under little, you know, lights in your garden and like, things like that. They don't. They don't typically live super up high, apparently. And we learned what their egg sacs look like, and so we learned a bunch of different stuff. So my wife was like, listen, I'm not going out here until we know that this is taken care of. After I saw the spider out there, they had sprayed two days ago. Like, you know, the guy says that it should handle stuff pretty quickly, so clearly it didn't work. Spoiler alert. Just spraying stuff and not being targeted with it is a problem, right? Just like just fogging your entire house and not being targeted with remediation is a problem. Just like doing an air sample in the middle of the room and not being targeted with where you're collecting that sample from is a problem, right? It's all related. It's all the same thing that's happening. It's a different industry, but it's the same thing. So what do I do on Saturday?

Kind of Morning and afternoon? I spend about six hours going through my backyard. I have a decent sized backyard, but it's definitely not like a big backyard, right? I spend six hours flipping over every piece of furniture, looking over, looking in every low area. We have these little garden light things that light up like a little path. They were. They were all in, under, like the hoods of the lights. There were egg sacs in all of them, right? And so he's like, yeah, you know, this type of spider, you know, they could release like 200 eggs out of their egg sacs. The guy's plan was just spray around, wait for the egg sacs to open, and then hopefully the spiders walk into them and die. That was the dude's plan. All right? And so I tore our backyard apart for six hours and finding as many of these things that I can, like under the garbage cans that you take out to the street, in the gaps of the door frames where maybe they were separating apart on the side, like the side gate frames, I should say. The gates leading into the back of the house. Like, different little, like under window ledges, all these different places. Listen, this guy. If their job is that they're supposed to come out and they're supposed to prevent this stuff from happening, you know what prevention is? Prevention is not spraying and hoping that spiders and bugs walk into it prevention is fixing the source of the problem. Just like when you call a mold inspector out and you want them to find where, you know, find the mold, basically. That doesn't mean putting an air pump up in the middle of the room and hoping that some spores fall into the air sample. It means actually doing an inspection. Six hours, right? When I do inspections, they're around five, six, seven hours. I did the same thing in my backyard that I do when I go through someone's house and I found so many egg sacs that were there, I took away so many different cobwebs that had built up, you know, which are obviously like where the homes where the spiders hang out and stuff. And then I did targeted spraying in areas going around the house to try to fix the problem. But the reason that I wanted to share this story with you because while I was doing it, I was like, oh, this isn't just mold inspections. This isn't just my industry. This is literally every industry. It's everything. It's how people approach their skill, their craft, their job, their whatever. It's kind of like human nature, you know, like if they don't love what they do, then, and they haven't taken the time to really educate themselves and do whatever, then they're going to come out here and do a job like this. This company is like a franchise company.

Mold inspection franchise companies, remediation companies, in my opinion, are all the same. It's because they don't have quality control over their people. Right. I'm sure the guy that started this company was like really passionate about starting a pest control company. Why else would you start one? Right. And as it grows and you start franchising and putting different people in charge in different states and different business units. When you do franchises, if you're not familiar with how franchises actually work work, the individual franchise owner is kind of in charge of his, of his own business. And then they just get like marketing support and some revenue support from the corporate umbrella, which is, you know, the brand of the franchise. Right. So the, the, the company that, that is the top of the, of the franchise name, they're not overseeing all the work that's done by every individual franchise everywhere. Imagine, you know, if you're like a big franchise that has hundreds of locations, how are they going to oversee all of that? Right. That's why on our end, when we created our business, we actually went down a franchising road. We looked into it because we wanted to train people and figure out how to help people in different places. And we thought the way to do that was to franchise out and change local people or train local people. And then we realized how this all works and how you have a lack of control and input on how things are done. And we immediately cut it off. We're like, no, this is not how this is going to happen. We need to have a close, tight team that we train directly, that comes out of a central hub. And that's how we built. We inspect, which is a team that travels and flies and is overseen by us. Right? That's how we did it. But this isn't just a mold thing. This clearly happens in other industries. And as I'm going through and I'm doing this, I'm getting so upset. And I hear the stories all the time from my clients about, yeah, I had, you know, I had a mold inspector come out, and it cost me, you know, 800 bucks the first time. And they did a few air samples and they didn't find anything. Right. I'm going through my backyard now. Granted, you know, pest control doesn't cost as much, but it's, you know, like a subscription thing. It's like a hundred bucks a month for these people to come out and kind of maintain that for us, right? So this was the second month that they came out, so I paid this dude a hundred dollars to come out, just. So I then had to go out for another six hours and do all the work myself. I was furious, right? And. And I. It just made me think. I'm like, this must be what everyone feels like. Except these spiders aren't making me sick immediately. I mean, they could have bit me and made me sick, and they definitely could have got my daughter, and that would have been terrible. But, you know, for. For a lot of you guys that are listening, it's like, it's impacting you right now, you know, you can't wait around for that, for the guy to come in and. And not look for stuff, you know? So I just wanted to. I just wanted to share that with you because it's. Don't think it's. It's just like, one industry that's doing this, right? You have to think about this with. With. And I will, too, now. And anything that I ever get done, you know, who's coming out, all right, where are they from? What do they do? What's the process like? The interview process is gonna be much more thorough than it ever was before for everything I'm doing now, because it just hit me, you know, I just thought it was. I just Thought that we kind of lived in the wild, wild west when it came to mold inspections, because there really are no, like, guidelines on how to do it. People could get certified in like a weekend and say that they're certified mold inspectors. And it's like, how do you know, right? So I just kind of thought that was our industry and you have to, like, relook at stuff because I. Because it's not. You know, I think it's. I think it's just people in general. You know, I think it's human nature to want to get in and out of your job and get back home. And unless you're the person that started the company and you really love what you're doing, you're probably not going to put in that kind of time. You know, we texted, we called the guy. He's like, yeah, you always have our number. You could text and call us. Yeah. Not a return call. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So I was very unhappy with them. And I totally understand what a lot of you guys are going through, too. I understood it because I heard the stories so much, but it hadn't happened to me in that way before. So you continue to learn, you continue to grow as you do all this stuff. Some of the stuff that you learn is the actual scientific stuff. Some of it is process and the best way to do the order of events in terms of testing, remediation, all that. And some of it is just getting a better relationship with the people that you work with and getting to be in their shoes sometimes where you are normally. And that helps your outlook, too. And that's a part of learning also. And I think in anything that we're doing in life, we have to look at all of our experiences like that and not just have the experience hit us and then kind of move on to the next thing, but try to take something out of it. And, you know, I was definitely not happy going through my whole backyard when it was 90 degrees outside looking for spiders and spider sacks. I'll tell you, I was not thrilled about that. But it just like, while I was doing it, I just felt like I got hit with like a ton of bricks and a light bulb. And I was like, oh, my gosh, this is exactly what happens. Everyone else that I've worked with, this is the same thing. So the point of all of this.

Mold inspections, right? You have to find the source. Same thing with pest inspections. The same thing with whatever you're doing, right? You know, medical treatments, all this stuff, you have to find the source.

If you're not finding the source, then you're not fixing the problem. Right. The source in our case was where are they currently living? And then where are the babies going to be born? The source in terms of mold inspections is where's the mold hiding? Right. If we just spray, which is what this guy did. Right. So again, he just sprayed everywhere and thought that was going to fix everything. You don't get any of the source, the babies are still going to be born. The spiders that are there are still going to be there, and hopefully they walk in the path of the spray. Like, this is the plan. If you don't find the source of where the mold is hiding in your house and you just fog the house and think that that's going to work, same thing's going to happen. They're going to get. The mold's still going to be there. It's going to come back. Right. And so I was hoping this story would help crystallize that for you guys. So thanks so much for taking a few minutes to listen to this.

So I got time for one more question before we wrap this up today. So I'm going to go back to the question thread that I put out last week, I think on Instagram. There's a lot of questions here. So I'm just going to scroll through and pick one out here. And we have one from Merpavlov and it says, we killed the source of mold, or so I thought. But random stuff throughout the house is still growing mold. What gives? I've tossed books, shoes, a dress, couches, lunchboxes, etc. If you still have mold growing on your stuff, then there's. There's still a hidden mold source in the house somewhere. I mean, that. That's the short answer of it. Most times when I go into homes, I'm not seeing mold growing on belongings and contents. Usually when I'm seeing that there's a much bigger problem going on, then, you know, there was a leak under a sink or a water heater or a dishwasher, and there's something that's kind of localized. This means that you've got a lot of. You've actually got viable spores, which are, you know, we've heard mold spore before, right? So the spores are what are released off of the colony. Viable means that they're actually like active and ready to grow. And so it means you have viable spores floating around the house and they're landing on stuff. And then if it's growing throughout, you probably have a humidity type of issue as well. That's allowing the mold to grow in those places, because even if the spore is viable, it's only going to grow if it has enough moisture. So, you know, if the humidity in your home is, you know, 55, 60%, then you may get mold growth on contents as a result of that also. So there's a couple things to keep in mind there. But, you know, you mentioned you had killed the mold. So the first thing is, what does killing the mold mean? If killing the mold means that you sprayed it or wiped it or had something done from a remediation company that did that, then they didn't actually remove the source, right? So when we hear the word remediate, it's different than when you hear the word kill. You know, when I hear the word kill, I think somebody sprayed something on someone, right? Like in your yard, you have weed killer and you spray your weed with a spray and then it kills the weed, right? That's what I think. When you kill it, when you're remediating it, you're removing it. And so if we didn't actually remove it, then whatever that source is is probably still there. And it's probably hidden would be my guess behind wherever it was that you found it. But the other thing to keep in mind, though, is that if you have this stuff floating around the house like this, we have to think about the other areas of the house. So I've mentioned in a previous episode that this idea that remediation doesn't work, right? And I hear this a lot, you know, clients say, oh, remediation just doesn't work. You have to move out, you have to burn your house down. It's not that remediation doesn't work. It doesn't work if it's not executed the right way, right? If you don't do the full plan, then it's not going to work. So think about this way. If you went to your doctor and your doctor said, and you were, you know, sick and with whatever. And your doctor said, okay, if you do. If you take these three or do these three things, right? Let's say one of them is you have to do a sauna every day. And the next thing is that you have to take a vitamin. And the third thing is that you have to take glutathione. And let's say those are three things. And they say if you do these three things, you will get better. 100%, you will get better. And you say, okay, cool. And then you decide that you're only going to do one of those things, you're like, well, I don't have time to sauna today. And the glutathione doesn't really taste that good. And it's expensive to buy that bottle, so I'm not going to do that. But I'll take this vitamin and that's it. And then you go to your doctor and you're like, doctor, I've been taking my vitamins. Like, what's going on? And the doctor's like, well, have you done the sauna or taken the other? And the glutathione. Those are the three things that I said you need to do. And they'd be like, well, no. And you say, okay, well, that's why. That's why I told you what had to be done. It's not getting done, right? So think of it like that. And I know you're not getting, like direct direction like that like you would be from in this example, but the idea is that you have. Your house isn't just one thing. It's not just the wall where the problem was or whatever, or the cabinet where the problem was. It's the heating and air conditioning system. It's the particles that are floating throughout the house. Your house is an entire living system, and things move everywhere. So if you only focus on one of the things, the other, and you don't address the other two things as part of a remediation, then it's not really going to work. And you're going to think that remediation doesn't work. And the truth is, is that we just didn't execute everything properly. Right? And so that's the difference. So, you know, in what you're describing here, it kind of sounds to me like a combination of things. And truthfully, I don't know exactly what it is because I haven't seen anything. Right? But when you say that you've, you know, you've done some sort of killing of the mold or that you thought you did. Again, killing to me does not sound like true remediation. It sounds like, you know, fogging or spraying or something like that. So that's the first thing is the source that you think you got, did you actually get it right? That's the first thing. The second thing is, okay, how has that source moved throughout the home? So if you have, again, spores that are settling on your items and belongings and growing there, that means in the ambient space, you have these spores floating around everywhere. So you could kill the source as much as you want, right? Or remove the source. But if we don't address the cross contamination the source has already created moving throughout the house, then it's still going to be moving throughout the house. It's still going to be growing on your stuff. So that requires this second phase of remediation cleaning, which we've talked about in a few different episodes as well. And then the third thing is your heating and air conditioning system that is, is a conduit for moving all of this stuff throughout the house. So a lot of times people will, they'll clean the house and they'll. And they'll remediate the source, but they don't touch the heating and air conditioning system. And because that system pulls all the air into the system and then redistributes it back throughout the rest of the house, it can still be pushing the problem around. So that could be another thing that's going on. And the last thing that could be going on is maybe there's more than just the one source. Right. Like I said, when, when I've worked with people and they have like, stuff, they have more growing on their stuff everywhere. It's never one place. I've never been in a place where, in a house where there's mold growing on multiple items throughout the house and there's only one source of mold that's never happened in my, in my experience, it's usually a much larger problem. And so the other thing I would keep in mind is that I think that there's probably more going on than just the one place that you're thinking of. And at that point you really gotta. We gotta figure out where it is, right? And that's where the inspection comes into play and the source identification comes into play. So I hope that that's helpful for you just so you can get kind of my take on what might be going on and some of the similar projects that I worked on. So best of luck to you. Thanks.

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