56: Attics - Why they should be remediated and how they impact your 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.

All right, guys, so let's talk addicts. All right, so I was just working with somebody. They had moved into a house. They're only in there for two years, or. Not that they were only in there. The house was only two years old. It was a new construction. And you got it. You got to think. You're like, oh, man, if. If the house is only two years old, I'm running into problems like, how do we ever get around this? You know, And I understand where you're coming from. This is. This is why there's just a flat epidemic of sick homes. Because it's not only about the homes with the large. With the large history. It's also about how new builds are put together. So this home in particular, so what it looked like was that the wood that they used to build the house looked like that there was mold on it. Okay. And, you know, it's hard because you don't know if that's happening, right? And so the. The easy way for us to get a feel for that is that you go into an attic, right? I know that a lot of people don't go in their attics, right? Why would you ever go in your attic? What's the need to go in there? In this house, the heating, air conditioning system also lived in the attic. Okay? So you've got. You've got this open space. Let's just talk about, like, building pressure and how air moves around and stuff. So I've mentioned this a few times before, but the normal airflow in your house is going to move bottom to top. It's called the stack effect. And the bottom of your house, if you have a crawl space or a basement, that's the true bottom of the house. It's going to move upward. The top of the house is the attic. It's not just the top floor of your house. Okay? So, like, your house doesn't know that you don't live in these other areas. As far as your house is concerned, these are all part of one big box that's connected. Right. And so we have to think of it that way, even though that it's not an Occupied space for us, it's an occupied space for your house and the air that moves through it, you know, and so when the air goes upward into the attic, some of it is going to ventilate out and some of it's going to kind of recirculate back down. Okay. And then you're going to get this kind of circular airflow and some of it's going to move out. Some other air is going to come in the house. And this is kind of this movement that happens on a regular basis. So the reason that I say that is people say, well, if there's a problem in the attic, like, why is that a big deal, right? Especially if your airflow goes bottom to top, why is it a problem? And so it's because that air does come back and recirculate down some of it exits as well.

So when we're talking about, like, what you do in an attic, if there's a mold issue up there. So the question is, yeah, we see it on some framing. It's not everywhere, right. So it looks like there was select, you know, beams that had mold on them. And the question is, you know, do we need to remediate this? And so the first thing is, first we have to know what. What's there. Okay, so what happened with them is that their home inspector, their general inspector said, oh, this is just lumberyard mold. It's not dangerous. I'm going to tell you this right now. There's no way for anyone to look at mold and tell you what it is and tell you if it's dangerous or not dangerous. Okay, first, we don't have microscopes for eyes. For us to assume that we know what something is pretty freaking arrogant for us to be able to do that. I won't ever do that. I might have a suspicion, but I would never tell someone that this is what's going on, you know, because I don't know. You have to test it to find out. And the other thing is, we as environmental people, and there are obviously different levels of inspectors, but any of us have no idea how something is impacting your health. Literally no clue. Because we don't know what's going on in your body. We don't know what your toxic load is like. We don't know what your genetic predispositions may or may not be. We don't know about your previous exposures. Has your whole DNA been rewired because of previous exposures when you were younger? We don't know any of that stuff. So you can't just rely on someone to say, oh, this isn't dangerous. Don't worry about it. They literally have no idea what they're talking about. And it could put you down a bad path. Right. Because even some smaller issues up in an attic can have an impact on you and the house, especially when your heating and air conditioning system is up there. So.

Some of the areas that were impacted up there were around the heating and air conditioning system. Now.

The system that's in the attic is called the air handler unit. A lot of times I ask people, you know, where's your air conditioning system? Just, you know, when I come to the house initially and I'm kind of doing my walkthrough with them, just, you know, so I don't have to, like, search for it if they happen to know where it is. That's nice. Most times it's in an attic or a basement or somewhere. It's usually pretty easy to find anyway. But a lot of times people say, well, we have, you know, two on the outside of the house. And they kind of walk me through where the condensers are. So the condensers are not the piece of the equation that we're super concerned about from an air quality perspective, because your airflow doesn't go through there. So that piece on the outside of the house, that big machine on the outside, that's not really the piece that your air is circulating through. It's the piece inside of the house that has all the duct lines attached to it. That's the piece. And so in this house, that piece was up in the attic. It's called the air handler unit. And. And that's where it was. Well, some of the impacted wood was around the air handler unit. So if we think of what happens when you turn your air conditioning system on, you turn it on, it creates a really heavy suction to pull air through it. Right. Because so it's pulling air from inside of the house, it's moving it through the system, and then it's sending it back out of the house. Well, all of that suction originates from that air handler unit, that unit that's living in the attic in the place. So that's where all of that suction originates. If you have mold issues floating around in your attic, not only is some of it going to come back down through the natural airflow in the house, but it's also going to get pulled into the air conditioning system in some places and move through. And you might say, right. How does it get pulled in the air conditioning System. Like, there's duct lines that attach to everything. Like. Yes, hopefully. Well, let's say hopefully first.

There are places that actually use, like, open wall bays and open wall cavities as their duct lines. I was working with someone who was just describing this to me. It was an older house. It was a 1920s house. They had kind of retrofitted their air conditioning system. They had supply duct lines. Supply means that's where the air that's being distributed into the house is coming out of. So, like, when you look up, you have, like, the little vents that push the hot or the cold air out. Those are the supply vents. So the duct lines that attach to those were all put in place. But the return areas, which is the. Usually the bigger vents that you have in your house, those are the vents that are sucking air in. In his situation, those returns were actually just open wall bays where the air was moving through. And you don't want that. That's called an open system. That's what we call it. It's an open system. And what that means is that suction that I was just talking about from the air handler unit, when it turns on, it's pulling air through those open wall bays. Now, wall bays are not sealed from the. You know, whatever's kind of moving around in the house and whatever is gross and lurking behind the walls of your home, there's air that will work through all of the walls, and you could pull all that stuff in. So if you have hidden mold in areas behind walls of the house, you could get that stuff pulled into the air conditioning system. Because your return area is not ducted and protecting the suction from all of those open wall sections. But because all the air is just coming through an open gap in the back of the wall, pulls all that stuff into the system. So that was a little sidetracked, but I just want to kind of explain what that was for you. So.

That'S how. So when we're talking about how air in the attic can get into the house. So the thing is that those air handler units, those mechanical units that are in the attic, they're not usually airtight sealed. Very rarely do I come across one that actually looks like it's sealed properly, really what happens is that you've got, like, this. This blower fan, this mechanical setup, and then they just have a couple metal panels that cover it. But if you look around the edges and the size of them, those panels have gaps in them. And, you know, they're not flush. They're not completely sealed. And so when that suction happens, you could pull air or air can get pulled into those little gaps into the system and work their way inside of the airflow chamber and then move their way in, right? And so that's how stuff in the attic can impact. So.

The first question was, do I need to deal with this? Like, is this a problem? And so like I said, I said, well, first we need to test it, because.

If we don't know what it is, then you kind of don't know the severity of the issue for yourself to understand, like, how important it is to you, right? There are times where I have tested, surface tested the mold that's growing on these framing pieces in the attic. And it looks like it was stuff that was from the wood that was built. So the way that this happens is that the builders, they don't store the wood properly. They leave it out in the elements. It gets rained on, it gets hosed on, and mold grows on it. And then they take those same pieces of wood and they come and they build your house with it, right? So that's, that's what's happening. So your brand new home has mold in it when that happens. And so the thing is, they'll say, oh, that's lumber mold. That's not a big deal. They're downplaying it because it's part of their.

It's like they're covering their ass, right? They're like, oh, it's. Well, it's from the lumber yard. So, you know, water hits the lumber yard. So it's lumberyard mold. And so then that must mean it's not a big deal because it happens all the time, the same way that sinks leak all the time. So it must not be a big deal, right? All of these things that happen consistently we just start to downplay because they happen a lot. And it's like, oh, well, there's nothing we could do about it. So it's. So let's not think about how we fix it. Let's just say, oh, well, it's normal. So it's, it's just life. And, and that's the, the thought process from the builders. It's unfortunate that there's no kind of regulation or oversight on how things are being built in that way. But anyways, there are times where I've tested that lumberyard mold and it did come back as that mold type. So just so you know, when people say that they're talking about a mold that's called ophiustoma, that's what it's called, as far as I know. And I haven't seen anything anywhere else. But it doesn't seem to be like a toxigenic type of mold. I haven't really seen anything that's talked about specific health effects tied to that mold. Specifically. Specifically. Okay.

So that's what that mold type is. It's dark, it's a blackish color. Okay. So there are other times where I've tested something that looked exactly the same, and aspergillus or penicillium came up, or catomium came up, things that are a much bigger deal or even cladosporium came up. There's no way for us to look at that. Know that, right? So you have to test that. So the first thing is, okay, let's test it. Let's see what's in here, then you see what's in there.

If you're. If you're thinking about not remediating your attic and you really don't want to, the other thing I would probably do is I'd probably do an Ermie in the attic, too. So you can see what's settling in the dust, what's moving around, what's getting pulled all over the place, because that's going to show you actually kind of what's in the air currents and what's moving. So I would probably do that, too. If you're thinking about not doing it. Here's the deal, though. If you're. If your goal is to. Is to reduce your overall load of environmental contaminant, of mold exposure, the attic is a big piece of that. Right? And in the grand scheme of things, it's actually a lot easier to remediate an attic, you know, than you think, because there's not a lot of demo that's happening. It's really just a lot of cleaning. Now, the one thing that kind of sucks about remediating an attic is that you do need to pull the insulation out if you're going to do that. And so that part kind of sucks. But you're not, you know, you're not ripping out a bunch of walls. You're not doing a bunch of demolitions. So from that perspective, it's actually a little easier on you for an attic remediation than let's say we're gonna rip out your entire kitchen. You know what I mean? And because there's really not like a rebuild process, you know, so when you're doing remediation, it's okay, we have to remediate. We have to remove whatever we have to remove. Let's say it's a kitchen and you're removing a chunk of your kitchen, and then you're like, okay, well, now I got to build a new kitchen. And so after the remediation is done, which could take a few weeks, then you got to get a contractor out and build your kitchen again. And that can take however long that takes. I don't know, like a month or something. Right. So you got that extra timeline piece on the back end of it. With attics, you don't really have that as much because there's no rebuilding really to happen. So, I mean, those are a couple of things that addicts. But attics, with all the insulation and all the space in there, can become a very big accumulation point for problems. So when we talked about how airflow moves up into the attic. So let's think about this. Let's say you have some mold problems up in the attic. Right. Or, sorry, throughout the house. Let's say you have a few different mold issues throughout the house. That airflow is going to move up into the attic. Some of it will escape, some of it is going to settle back down and get pulled back down into the house, and some of it will get pulled all the way down. Some of it's going to get settled and stuck into the insulation in there. Okay? So over time, the insulation is going to continue to harbor and collect and collect more and more of the mold particle. And if there's toxins in the house, the toxin particle, and it's going to start.

You know, building up in that insulation. And so a lot of times what I say to folks is it's. It's not that the insulation in the attic has mold growing all over it, but because of the nature of it being exposed and is porous, and it is what it is, it becomes a very big accumulation point for all the particle that's moving around the house. And over time, it becomes a source of a problem because it's just gathered so much particle that now as the air currents move over it, it pulls it and moves it down. And so, you know, when you're talking about attics, it's really important to kind of understand those different elements. It's not just about, you know, is there mold growing on the framing? Yes, that's part of it. But the other thing is what's going on in the rest of the house is that moving upward into the attic? Which. The answer is yes, it moves up into the attic. And then how do you clean the attic in its entirety? Because if you think you're, you know, your attic may take up the whole footprint of your house. It may be that wide, right? It may not be that wide. Maybe it's half the size of your house, depending on your, on your setup. But you know, a lot of attics, you go in the attic, it's almost the full length and width of the house, above the house. If there is a lot of accumulation happening up there in terms of the particle and the insulation and what's going on up there, and you choose not to do anything about it and you still decide you're going to clean the house or remediate some other things, you're still going to have exposure in the house. That's going to happen, right? There's, there's these three different sections of the house that you have to address in remediation. You have to address your heating, air conditioning system. You have to address the occupied living or the, the source areas, wherever the, the actual growth was. You have to get rid of that. And then you have to address the settlement, which is where all the particles have settled throughout the house. They also settle in the attic. So if you're not addressing that, you're missing out one of the components. And you know, if you, if you don't do all of that, there's still going to be issue in the house. Now you may decide that you're willing to not do one thing over the other. And I'm definitely not here to tell you that you should or you shouldn't be doing X, Y or Z for your remediation. I just want you to understand that if your goal is to get this place back to a clean slate as you can get it, that the attic needs to be part of that equation. And if you leave it out, you're not going to get there. And you may still have some exposure issues in the house. If we do retesting in posts, we actually see that the house isn't passing and we could tie that back to the attic if we're testing in the right way to kind of show that correlation. And that happens too. All right, So I just wanted to kind of walk through the attic, how it works, what happens with the air conditioning system up there, why it's important. I've spent a lot of time on crawl spaces and basements, but I want to make sure that we're talking about attics. And the reason I spend time on these areas, guys, is because we don't think about them, because we don't spend a lot of time in them. It's like it's that out of sight, out of mind thing, you know? And I don't want that to be the case for you. If your goal is to really try to get your place back to, you know, as healthy of a environment as it could be for you from a mold perspective, then we need to think of these other areas because they all contribute. Right. Just because we don't see them doesn't mean they don't contribute. So hopefully that kind of gives you an overview of the attic and how stuff's moving around and what happens if your air conditioning system is in there and how it can become impacted just quickly. And then I'll wrap it up. You know, a few years ago, I did a project that was a new construction also. It was a very expensive home. It was like a $5 million home. And they had multiple air conditioning systems up in the attic that they put up there. There was three air handler units up in the attic. And the same thing was happening. They had mold growing on the framing, which was the mold that they used to build the house. Right. Because the house is brand new, so it's not like there was problems that caused mold growth up there. So they used.

Framing with, quote, lumber mold on it. Right. We tested it. Aspergillus, penicillium, cladosphorium. Very high counts throughout the attic. So again, just because it grew in a lumber yard doesn't mean that it's a mold, is not a big deal. Right. So just wrap our head around that. And then. And it was kind of throughout the attic, they had the three air conditioning units. I opened all of them up, tested all of them. All of them were heavily, heavily contaminated. And they had to replace all three air conditioning systems and duct, all of it in a brand new house. Okay. And so I say that to you because this is how it happens. It happens because the unit is there, it's in the attic, it's surrounded by all this stuff. It gets pulled into the unit, it gets distributed throughout the house. This is a pathway. This actually happens. Right? This is how it works. So just keep that in mind when you're thinking about your attic, trying to understand how your air conditioning systems are impacted. When you're figuring out what your remediation plan is going to look like and trying to map out where you're going to spend your time and your effort and focus your energy and your dollars. Don't just write off an attic or a basement or a crawl space, because you don't spend time there. Because a lot of times they could be a very big contributor to what's going on.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the 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.