61: Building a Sampling Plan

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, I am back. We're ready to go hit the ground running. I know it's been a little time. Before we get into it, Just a reminder that Mold Finders Radio is officially now and always brought to you by the Mold Phone, which is my second phone that I bought just to talk to you guys. So I know it sounds nuts, but you literally can text me like I text people. It's a real thing. It's me. It's the phone that is mine that is in my nightstand. So the number is 949-528-8704. It's 949-528-8704. All right, guys, so you could text me and I'll get back to you. And, you know, it might not be immediate, you know, kind of, you know, give me some leeway there, but I'll get back to you when I can. All right, so I definitely read all of this stuff, and I. And I respond as quickly as I can to a lot of these things. So.

Anyway, I know that I haven't been posting as many episodes as I have been historically, and you've let me know that you guys have missed them. So thank you for that. I sent an email out to everyone on my list yesterday. By the way, if you want to get on that list, you can do that if you want to. I send emails now more frequently. Again, like I used to. I was, like, in this black hole, like, blinder of getting this training webinar that I did last week finished, and it was so much. And it took so much effort, and so I just had to, like, stop doing everything else and focus on it. But anyways, we're getting back onto regular schedule with the podcast. We're getting back onto regular schedules with the emails going out multiple times a week. If you guys want to jump on that list, if you're not on it, you could go to Mold cleaning product dot com. It's Mold cleaning product dot com. Um, I'll actually give you the product that I like for cleaning your stuff. Uh, so you'll get that also, but then you'll also be added to my list. So When I send things out to everyone, you'll get a piece of that, so you can check that out. But everything's back on schedule. And so I was thinking today, like, what did I want kind of the welcome back show to be? And I want to talk about building sampling plans. And then after you build the sampling plans, like, how you like the way you collect the samples and different things like that. Okay, this is gonna be a really awesome episode. Bookmark it. Save it. All right, so I'm telling you now that this is gonna be a good one for you to reference back, because I'm really gonna break it all down for you. So.

Obviously, there's the inspection piece. I'm not gonna go through how to do the inspection. Obviously, it's not something I could do in a quick podcast episode. That is, however, what Moldfinder's method is all about, which is the free training that that I did last week. I'm going to continue to do those, if you're interested, to learn how I actually go through a house and what I'm looking for and where I'm looking for it and all that stuff. I literally break all of that down in this training for you guys. So it's moldfindersmethod.com, you can register for the next one that's there.

I think the next one's, like, a couple weeks from now. So just anytime that you listen to this, you can go there. That site's going to be active for it, and you can figure out when the next training is. I'm going to be trying to do these somewhat frequently. I don't know exactly how often I'll do them, but for the foreseeable future, they're gonna be somewhat frequent. So. Frequent. Yeah. There we go. Speak. Well, okay. All right, so let's talk sampling. So let's say we've gone through a house, right? Let's say I've already done this. Say there's a number of areas where I'm suspecting that there's some sort of hidden mold problems. Okay. So the idea is like, okay, so how do we build a sampling plan? And then how, like, are the best ways to collect those samples? Okay, so there's a couple things. The sampling plan is really based on your goals ultimately, right? The inspection never changes. Inspection is always the same. But how you test and what you test and why you test is all dependent on what you're trying to do and what you're trying to achieve, right? So, like, if you're a renter and you don't own the place. You don't necessarily care about every single area where there's a problem. You just kind of want to validate that maybe there is a problem. Right. As opposed to being a homeowner where you need to remediate your home so you can actually live there. If that's the case, then we need to do more testing so you could figure out not only what's happening, but also so we could kind of figure out, like, level of severity in different areas. And if finances don't allow you to do the entire remediation plan, then at least we could try to prioritize the areas that are most problematic and kind of have that talk. So that's, you know, those are just two examples of goals. There's so many different goals that people can have. So what I'm gonna talk to you about as if today is if you are a homeowner. Right? Like, if we're trying to figure everything out, that's kinda how I'm gonna break this down for you. Okay, so let's say we go through a home and, I don't know, let's say we find, like, 20 potential areas of where we think that there's mold hiding. So again, real briefly, it's not just areas where you visibly see mold, because most times that's not what we're seeing most time. We're seeing signs of historical water damage, and those are the areas that mold is hiding. Okay, so quick recap. You don't need water right now for there to be a mold problem. If there was water at any time and mold grew as a result of that water, even if it was 10 years ago and it was never properly remediated, then that mold colony still exists behind that area, and it can still impact our living space. That's why we have to be looking to validate these areas of historical water intrusion. So when we're doing that, there's a couple types of samples that we're kind of looking at most. When we're doing that, actually, briefly, before I go into the details of sampling, I want to talk about the whole plan in general. Okay, so we talked about this a little bit in some previous episodes. The goal is to think of your house as if it is broken down into different. Different components, right? And each component of the house can impact and influence the other part of the house, the other component of the house. So the three areas are your heating and air conditioning system, the structural areas, which are like your wall, ceilings, floors, cabinets, all that stuff. And then basically just like what's settling in your house and what you're being exposed to. Okay, so those are kind of the three things. If, if we don't address all of those, then we're not truly going to know what's going on in the house. And then remediation actually is not going to work because we may have not addressed an area that is impacted and we don't know about it. And then you're going to think that remediation doesn't work. So the idea is to basically say, okay, we need to understand where the source of the problem is. That's where, you know, these water damage areas are. And like I said, in this example, we say maybe there's 20 of them, different walls, maybe a ceiling, some cabinets, maybe, you know, something in a garage by a water heater, maybe something in a basement where there's a leak coming in. Right? So there's a number of things. Let's say there's 20 of those. And then after that we'd say, okay, well, if those are the sources. I've heard Brian talk about mold factories until he's blue in the face like a million times by now. So we know that those are the sources and that they are little factories that are creating byproducts that are moving through the house. So we then have to understand what is moving through the house and then what has potentially impacted the heating and air conditioning. So system. Because if we leave one of those two things out, you can remediate all the walls and the ceilings and the cabinets all day long, but you're still going to have a mold exposure in the house. Because the smoke that came off of those mold factories and moved through the house. Right. Those byproducts, whether it's the toxins or the fragments or whatever, they're still going to be in the house, and they're still going to be moving around. Okay? So you have to address all of that stuff if you really want to have a successful remediation. And so the different testing types that we use have strengths and weaknesses, and they're better used in some places than they are in other places. Okay. So I'm gonna kind of walk through those things with you guys today to try to wrap your heads around, like, how I go through and kind of build this plan. Right? So first off, when it comes to source areas, most of the time we're not seeing physical growth. Sometimes we are. Right? Sometimes you're seeing it. If there is physical growth that you could see or suspect growth, like, listen, guys, you're not gonna know something is mold, right? There are a lot of times that I don't 100% know that it is. I may in my gut think that it is, but we need to validate it and we need to know if it is for sure. Cause sometimes it's not. And you know what if you assume that it is and then say, well, we're just gonna remediate it. You know, remediating an area could be a couple thousand dollars, and then maybe the sample came back and it wasn't even mold in the first place. Right. Wow. Wouldn't it be nice to just test that and know that upfront? Like. Yeah, of course it would have been. Right? Then you could have saved yourself a couple grand. So.

Swab tests are the easiest. Some people use tape lifts. You get the same information from a swab test and a tape lift. And honestly, a swab's a lot easier. So I do swab tests for anything that's surface related like that. Okay, so think like, if you're looking at your window and you maybe see mold growing around, like the window enclosure and the window sill area. Or maybe you open a sink and there's darkness, you know, on the bottom panel, like the. Where you keep all your products. Or maybe, you know, you see orange spotting somewhere. When you open a cabinet somewhere else or something, you see spotting on the back. Or maybe in your closet, you pull your clothes back and you see spotting on the wall. Right. Those are things where you would take, like, surface tests where you visibly see something that you think is mold growing on the surface. All right, so that's kind of when you would do that. The other kind of test that you do for source identification, this is more of what we do. It's different types of air tests. Now, I've obviously blown up air samples multiple times. I don't think I need to go into it anymore. But these types of air tests, they're actually targeted towards source. So they're not in the middle of a room. They're directly in the area where we think that the mold is hiding and growing. Right. So for example, if you have water staining on a wall, like the thought is. Or when I see, I'm like, okay, is there mold growing behind this wall? Right. Because there's water damage on this wall. Okay. So that's where we come into cavity tests. So that's the type of test that we'd use for that. So a wall, a ceiling.

Gosh. I mean, that's kind of mostly when you do cavity tests. Sometimes in cabinets, there's like a little hole somewhere that you can stick a tube through, and you can get, like, underneath an area or something like that. But for the most part, walls, ceilings, those are cavity tests, for the most part. Meaning that you could put a little hole in the wall or a little hole in the ceiling, and you can basically put a tube through that hole, attach that tube to an air sampling pump, and then, like magic, you're taking an air sample from behind the wall or behind the ceiling. Okay. So the goal is to get as close to where we think the source is as you possibly can get. Right? And the way that we do that is we look for, again, these triggers of water damage. We want to be as close to kind of the epicenter of this water damage that we're seeing. Sometimes it's really obvious, sometimes it's really subtle, you know, and that's. That's what we need to figure out. That's. That's through the inspection process. But basically the goal is to get as close as you can. Okay. So one type of source air testing is actually cavity testing. Okay. The other type is more of like an enclosed source air test. Okay. So this is really prominent in cabinetry for the most part. A lot of times, cabinets will have signs of water damage on them, but you won't see mold growing on top of it. The problem is the bottom side of the cabinet could have mold growing all under the bottom of it. And so this actually happened in two of the places I lived in LA before I left, and why I left both of them. But what happens is that, like, a lot of our cabinets, they have like a laminate layer on. And when I. When I'm talking about. I'm talking about the floor, like where you. Where you set your products and stuff. So that area, there's a. There's something like a laminate layer that would cover kind of the top of it just to make it look nicer. But then under that laminate layer a lot of times is particle board. And particle board is super, super porous. Even. Even more than just like regular wood. It just soaks up water. So a lot of times a laminate layer can cover up mold and other problems that are actually underneath the. The bottom side of it, which is where the particle board soaks it all up. So for an example, so something like that in a cabinet, we would do what we call a source air test. Right? And the way that we do it, we open the cabinet, we take everything out of the cabinet, tap on the bottom of the cabinet floor a little bit. You want to. You want to disturb it just a little bit because you want to be able to pull it up in an air sample. Then you put the air sampling pump inside of the cabinet, and you shut the cabinet doors. And now you're sourcing an isolated area. And that's how you're testing it, Right. So you don't say, hey, we think we have a problem in our cabinet. Let's take an air sample, you know, on a tripod up at breathing level a couple feet away. That's not gonna show you anything. Right. You're gonna get false negatives all day when you do that. You actually have to get as close to the source as you can. Okay. Other examples of when you do that, when we do that type of testing is let's say that there was like water damage on a floor. So maybe you're in a kitchen and there was a dishwasher leak, and the floors buck of the dishwasher, we would do the same type of thing. Because you can't put a hole in the floor. Right? Ideally we'd be putting cavities everywhere because we could really get behind. But the thing is, certain materials you just can't do that with. Okay. So another example would be kind of this floor in front of a dishwasher. So let's say the floor is buckled or the floor is water damaged or stained or something like that. Then how do we test the floor? We can't rip the floor up. We can't put a hole in it. You do the same thing then that you do in a cabinet. So we put the air pump right there on the floor, and. And we kind of bang on the floor just a little bit right there, turn on the air pump, and now anything that gets disturbed is going to get pulled directly into the air pump.

That's an example of how you can do a source air test. So basically you have cavity air test, and then you have source air tests. Those are kind of the two things. So when we're looking at source, that's basically it. We're pretty much using one of those three methods anywhere that we see a problem, and we just pick the one that works the best for that situation. That's basically it, right? It's not that complicated.

So that's source testing. You say, okay, so that's great. So we're now figuring out where the mold factories are, right? We're figuring out where they're located, and that's cool. So now we know what we have to remediate in order to get rid of the source. But what damage have those sources created already? And that's where the next piece of the sampling plan comes into place. There's two other pieces to this. One piece is your heating air conditioning system. Okay, so you think about it. Your heating air conditioning system is like a giant super powered vacuum, right? It's just sucking air into the system really hard, right? Because it has to pull air from the house to get into the system, which it then heats or cools, and then it sends it back in the house. Right? So you have this loop, but it's forcefully pulling air into the system. Where's it pulling air from? It's pulling it from the inside of the house. So if you have 20 hidden sources of mold in the house and the smoke coming off of those mold factories is moving through the house, don't you think that some of that could probably get caught up into the air conditioning system? Yeah, it can. You know, sometimes the air conditioning system is not super bad. Sometimes it's really bad. It really depends. And that's why we test them. So here's why we test them, right? So we talk about why we do source testing. Same thing for air conditioning systems. Now, the thing in heating and air conditioning systems is that most times you're not seeing mold growth inside of them. That does happen, I would say a fraction of the time. That's what's happening most of the time. You'll open a heating air conditioning system and it's just dirty, and you'll have your H vac contractor or whatever come out like, oh, yeah, it's dirty. We'll just clean this. It'll be fine, guys. The byproducts from all the smoke that I'm talking about that's coming off the factories, they're little particles that are floating around. They settle in the dust and then they attach to dust, and that's how they move around. So if you have a bunch of dust in your heating and air conditioning system, and specifically I'm talking about the air handler unit. So there's a couple components to an H vac system. So you have the condenser, which is typically outside. Your air doesn't actually flow through that. So in terms of the air quality perspective, that's not really a piece we're concerned about. Your air goes through what's called the air handler unit. This is usually housed inside of your house somewhere. Attic, basement, or maybe a closet somewhere in your house. And this is where all your ductwork actually connects to. Okay, so this is that unit is the central hub of your whole system.

So typically, what we do is we open that unit up and we take a look inside. Right. Because that's the central hub of everything. It's also where the coil is located if you're, you know, if you have an air conditioner, too. And a lot of times you can. You can actually see that there's mold growing on the coil if there's a problem in the system. So we could see that, too. Side note, if you see mold growing on something, what do you do? Pop quiz. Surface test. Yeah, that's the answer. You're a winner. You. You get to keep listening. I don't know. So you would do a swab test on something like that in the H VAC system. However, the strengths of these other tests that we were talking about, the source error, the cavity error, the swab, it's all for understanding source. They're not as sensitive as some of the other testing that we need. We have to talk about how they're analyzed. So basically what you do is you take all those samples, you send them to a lab, and then a human sticks it under a microscope and physically starts counting the number of spores they're seeing. Like, it's crazy, actually, when you think about that. They just count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And then they extrapolate it out and they give you. And they give you a report. Right. Do we think there could be a little bit of human error there? Yeah, maybe. I mean, they're pretty good at it. I, you know, it's. I feel that they're accurate. But yes, of course, there could be. If there's too much debris on the slide, then they can't see that particular area as easily, for example. Right. So you have to be really careful on how you collect them, how long you're collecting them, how much, you know, debris and stuff is getting on those samples because it could cloud the view of the lab technician. So there's some things you have to keep in mind when you're doing that. You guys probably don't need to know that as much. That's what your. Whoever's coming out to do your testing, they're going to be looking, you know, they'll be doing that. You just want to make sure you're directing them to do it the right way, basically.

Okay, so the thing is, in your heating air conditioning system, to get back to that most time, there's not mold growing in it. So what does that mean? That means that if you did an air test or a Swab test on dust. They're going to put that under a microscope, and they're not going to see spores there. Why would they? There's nothing there, right? And then you would think, oh, well, there's no problem. But, guys, the limitation of those tests is that, is that the tech can only see spores. That's all that they can see, right? They can't see the tiny, tiny fragments that break off of them. They can't see toxins. They can't see these other things that are in there. And, and those are the. That's how these systems get impacted. Right? So it's not that mold is growing all over the system, is that mold is maybe growing all over the house. And then the tiny, tiny fragments that break off that are way smaller than mold spores, by the way, are floating around, get attached to the dust, the dust and dirt gets pulled in the air conditioning system. You open the system, you're like, ah, this is just dirty. I'll clean it. When the reality is, what is the composition of that dust? That's the question. If you have toxins and tiny fragments and really high loads that are in that dust, nobody can see that with their eyes. You can't see that. You have to test that to know. And then the reason that we test is because you say, okay, how do we handle the ventilation system, the heating air conditioning system? Meaning do we think that it can be cleaned, or do we get the test back and there's toxins in there, or the mold load is super high, or there's bacteria loads that are really high in here? And knowing that you can never fully clean a heating and air conditioning system in the ductwork, we then make the decision on whether or not we think that it warrants replacing it. So you have to test the system to know that. Otherwise you're not going to have any idea. And, and listen, if you're saying, and I'll tell clients this while we're talking, they're like, listen, we're going to replace it anyway. Like, well, guys, we're gonna replace it anyway, then we don't need to test it. Because the point of testing that is to know if you need to replace it or clean it. So if you're telling me right now that you're going to replace it, then that's fine. But let's define what replacing it means. Replacing it does not mean just replacing that air handler, mechanical unit that's in your basement or your attic or a closet in your house or something. It also means replacing all of the Ductwork. Because guess what? Air doesn't just stop in that metal unit. It goes through all the ductwork. That's how it gets to you. So to think that we would say, okay, we're just going to replace this, this unit and put a new unit in here, but then keep all of the old ductwork in there and then think that's going to solve the problem makes absolutely no sense if you actually think about it, right? So what I'll say to my client is, okay, so when you say you're planning on replacing it, you're replacing all of it. You're replacing the ductwork, you're replacing the air handle unit. They're like, well, no, we weren't going to replace the ductwork. We're just going to clean it. I'm like, then we have to test it. We have to test it because that ductwork might not be able to be cleaned. Well, first off, ductwork cannot be fully clean. Let's just be very clear on that. It's not possible to fully clean it. There's always going to be something left over. So then the question is, if there's a super heavy mold load or there's a heavy bacterial load, or there's mycotoxins or endotoxins in that system, are you okay with trying to clean it? Like, for example, if this is you and you have two mycotoxins that are in your H vac system, and you replace the air handler, the unit, which is just the mechanical unit, you leave the ductwork and you try to clean it as best as you can, knowing that you can't actually fully get rid of everything that's in there, are you okay with doing that? Knowing that there's still gonna be mycotoxins in your ductwork? It's a question for you, right? And this is the question that we have to ask when we're doing that. This is why we have to test the ventilation system, so you can make informed decisions and understand. Because again, if you just say, well, I'm replacing that unit. I'm going to leave the ductwork. And then we don't know what's in there. It doesn't get fully handled. Maybe there's a bigger problem in there than we know. And then you remediate the house, and you clean the house, and then you turn the air conditioning system on, and it starts spewing the stuff all over the place again. And then you call and you're like, hey, this didn't work. There's still problems in the house. Well, it's not that it didn't work. You just chose to omit one piece of it, right? So imagine this. Imagine you're seeing your doctor and your doctor's like, listen, if you do these three things, it will cure all of your. All of your health problems. All you have to do are these three things. I don't even just. I don't even know what the three things are. Let's just say there's three things. I'm gonna make three things up real quick. You have to sit in an infrared sauna. You have to.

You have to take X number of supplements, and you have to work out three times a week. Let's say those are the three things you have to do. Well, if you say, well, I could sit in a sauna, that's pretty easy. And I could take these supplements, I mean, that's pretty easy. But working out, yeah, I think I'm probably just not going to do that. And then you go back to the doctor and you say, I still don't feel well. And the doctor's like, well, are you doing these three things? You're like, well, I'm doing two of them. And the doctors be like, well, of course I told you you had to do these three things.

If you choose to omit stuff, that's cool, right? I just want you to understand that what the repercussion potentially of that can be. You need to understand what that looks like. The same way the doctor would tell you, like, I don't know what you want me to do. I told, I literally told you, if you do these three things, you'll be healthy. And you decided not to do one of them. So what did you expect, right? So that's kind of the deal with, you know, approaching an H vac system like that. So again, if they tell me we're replacing the whole thing and the ductwork, then don't test it. If they were thinking of just replacing the air handler unit and not the ductwork, then we would still want to test it. And if they weren't planning on doing it at all, then obviously we want to test it. Okay, so now how do you test it? All right, so we're looking at dust, right? That's what we're talking about. These are different types of samples completely. I've seen inspectors go in and say, what we're going to do is that we're going to turn on the air conditioner here, and then we're going to put this air sampling pump right here by this vent. And then we're going to turn it on. It's going to show us everything that's in there. That does not work. It's the same way thing is taking air sample in the middle of the room. It doesn't work. It's ridiculous. You actually have to test inside of the unit where the source of the problem actually would be accumulating. And you can't use air test and swab test because what we talked about before, because you have somebody looking only for spores and these things that we're looking for are much smaller and not even mold. You're looking for other stuff too, right? So.

The way that we do it, we do dust tests. So there's four things that we do when we try to understand what's in your heating air conditioning system, also what is in your living space. Okay. So it's all really been shaped on the medical community and how they've been guiding, not us directly, although a lot of them do guide us directly, but just kind of the overall knowledge of what's happening. Right. So at the beginning, early 2000s, it was mold. Everybody just knew mold. And that's all that we knew. Right. And then a few years go by and the doctors are like, oh man, mycotoxins, that's a, that's a problem. We should probably be handling that too. Right? So then they come to us, they're like, hey, we need you to let us know if there's mycotoxins in the homes or not. Because we're trying to figure out like where they're being exposed to that. Right. So then we got tasked with understanding that and then that kind of held for a while. And then about, I don't know, maybe like three years ago, we started getting tasked with understanding the whole bacteria side of water damaged buildings. See, here's, here's the realization that's been been happening on the medical side of things is that it's not just mold that's causing these inflammatory responses in these body reactions. It's being exposed to a water damaged building. And the ecosystem that is created in a water damaged building. Mold is, yes, a big part of that. You know what the other really big part of that is, is bacteria. And so we basically were then tasked with understanding the bacterial side of what was happening in a home too. Right. And so what we did is that we basically have four things that we look for when we're doing dust testing in your heating air conditioning system or, or just throughout the living spaces of your house, which is the next piece of the equation. So four things. One, and they kind of fall under two umbrellas. One umbrella is mold. The other one is bacteria. So on one side you have mold, so you have the mold organism, which is the actual mold itself, the living thing, and then you have the mycotoxin, which is the chemical byproduct that it creates. They're two completely different things, right? I've seen people say, well, we're testing, or we do an ERMI test, and that just tests for the mycotoxins. No, it doesn't. It doesn't at all. It's. It's the ermius testing for mold, the actual living DNA signature of the different mold species. Mycotoxin testing is testing for a chemical biotoxin. Completely different things. And molds don't always produce the mycotoxins, even if they have the ability to do it. Right. So uses analogy a lot. Like if you walked around and you had a gun, you know, a concealed gun or whatever, and you would never really feel the need to pull that out unless you were being attacked, right? Unless somebody can't, you know, you had to defend yourself. Then all of a sudden you have this weapon that you can defend yourself with. It's the same thing with mold. Mold doesn't just spew out mycotoxins for no reason. It's a defense mechanism. And so if other organisms, whether it's mold or other things, are coming to take over its territory, then it's going to use mycotoxins to defend itself. And that's where you get the chemical biotoxin. It's meant to kill other living things that are invading its territory. That's what it is. All right? So on the mold side, we test for mold, and we use ERMI dust testing for that. And then we test for mycotoxins, which is another dust test that we use for that. So that covers the mold side. Now, on the bacteria side, same thing, you have organism and you have toxin. It's a little different. On the bacteria side, there's two different types of bacteria. One's called gram positive, one is called gram negative. All right, gram positive bacteria. There's also kind of a segment off of that called actinomycetes, which is kind of like a bacteria fungus hybrid, sort of. It's like a bacteria, but it releases. It kind of sporilates like a fungus does. It's interesting. And side note on that, Dr. Richie Shoemaker, who is kind of the pioneer of biotoxin illness in general, he actually came out recently. He said that he Thinks actinomycetes might be even more problematic than mycotoxins for someone. I don't know, I don't know, I'm not the doctor. Right. But when that guy comes out and says something, you got to listen to him.

Anyway, so we do a panel of tests that identifies actinomycetes and the number of those as well as other gram positive bacteria. And it shows pathogenic, non pathogenic bacteria. So that's one thing we do on that side. Then for the bacterial toxin side, there's what's called an endotoxin. So this is a little different. Endotoxins are not a defense mechanism. Endotoxins are produced by gram negative bacteria. And it is basically like the skin of the bacteria essentially. So we don't have to test like separately for the gram negative bacteria and then for the endotoxin we end up just testing for the endotoxin. It kind of covers off on it. So that's kind of how we build it. So we're looking mold, mold toxin, bacteria, bacteria, toxins. That is the panel that we're running to understand water damage, environment. Because again, remember, the medical community is now aware that it's not just mold you, it's not just mycotoxins, but it's water damaged buildings in the ecosystem created by those spaces that are creating the issues for us. Right. So we've built our testing plans off of that information, right off of that direction from the people that know best. That's, that's where the testing plans are built from. And you know, it's important because depending on what we see there, it shapes the recommendation on how to clean it. I didn't talk about how we clean all this stuff. I probably won't on this episode. I think I've told the story a couple times, but basically it took us a couple years and about $3 million of our clients remediation budgets to figure out how to remove biotoxins from a house. And finally we figured it out and it works. And so it took a while and now we have a process that works, that we've honed. And so we essentially, we don't want to roll that process out unless you really need it because it's super, it's comprehensive, it puts you out, it's, it's not easy. Right. But if the goal is to get rid of this stuff, and we know that stuff is there, then this is what you have to do. Okay, so we have that panel, the four things we're looking for, Mold, mold, toxin, bacteria, Bacteria toxin. Okay. So we look for that in the heating and air conditioning system, and then we also look for that in what we call a home screen. That's kind of what we've dubbed this collection of tests throughout the house. But basically it's those four tests throughout the living spaces of your home to see what's moving through your home when we do that. We have now addressed all three sections of your home, if you will. Right. You have your heating and ventilation system. You have your structural components, which is typically where the mold growth is happening. That's where the factories are. And then you have what we call the settlement, which is what the home screen is testing. The home screen is just dust testing from throughout the whole house. Just grabbing dust, like on top of door frames and under furniture, and like all these different places where dust collects. That is your most direct pathway to exposure. So it's letting us understand what that looks like. It's also telling us what's actually settling in the spaces and in turn, settling on all of your contents and belongings, which then brings up the conversation of what do we do with our stuff and how do we clean it? I have some other episodes in the past about, like, cleaning contents and stuff that you can look back and grab there. But that is the idea of building out a sampling plan. Okay. If we don't look at all three of those areas that we talked about, right? So heating, air conditioning system, structural walls, floor, ceilings, all that stuff, and then the settlement, which is basically what's popping up in your breathing zone throughout the house if we don't look at them, and then we also don't put a cleaning plan in to address all of those, your remediation won't work. Just won't work. It won't. You'll probably spend a lot of money on it. Somebody will tell you it'll work, and then you'll be upset that a month later or something that you're not feeling great again in your house, and you'll have spent a whole bunch of money, and you'll think it doesn't work. You'll think you have to burn your house down or you have to go live in a tent in the backyard. And this is why. All right, so the sampling plan is so important. So we could put the right cleaning plan in place to make sure that you don't end up wasting all your money and you don't end up burning your house down. You don't end up living in the backyard in a tent. Right. This is why we have to sample like this. And, you know, some people may say that it's overboard.

I say that what a lot of people are doing is actually a massive, huge, major disservice. And it's taking money from you. It's almost like burning your money on fire. Because we don't know all the components, then whatever you're doing isn't going to work. And so the question is, is it really overboard or is this actually kind of the true way to get a feel of what's going on in a whole home holistically? And is it everything else that's happening a disservice and under servicing you? Right, that's the question. Just because most people do it one way doesn't mean that that's the right way. It just means that's how most people do it. Right.

So just keep that in mind. But I wanted to do kind of a big breakdown on sampling, how we collect them, where we collect them from, all of that stuff. Right? Because I get asked questions a lot about, well, how would you do this? Like, on the mold phone, I get texts about, well, how would you test this and how would you do that? And.

I want to have this resource that I could point you guys to, to listen to the whole explanation on how we literally go about doing all of it. So that is today's episode sampling plans, how you put them together, how they connect to remediation, the whole story. So, guys, when I go through a house, this is exactly how I do it. It's literally exactly how I build the plan. And I have a conversation very similar to this entire recording with every single client that I work with directly. All right? So listen, guys, I'm trying to put this. I'm trying to give you stuff, trying to give you as much stuff for free as I can. I'm trying to help you guys, all right? So please, like I said, I think this is going to be one of those episodes that you're going to want to be able to refer back to, you know, as you go down the process, maybe you have somebody come in the house, maybe you start going through your own house after you learn how to do it from Mold Finder's method. And you don't even need inspectors to come in. It's a fun little tease for those of you who haven't gone into the training yet. But, guys, if you don't want to rely on someone doesn't know what they're doing, just learn from me and then you could go do it yourself. That is what this training is meant to teach you to do so. You could do that, too. So either way, though, the next step is testing. What do you do about testing? You want to make sure that you don't have someone misleading you on how to test stuff, right? Because you'll just spend the money on testing. It's not going to work. And then you get a false sense of security because the tests come back and they show false negatives. You think, okay, well, my air conditioning system is fine. Well, the guy tests it with an air sample by a supply vent. So you literally have no idea if your air conditioning system is fine. But in your mind, you think it's fine. It's no longer an issue. You checked it off the list, and you're going to go through and do some other work in the house. And if it really is contaminated, you're still going to have this stuff moving all over the place, and it's not going to be what you're looking for. Right? That's not the goal. So.

All right, thank you for listening. Sorry I was gone for a couple weeks, but like I said, I was in the zone. I'm putting that training program together that I was talking about, molefinder's method. So if you're interested in seeing what that looks like, go to molefindersmethod.com you can register for the next training, whenever that is, depending on when you listen to this episode. And if you want to text me, like, a picture of your dog or something, you could do that, too. The numbers 949-528-8704. It's literally my number. I'm holding it right now. All right, it's 949-528-8704. I take about 20 to 30 minutes a day to respond to things that come in. So.

Yeah, that's what I got for you today, guys. All right, we'll talk to you soon.

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.

Sam.