62: How minimal mold sources can impact your HVAC system

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 for today's episode, what I wanted to do was review an actual inspection that we did. The results, kind of a summary of what we were finding, what the recommendations looked like, some of the conversations that we had when we were going over the results. Because I feel like, you know, a lot of times we talk about theory on how things work, right? And I think sometimes it's cool to actually hear how it's happening in real life to someone basically. So, you know, I'm not going to mention any names or anything like this. I'll give you a little kind of background on what was going on and share a little bit of what we saw and maybe this can help kind of put some things into perspective for you on all the concepts that we talk about a lot. Alright, so this house was 15 years old. The clients had only lived there for two and a half years. So there was like a 12 year history here that we didn't know a whole lot about. As far as my clients, one of them had mycotoxins in her body, otratoxin A. And then there was some autoimmune issues there. So that's why obviously they reach out to us, how they found us. And so, you know, they've been in this house a couple years. There's a couple of things they knew about. One, there was a leak from a porch, like a second floor porch. And it kind of came down because the seal between the porch and, and where it meets the house. And this actually happens a lot. So I know I don't talk about this particular piece, I don't think I have. But a lot of times if you think about like an exterior porch, so think of it like they had a bedroom upstairs and they had like a porch off their bedroom, you know, and then that room is above kind of a kitchen, dining area place. And so the thing is where the porch meets the house, right? So where it meets like the, the entry into the bedroom upstairs or where you would like walk back into the house, there's the joint of where the floor of the porch reaches that or meets that. And there's a lot of times where the seal between where the porch meets the actual home exterior there just fails. It's not done properly. When it was installed, it wasn't done right. And. And then if the grading of the porch is not draining properly, when water goes out there and it's kind of moving back toward the home at all, then water comes back toward the home. The seal where the ground of the porch meets the exterior is not sealed. The best water starts getting into the kind of building envelope, and it. And it falls down into the area down below. Okay. And so that's actually what happened in this place. And it had. So that was one thing they knew about, and it impacted this door area, and they did some, like, removal, but they left or drying. I want to say, actually off top of my head, I don't remember totally off top of my head, but what I do remember is that we were still testing around the area. So if that's the case, then that means that there actually wasn't remediation, a full remediation that was done there. So whatever they did was pretty minimal and wouldn't have affected the full outcome of that. So that was one thing we knew about. The only other things that we knew about was in the kitchen, they had noticed an odor from under the sink. And then there was a previous leak from the water dispenser that was fixed. And then there was also a dishwasher leak as well. So you had a leak kind of in the sink area, and then a leak by the dishwasher which impacted the floor in front of the dishwasher. And then the last thing we knew about was in the master bathroom, there was some. The drywall by the shower was actually, like, water damaged. Right. So you could see. So that's, you know, telling me that water is kind of penetrating from the shower to that wall. Right. So that's what we knew going in. Basically, there's three things or three areas that we knew about going in. Right. So we go through. I'm not gonna, you know, walk through the entire assessment with you. I just don't have that kind of time. But that would be called a ride along, which. Which can take like an hour. But. But basically, at the end of it, we found in the house, there was 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 isolated areas of issue that came back where we were recommending remediation in terms of source. So remember, we're always looking for source. Then we're trying to understand how that source is moving through the house. Part of that means the breathing air and kind of the Settlement. And then the other part of that is how it's getting into the heating or air conditioning systems and what's being recirculated. So. So those are the three goals, right? And so, you know, when you think about a big picture, this is actually. It was a very nice house. It was a big house. I want to say it was somewhere around 4,000 square feet, maybe. So it was a big place. So to think that there's really only five areas in the house where there's a source doesn't really seem like that much right now. One of those areas was a crawl space, and the other area was an attic. So those are kind of like larger footprint areas. But at the end of the day, it's kind of the same thing that you're doing in that space, and you're not doing, like, demo necessarily, because those are kind of the unoccupied areas that aren't finished with a bunch of walls and stuff. So it's kind of like, it's a more open area that you're able to work at. The interesting thing on the crawl space was the crawl space is actually a. Had like, a rat slab finish on the bottom. What that means is that instead of dirt underneath, it was actually like a cement floor underneath, but it was in a crawl. And what was interesting. And this is the big thing about the crawl space. So this is kind of a note for you guys, is that they had drainage from different mechanical components. I actually think was probably their air conditioner drip lines possibly, or maybe some other drip lines from something. And they had a drain in the crawl space, and they had all the drip lines kind of releasing water near the drain, but they weren't going into the drain. Right. So think about. Think about it like if it was your. Think about the bottom of your shower or your tub, right? Because we could think of it that way. So you have, like, a drain at the bottom, right? So ideally, if you have a drain like that in an area, you don't want to release water, like, next to it and then hope it pushes toward the drain. You actually want the pipes that are running the water to release into that drain. So, like, the pipe would actually kind of curve and go down into the drain and then drip into it. So I see this a lot with sump pumps. A lot of times with sump pumps, there's issues around the sump pump, and it's because maybe the drainage is the. The pipes aren't going directly into the drain. They're kind of going nearby. And so what it does is that it allows the concrete slab around that area to collect water and increase moisture. And when that happens, the humidity in the space will go up because now the concrete has gathered moisture from the water that's being kind of soaked into the concrete right next to the drain. Meaning not all the water is getting in the drain. Like some of it's getting soaked into the floor under the house. Right. And so that was. That was one of the problems that we saw in the crawl space. We did some testing in the crawl space. There was elevated issues, mold issues happening down there. And so, you know how I've explained a couple of times, if you've listened back, and if not, just quick overview. The air in your house typically moves from bottom to top. So if you have a problem in a basement or a crawl space, that is really the true bottom of your house, this is called the stack effect. So unless you're actually changing the airflow in your house, this is kind of standard how air is going to move unless you forcefully change that flow somehow. So.

With the true bottom of the house being the crawl space, your house doesn't know you don't live in the crawl space. Right. Like, we think the bottom of our house is the bottom floor, but it's all connected. There's floors, there's walls and everything. Your house doesn't know that you don't go down in a crawl space. It thinks it's the bottom. And so the airflow is going to move upward through there. Right. So what we had going on, we had an issue in the crawl space. That area that I talked about at the beginning with the porch that leaked down. There definitely was a problem, like around this door and kind of area from that, the kitchen. We did see that there was an issue by the dishwasher where that previous leak had happened. So those were two historical leaks. Right. We talk about historical issues and why they're so important, and this is why we ask all these questions up front, is because just because something happened a long time ago doesn't mean it can't still be impacting the space. And so these leaks happened, you know, a while ago. And we come back and test, and the problem is still there. This is proof that shows that just because a leak happened a year ago or a couple years ago or whatever, the mold doesn't magically just disappear when the water goes away. It stays there. And then we can validate that through testing. And that's exactly what we did in these two spots. The other spot that was a concern was that Shower in the master bathroom. So three of these five areas basically are things that they knew about, right? Did they need us to tell them that these areas were a problem? I mean, yeah, they did, but at the end of the day, like they knew that something happened in these areas. Right. And that's more than half of the source problems that we found in the house. Right. So it just goes to show you how like documenting and keeping track of what's going on in your home is really important because it can really kind of illuminates some things that are going on, you know. And so it's more important for us to take those areas more seriously than it is for us to say, oh yeah, we knew that happened, but we dried it up and so now it's not a problem anymore. And then to take it less seriously, you know. So those are the source areas. So that's what we did. And then we also tested, they had multiple air conditioning systems. We tested each of the systems and then we did some testing throughout the house just to see what is kind of moving and circulating in the house. House. So that was kind of how we did it. We talked that there was five areas that came up with an issue in terms of source. Again, large house. Five areas in a large house. Not really a massive project. Right. So this. So when you think about that, you're like, oh, that's cool. Okay, if that's all that we did and they said, okay, we're just going to remediate those source areas and that's it. We would have been missing something really big. And that's the heating and air conditioning system systems. This is why it is so paramount that heating air conditioning systems are tested as part of the assessment. And the thing is, most times when you open a heating and air conditioning system, there's not mold in it, right? So you can't just open it and say, ah, this looks fine, I don't see anything growing here and shut it. Because the problem is that those systems become cross contaminated from the sources in your house. So again, I'm going to use the mold as a factory analogy. If you guys are sick of hearing it, you can Skip forward maybe 15 seconds. I should probably be done by then. But if not, mold is like a factory, right? And if you drive by a factory, smoke is coming out of the top of the factory. That's the byproduct. Well, that smoke is what's moving through your house. When your air conditioning system turns on, it's pulling in air from the house. What is included in the air from the house. The smoke that came off the mold factories is now getting pulled into the heating and air conditioning systems. So it's not that mold growth is getting pushed into them, but the byproducts of mold. And if there's bacterial issues in the house or whatever, all of that can get pulled in the system. And it could be invisible to the eye because it's not like a massive growth issue. It's a secondary cross contamination issue. And so that's why I kind of want to hammer that in that piece in there is because we have to be looking at that. And you can't just assume because there's not something visible in there, that there's not a problem. Okay. And so it's a very good thing that we did that here because in the different systems we found. I'm not going to break each one out separately. There's like three systems here. But we found mycotoxins, which are mold toxins. We found bacterial toxins, which are called endotoxins. And we found actinomycetes, which is a gram positive bacteria type, which could be very problematic too. All of those were present in the different systems. If we find toxins in the system, it's immediate, like super bad news. Right. And if you find actinomycetes or mold in the systems and they're at a high load, then that's a big problem as well. Right. And so that's what we were seeing combined, you know, in these different units. So back to what I was saying before, if we didn't look at these air conditioning systems and they just. Or the heaters and air conditioners, and they just went in and remediated those five areas and said, we're done. They still would have exposure moving through the house. Right. So because we tested these systems and now we know what's going on. You know, these were in pretty bad shape. Even though the rest of the house seems like it's in good shape and there's only five sources. What happens is the longer that a problem has occurred in a house, the more smoke is coming out of that factory for a longer period of time. Right. And it accumulates and it accumulates and it builds up and it adds up. So the air conditioning systems might not have been impacted immediately. It might have been like a slow burn. You know, like it just kept adding and adding and adding to the point where now we thought they were beyond cleaning at this point. And so we recommended that we thought that they needed to be replaced. I've Talked back on some previous episodes about, you know, the considerations when you're. When you're looking at air conditioning systems and if they need to be replaced and all of that. So I would recommend to go back and look at that. But the summary is you can never fully clean a heating and air conditioning system. It's not possible because you've got flex ductwork running in most systems anyways. You have flex ductwork running hundreds and hundreds of feet throughout the house. And in that ductwork, there are grooves and crevices that are created. Kind of like imagine you're pushing an accordion together. You know, how it kind of squishes together. So there's like a lot of crevices and grooves created in that accordion trunk line. Same thing happens. That's what flex duct is, basically. So you get all these grooves and crevices, particles moving through the system get wedged in there and it's. I mean, it's. Truthfully, it's impossible to fully clean it. So the reason that we test them is to understand, like, do we need to.

Is there not really a big significant issue in the system? And if so, yes, let's go ahead and clean it. Because there's not a huge load for us to worry about, or is there a bigger loaders or toxins in the system? And then we know that you can't fully clean that out. So then we would be leaning more towards recommending that they be replaced. Right. And so, you know, that's what we ended up talking about doing here. And then we gave them a cleaning plan to clean the rest of the house. Right, because we have to clean the interior living spaces of the house in order to kind of address the full interior home system of airflow. Right. So airflow you have from sources moves through the living spaces of the house, then gets pulled into the heating and air conditioning system. So you have to address all three of those areas. You have to address sources, living areas of house, heating, air conditioning systems. If you're not addressing all three, then you're gonna be missing a piece. And there may still be some issues. Right. So we talked through all of this on the call, and what was really interesting about this client, which was super cool actually, is that they had an advisor that they kind of had on all the calls as well. And. And he is. He was a. He's a. I don't want to get the title wrong, and I think I'm. I think I'm going to get it a little wrong, but he was basically a biologist with a degree from Harvard, who knows all about like microbiology basically. And so it was super cool to kind of geek out on this stuff with him on the phone calls. And, you know, we're going over stuff and the pretty cool thing about when, when we started going over the results, there are times when the initial response from the client, when I start trying to explain what I just explained about how air moves into an air conditioning system and it's not that there's growth in the system, it's getting cross contaminated. The initial response from a lot of people, and it's totally natural, is that they can't see that. So it's hard to wrap your head around that and believe that, you know, especially if I'm thinking that the system needs to be replaced at that point because it's not cheap to replace a heating or air conditioning system. And so then you're basically putting your faith in me and the lab data that comes from the accredited labs that we use and you know, kind of the knowledge and the thought and all this stuff, you're putting your faith into that and not from something that you can visibly see. And so there are definitely times where people will push back on that, right? And they'll, you know, not saying that they don't believe me, but just trying to like, wrap their head around the fact, like, is it really necessary for me to have to do this? You know, and listen, I always tell people I'm. The recommendations that we give are what we know works the best, right? Over the few years and the millions of dollars it's taken for us to really hone in our remediation process, this is what we know that works best. And so my goal is to give you the plan that I know works best. And if you want to pull things out of that or change things, that's okay. But when we're talking, I'm going to make sure that you understand kind of the pros and cons of doing that, right? Because if we're not, let's say, going to replace a heating and air conditioning system or you're just going to clean it, well, then, you know, what I'm going to explain is what we just talked about, which is there's going to be something left over because you can't fully clean them. And so I don't know if that's going to be acceptable or not. But you just have to understand that's the risk of going that route, you know. And so anyway, so I'm talking to the biologist with the Harvard degree and he, he was so complimentary of the entire process. He's like, you guys did an amazing job. He's like, I read every word in this report. Report, by the way, guys was probably 80 something pages long of everything that we put together with the background and kind of all the stuff that we used to explain things. And he's like, I mean, the lab results, he's like, the type of testing you guys are using, this is, this is the best of the best testing that there is. He's like, you can't argue any of this. He's like, I, what you guys did is amazing. And the process and the data that you're giving us, he's like, this, this is exactly what we needed so we can make decisions, you know, and that when he said that, like, that is truly the point of what we do, right? We don't come in to tell you that you need to do X, Y and Z and you got to rip this out and you got to do that. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we're an information source for you, right? We're just giving you a look at what's going on, giving you the data and then also giving you kind of more than that in terms of research and development that we've done to create cleaning plans and these different things. But we're giving you kind of a roadmap and the data pieces that are supporting that roadmap. And then you take that and you do whatever makes the most sense for you, right? And it was really cool talking to somebody with a background like that who basically was validating the whole process, all of the testing methods, the way that we went about doing it. Not because I was questioning it, because I know that it works, but it's just nice to speak with someone who has that type of background and they're validating that, right? And it's just kind of showing that.

There is knowledge and there is, there is a better way to be going through and doing these things. And it's just not.

The way that the kind of mainstream industry has been ready to adopt yet. And it's because, I mean, honestly, they haven't been forced to adopt it yet. That's truthfully why it's happened. Because the reality is your standard, you know, run of the mill local mold inspectors, they're, they're not doing all of this research. They haven't invested all of this time, all of this money. They haven't been going to these conferences. They haven't been educating themselves. What they've done is they've Taken kind of the book on how to do stuff, which is, you know, 20, 30 years old. And that's what they're using. And then they're relying on that because as kind of their safety net. So if you question something, you know, question something that's going on, they say, well, this is, you know, this is how it's done, right? This is what we know. Except what we know in terms of the industry is all super dated. What we could know is much more relevant and much more progressive. It's just not been adopted by any, any sort of government or, or any sort of governing bodies in the industry. And because of that, it hasn't been, you know, pushed down or dripped into the industry for them to start having kind of a safety net to lean against and say, listen, this is, this is how we've shaped our process. So on our end we, we actually went out, we found the research studies and we did all of our internal testing. We have our own studies that we've done. And so we lean on that, right? And so, you know, it's not, it's not what the masses of mold inspectors are leaning on, but it's enough for us to go to court and have enough.

Supported, validated data and different studies for it to win court cases. So as far as I'm concerned, it works, right? Like if it's presented in the right way and you kind of show the, the evolution of the different types of testing that are available, the different way that airflows and things move through the house, and you start putting that puzzle together like we have, and you say, okay, if we know this, and we know this, then this is the way to figure that out, right? Let's, let's, let's take the information that's out there and use it instead of waiting for whoever the governing body is going to be to come around and say, okay, we'll go ahead and say that we think this is okay, because honestly guys, that could take years, right? So it was just a nice validating piece for me. And you know, the process kind of getting back to the whole kind of case study piece of this, the thing I wanted to pull out of the case study piece of it is that we only had five source areas, five factories in the house in a 4,000 plus square foot house, right? When you think of it that way and you're like, wow, there's really not a lot going on. But then we take a look at the heating and air conditioning systems and we see what has happened to them because of those Sources. It's showing you. That is actually showing you how the air is moving through the house over time. And it's actually showing you how the air conditioning systems can become worse and worse as time goes on, because they're con. They're just grabbing and holding on to this stuff, and there's no way for it to get rid of it. So it's just holding and holding and holding. It's actually very similar to our immune systems in our bodies. If we can't detox properly, right? Our. At first our bodies are clean. We're doing fine. Right? We're functioning. And then our bodies start grabbing toxins as they come in our body. And since we can't get rid of it, we just hold them and hold them and hold them until all of a sudden we have this sort of cascading reaction. That's a problem. And it's because we're accumulating, right. Dr. Jill Christa talks about this concept that is accumulation versus detoxification. And your body is always in one of those two states. You're either accumulating or you're detoxing. And so what you want to be happening is you kind of want to be in the middle and you want to be switching back and forth, so you're actually able to move things, you know, the proper way. And that same thing is happening in your heating and air conditioning system. The problem is that your heating and air conditioning system doesn't really have a detoxing switch on it, right? And so it's accumulating and accumulating. So maintenance on those systems is so important. There's technology pieces you can attach to them to help, you know, kind of support that maintenance moving forward. There's filtration pieces, there's bipolar ionizing components. But so let's think of those as, like the detox switch that they have. But if you're accumulating too fast and if you've accumulated too much before those technologies have been put into place, then they're not really going to be as effective as they can be. Right? So that's kind of the big point that I wanted to push through this particular case study is how even just a few source areas in a home.

If they're not dressed quickly and they're relatively significant, there's things happening and it's moving through the house that it can accumulate in the living spaces and your heating air conditioning systems over time and actually build up to a larger issue in those areas. And so then we can't just focus on the Few minimal factories that are there. We have to address the rest of the house too, if the goal is to try to get as clean slate of a home as we can to support our healing process. Right. So anyways, that's. That's what I wanted to share with you guys today. So you kind of get the whole concept of Source, how it's moving through the house, how remediation plans have to kind of incorporate for all that stuff, and how testing plans really should incorporate all of that. All those components too. All right, so we will talk to you soon. Remember guys, if you have questions or feedback. Last time on the last episode, I was talking about the Mold Phone, obviously. Like, you know, the. The official sponsor of molefinders Radio is the Mold Phone, which is my own phone sponsoring my own show. Hilarious. I don't pay myself anything for a sponsorship. It's a free sponsorship I'm giving to the Mold Phone guys. So anyways, I talked about it and I was joking around. I was like, hey, I don't even care if you send me pictures of your dogs. Like, it's cool. Just like I. I want to see that. I'm, you know, that we're. We're interacting and you guys are getting benefit and you're hearing me. And I had. That day, I had seven people sent me a picture of their dog. And honestly, they were all super cute pictures and it was awesome. So.

If you want to send me pictures of your dog, that's cool. I realize I actually like looking at cute dogs, so that's cool. But anything else too, right? If you've. If you've recently.

Become a Mold Finders Method member and you want to share with me the experience. I've had a couple people that have actually texted me and told me that they found several problems in their homes already because of Mold Finder's method and how it helped them find them, which is so validating from the program that we spent so long to put together. So guys like that could. That could be you too, right? So I want to hear what's going on with you guys. I try to interact as much as I can, obviously, while trying to make sure that my wife is not upset that I'm sitting on the phone too much. So I look to balance it all out if I don't get back with you guys right away. I will try to as soon as I can. As we are today, I've pretty much. I've gotten back to everybody that has ever texted me so far. So. So that's happening, right? So you have. You have the ability to do that. So you guys could reach me at the Mold Phone, if you are so inclined to text me. And the number is 949-528-8704. It's five. Or, excuse me, 9495-2887. Text me anything, guys. Whatever I like. I like to have text messages. It makes me feel loved.

So that's it, guys. Thanks for listening, and 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.