74: The EPA is wrong. DIY Remediation should NEVER happen.

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.

Man, everybody, I am hot and bothered right now. Like, I'm literally hot and I'm literally bothered. I'm sitting in my sauna, I'm sweating my ass off. And I'm bothered because I had a conversation with someone today that kind of reiterated something that I saw last night when I was just perusing around on the Internet, like all of us do, about, you know, the mold. Because that's what we talk about here. And it just bothers me that this information is out there all the time, right? So like, while I'm sweating in here, I'm getting all like worked up about this. I was doing like little tiny videos for stuff. I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna make this full on topic for podcast. We'll see how far we go. If it's long enough, that'll be the topic for the day. If not, I'll add some more stuff in as we go. Alright? Okay, so here's what's bothering me. All right, so. So like I said, occasionally I like to surf around on the good old interwebs and look up mold stuff, right? I do a lot of just kind of like mold searches, see what comes up. And a lot of times, you know, what comes up is like different local companies that have their articles talking about ways to do things, inspections, testing, all that stuff. And I read these articles and as I'm reading it, I'm like cringing. I'm like, I can't believe people are actually writing this stuff and putting it out there for you to read. And I don't know why I read them, they just bother me all the time. But one I read in particular yesterday and I've seen this before in other places and it just kind of like jogged my memory on it reference something that the EPA says in one of their random old documents somewhere and it's talking about remediation. See the. I could tell what the motivation behind the article that this company wrote was. They were writing this article that was kind of saying like, do you really need to test certain things? Do you really need a remediator to remediate certain things? And they're trying to kind of create this position where they, they were trying to build trust with their reader by saying, you don't need to hire us for everything. There's some things you could do on your own. Right? And to try to create that trust with their reader, you know, in an effort to get that person to then call them and say, man, you seem like really trustworthy guy. Let's talk about stuff, right? The problem is the stuff he was telling the readers that they could do on their own, they shouldn't be doing on their own. And it was crazy. And he's putting people in harm's way by writing stuff like that. Right? And so that's what was getting me bothered. And so the thing that he referenced was this thing that I was like I said, I've seen in EPA articles and it's talking about, like, when you could do mold remediation on your own. And that's just so funny to me because first off, you shouldn't ever be doing mold remediation on your own. Like, do we not understand what we're dealing with? Well, I'm going to digress a little bit and then we'll get back to the point of that. But like, if you guys are new listening to me, I know we're getting a lot of new followers all the time. I'm seeing people, new people subscribing to the emails so you can see everything's coming out. So you may not have heard me rant on for the 70 plus episodes before this, so I'm gonna give you a quick little refresher. And for those of you who have heard, it's been a hot minute since I've talked about this stuff. Hot minute because I'm in the sauna. Anyways, here's the deal, guys. Mold is not like some thing that is not a problem, right? I know it tries to get played down a lot like, oh, it's just mold. You know, mold happens because we live in a world where there's mold. Yeah, it happens. Just because it happens doesn't mean it's good. No. Guess what else happens? Cancer happens. Is cancer good? No, it's similar. You can't just like put one to the other like, say, oh, this happens. So because it happens often, then it's okay, right? If you're doing that, then you have all kinds of problems. Right? We would just tell all the people with cancer, hey, you know what? Cancer rates are rising, so it must be pretty normal. I guess there's nothing we can do about it, right? That's. That's the idea. That's what we're talking about here. Don't fall into that status quo of saying, well, because it's normal, or I should say, because it happens often, it's normal. Those two things are not directly related. All right? It may happen often. Doesn't mean it's normal. Right. And so when we're talking about mold and then the toxins that mold produces, like mycotoxins, those toxins are literally chemicals that are meant to kill you. Right? They're chemicals meant to kill living things. It's a defense mechanism for the mold colonies. I've talked about this many times. I won't go super into and deep into it, but they produce this chemical to protect themselves from foreign invaders. By protecting themselves, they kill their foreign invaders. So this chemical is meant to kill living things. That's what it's meant to do. Okay, so that's the background on this piece of it. All right, so. So now I'm go back to this article. Okay, so the article is like, you know, do you need a remediator for remediation all the time. Are there things you could remediate yourself again, hard. No, there's no remediating yourself. Right. Don't do it. If, if you're listening to this and your spouse is one of the people that wants to, like, rip open the wall and see what's happening back there before they, you know, quote, spend any money that's unnecessary, please, please shake some sense into them. All right? You're literally cutting open a wall that may have poison back there that you're going to get exposed to. Is that worth it? No, it's not worth it. Okay, so this, this EPA reference talks about the size of an impacted area and whether or not you need a remediator based on the size of the impacted area, which is hilarious to me because most mold, as we know, mold finders, is hidden. So how are you ever going to know what the true impacted area is by looking at something from the outside? There's no way to know, right? You could have something that's literally one little tiny spot that you open it up and it's a massive problem to spread behind the whole wall. I did. I was just doing a report today, and there was a previous leak from this water heater that had happened, and there was no water damage anywhere. There was no staining. There was no anything that you could see, really. It sounded like the leak kind of happened internally and maybe leaked out the floor or something in the garage. You couldn't really see staining or damage anywhere. But because of the history we tested the platform that the water heater sat on, do you want to know what came back in that sample? 500,000 count of Aspergillus penicillium just in that little space. Okay, so what if, what if when looking at that, I was like, well, and by the way, the space, the size that the EPA references is like 10ft. If it's, if it's smaller than 10ft, you can do it yourself. Okay, well that's again, hard. No, let's just. I don't want you to like hear this clip and for some reason think that I'm saying that's okay. Absolutely not. All right. For all the aggregators out there, absolutely not. Okay, but this is kind of what's written, right? If it's less than 10ft, you could do it yourself. You don't need a professional to come in and put up containments and stuff like that. You can just have a contractor come take it out. Because it's so small, we have no concept for how small things are. Okay, you have no concept from visual. When I was looking at that platform where the water heater was not any staining, I literally only tested it because the client told me there's a previous leak there. And I obviously asked those questions. Then we find there's a massive problem. Guess what was right next to the water heater? The air conditioning air handler unit. Okay, so let's just play this out. Let's say that I didn't see 10ft of damage. I didn't even see 1ft of 1 foot of damage. Right. Because I didn't see anything. So I go. And I'm like, well, the EPA says I can open this up. And this guy's article that I just read said if it's less than 10ft, then you don't need a professional to come remediate. So I'm just going to rip open this platform with where the water heater is just to. Just to check. Just want to check. Before we get involved with anybody, let's just make sure there's nothing here. Right, you do that. What did you just do? You just blew apart half a million spores all around, not only out in your face, because you're probably not protecting yourself if you're not thinking of it that way. But only guess what's right next door. Your air conditioning air handler unit. So now when that thing turns on, it's going to pull all that into the system and you've Just compromised your heating and air conditioning system from doing that. Okay, so this is the problem. And when I say half a million spores, I mentioned this before, too. Spores are the biggest pieces that come off of these colonies. You know, I didn't do testing down to the DNA fragment size because it's not necessary when you're doing source testing like that. But plenty of studies out there that show that fragmentation could be anywhere from 200 to 500 times the amount of spores. Okay, so you have 500,000 spores times 200. So the five would be a 10. You would add two zeros on 500,000. That's five million. That would be 50 million fungal fragments that would have just been released into the space. 50 million. All right? These fragments are the ones that are small enough that are able to bypass our natural breathing defenses. So our nose and our throat, we have basically a natural filtration system in our body that's trying to protect ourselves from what we breathe on a regular. However, these particles that break down, the 50 million of them. And by the way, if my math is wrong, you could just, like, let me know. Like, you could. You could text me on the mobile phone or comment or something. If my math is off, Somebody's done that for me before, by the way, trying to do math on the fly when you're sweating your a off and. And trying to talk, you know, it's. It's juggling a lot of things. Anyways, so the point as I hydrating here is.

That visual area of the spot under the water heater was less than 10ft of visible issue. Less of 10ft of visible issue equaled 50 million mold fragments that would have exploded and been blown around all over your house. And in this case, it's getting in the air conditioning system because of the proximity. Okay, so this is the thing. This is the thing that literally has me hot and bothered. I'm even more hot right now because I'm really sweating right now. And I'm even more bothered the more that I talk about it. So there's a couple things, right? Sometimes I hear. I hear clients where their spouse is the one that's kind of pushing against this, right? Like, well, we don't need to have an inspection right now. Like, we can just take this thing out ourself. Or there was a leak under our sink. We'll just remove that little panel under the sink. It can't be a big deal. I've tested sinks that have come back 30,000, 50,000, 200,000. Like, you don't know what's under there? Okay. This isn't one of those things where, you know, the repercussion. Doing it on your own is super minor. Like, do a cost benefit analysis on it. Right? Okay. So the benefit of doing it yourself is maybe you save a couple hundred bucks on testing. The cost of doing it yourself is maybe you expose yourself to 50 million mold fragments and now get into your body, break the blood barrier, and start causing problems in your body.

I don't know. For me, it seems pretty straightforward, like what the option should be at that point. The reality is, guys, we don't. We can't see all this stuff, right? We. We don't know how. How much. Is there any inspector, anybody who comes in and looks at something and says, oh, yeah, this is a small problem. They have no idea. They have no idea if it's a small problem. You don't. There. There are things. There is the same house I was talking about. There was a spot on a ceiling that was much larger and it was dark and it looked like mold. And I did the surface test on was nowhere near the levels that I was seeing in that cavity sample, right? So, like, visibly I had one spot that looked a lot more significant, and then I had another spot where I literally didn't see anything. And they come back and the results don't correlate with the visual. Okay. This is why the inspection process for one, and then two, testing. This is why testing is so important. Okay. Now that I've tested that area, now, we could give them a remediation plan. By the way, the plan extended because of how significant it was. Right. Like, I saw how bad it was down there. This is no longer just removing a platform that's there. We need to extend removal beyond. Because when you're getting levels that are that high, there's a good chance that the water went further. And when I was looking through the garage, I actually saw some. Some staining on the kind of the slab floor in there that was a little bit away from the. From the platform. So we know that it had extended further. So the remediation plan can be impacted by the testing. I have also seen inspectors say, you don't need to test because remediation doesn't change based on testing. That is such a crock of crap. It absolutely changes. Every home is unique. Every area is unique. Now, while there are a lot of consistencies in how you would do things, and there are times where, no, it wouldn't change. There are times when it would change. There are times when we do toxin testing in a house, for example, and if it comes back negative and we look at some of the other results, that we would actually implement a completely different home cleaning protocol, which I did today in a report that I wrote, than if the mycotoxins in the house came back and they were positive. Right. There is a reason to test things, and one of them is we don't have microscopes for eyes. Number two is we have to protect ourselves from our own ignorance and arrogance. Right. Ignorance meaning that we don't truly understand how all of this works. And arrogance thinking that we can handle anything. Because, you know, I've seen a home improvement show. Right. So we're dealing with. With a level of ignorance just from lack of education. Not on purpose. People aren't doing it on purpose. Right. We just don't know. Right. So you're dealing with that piece. So lack of education, you're dealing with kind of. This is an inherent human nature arrogant factor. And again, I'm not saying this like it's a bad thing. Right. A lot of us are arrogant about certain things. I'm absolutely arrogant about stuff. But we have to recognize that when the cost benefit shows us how bad of a situation we can create if we're wrong. Right. You have to cover yourself in that case. You can't. Like, that's not a gamble that I'm. That I'm willing to take. You know what I mean? And it's not a gamble that I'm willing for my clients to take. And that's why we have these conversations about how you have to do that. All right, so the whole point of this little piece was the area, the visible area impacted by mold has nothing to do with whether or not you should have professional remediation done. The reality is, if you have a mole problem, regardless of what it is, it should be remediated professionally with proper engineering controls and proper processes. Right. And then there's steps in the remediation process that need to be executed properly. And we won't dive super into all of those. Right. But one of the issues, and it kind of ties to testing and ties to what I was just talking about how, you know, the remediation plan can actually change based on what we're seeing, is you have to make sure that you're removing the proper amount of building material. You're going far enough beyond the level of impact. So think of it this way. Like, if you looked and you saw just one little spot somewhere, you would think that you only need to remove maybe 2ft each direction from that. But because mold is microscopic and you can't see it even when you open the walls, it might not be this massive black thing everywhere. Guys, this is one thing I want us all to wrap our heads around. When you open a wall, there are times that we've done a test, it's been fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, whatever it is, there's a problem back there. The wall gets opened and then the. And then the client calls us and is like, the remediator said, there's no mold back there. And. And it's so funny to me. Like, how does the remediator know there's no mold back there? Well, they looked at it and said there was nothing there. Like, really? They looked at it. Huh? Wow. Do they have, like, microscopes for eyes? Do they have very chemical testing instruments built into their bodies that they can tell you this? Like, how did they really, really know that? Amazing. And they're like, well, they didn't see anything. And then it turns into this conversation like, guys, mold is microscopic. If you can see it, it's a big problem. A lot of times you can't see it. It might be growing in the dust, it might be growing in the debris in the area. It might be harboring in the insulation that's in the area. It might not just be this obvious black thing on the back of drywall. When you open the area up, then my next question is, I'm like, okay, so the remediator, they said there was nothing there. Their eyes showed them, you know, there's nothing there. Okay, well, what do you make of the test then? That went to a third party accredited laboratory that actually proved that there was something there and it wasn't subjective. Like, what do you make of that? Like, which one of those are more valuable? Right? Which one of those are the one that we really should put our stock into? And of course, the answer is the testing, right?

You're actually sending it to a third party, right? So when you're sending it to a third party, they have no vested interest. And whether it comes back positive or negative, a remediator, you know what their vested interest is, is to get out of your house as fast as possible. You know how they do that? By opening up areas and saying that there's no problems, then they could get in and out. They're charging you the same amount because they've already opened it up, but now they don't really have to clean it very well because they said there's nothing there, right? So you got to think of motivations, who you're talking to. And you got to understand that if we're just relying on visible, on visual and nothing else, you're going to miss things. You know, and this is actually one of the things that I included in the, in the recent resource that we just created that's called 10 most common remediation Mistakes. One of the mistakes is not removing enough building material. One of a second of the mistakes is not cleaning the area of the debris and the dust and the dirt properly because that's where the mold hides and harbors like I was just talking about, right? So, you know, there's, there's eight more of these mistakes that I included in this download. I don't have time to get into all of them right now, but I really encourage you guys go check it out, right? It's remediationmistakes.com literally a free download for you, right? Just tell me what email you want me to send it to you. I'll send it to you. Because if you're having remediation done, you want to make sure first, when you're interviewing people, use this guide to ask them about their process. If things don't line up between the 10 mistakes that I see most often, like if you ask them about one of those mistakes and then their answer shows that they would do it wrong based off of the description that's in there, then you know, you shouldn't hire them, right? On the flip side, if they're doing the work already now you have a way to do checks and balances on them prior to testing, right? Say, okay, I want pictures of all these things in here. And then you get pictures of everything and then you look at the guide and the 10 things that I have included in the guide, and you make sure that you're not seeing any of it because you can see all of it, right? You can see almost all of it. A couple of things would require probably eight of the 10 things you can see with your eye, right? So you'd have to have a conversation on the other couple things. But this is going to give you a reference point when it comes to remediation, right? How it's done, how it's not done. You know, this is all source remediation specific, right? So we're really focusing on trying to get rid of these factories that are creating the problem. But that's what it's all about, right? So, you know, point of this entire story is a couple of things. One, don't do remediation yourself. You're Just asking for problems. Two, there are common mistakes that happen during remediation. Right? So you need to make sure that you're trying to do your best to avoid those. That's what this free guide that I made for you is called. Again, it's remediationmistakes.com and three, don't try to cut corners on testing, right? Because testing one area can help you understand path and movement of what's gone on. And then you might need to remove a bunch more building material that you didn't even think about. So testing's important too. So try not to shortcut the testing. I know in the short term it seems like, well, if I could save a hundred bucks or so on a test, then that would be really helpful. And I get it, it would be, right? We're in a rough time right now. I get that that would be helpful. But then again, do cost benefit on that, right? Why are we testing here? We're testing here to understand spread how things have moved. Maybe that's one reason why you're testing. Maybe a second reason why you're testing is to understand priority orders, right? So if I can't afford to do all the remediation, you know, if I test over here, which is a little further away, and it shows that there's, you know, maybe there's a little something, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the other areas. And I need to try to prioritize my dollars. I now have a data point to reference that again against. Right? So there's, there's multiple reasons that you test, but trying to go in and shortcut stuff on the front end like this, it's going to lead to big, big problems on the back end. And then to fix the big problems is going to be way more expensive. Right? So that example I talked about earlier with the 50 million fragments that just flew out from behind.

Or was it 100 million? 50 million? God, the numbers, guys. I don't know. Anyways, the 50 million fragments, let's hold on. That number that flew out, it's now in your air conditioning system. Guess what you're probably going to have to do with your air conditioning system now. You're probably going to have to replace the whole thing because it's become contaminated. Those fragments move throughout the whole system. It gets into all the ductwork. It's impossible to completely get all that stuff out of your ductwork. So there's always going to be some level of it left in there and it's going to cause a problem. Where it's spreading throughout and you may get to the point where you have to replace the whole thing. Maybe it can be cleaned, maybe not. It just depends on how impacted it got. Right? But all of that would have happened because you thought that you could skip a step at the beginning and just open something up yourself. Because you didn't see anything, because the EPA said if it was less than 10ft in visibility that you could do it yourself. Alright, so I'm gonna get off my soapbox for now. That's my, that's my PSA for the day.

So thanks for listening. I hope that this resonates with some of you guys. And be sure to grab that free guide that I made the 10 most common remediation mistakes. Again, it's remediationmistakes.com remediationmistakes.com just put in your email so I know where to send it and then I will send it to you right away. All right, thanks everybody.

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.