80: 5 Ways to Prevent Mold Exposure in Your Home

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Hey, everybody. What is going on? Ready for another episode? I am. That's why I'm here. All right, so last week, I think maybe two weeks ago last week, I don't really remember all the time is blending together so quickly, but I was asked to write a guest article on a blog that was about things that you could do to help keep your home mold free. That's what the article was about. So I was asked, like, hey, can you write something for us that we could put up? And I was like, yeah, sure. It's tough, though, because, you know, on one hand, there are definitely things you can do to help prevent, you know, molded water events, mold issues from growing, things like that, Right? To have a title of keeping your house mold free, it's hard. It's hard because you can't just do these five things and think that. Right? And so I didn't. I don't necessarily want it to be thought that, well, if I just do a couple of these things, there won't be mold in my house. Right? Because it's not. It doesn't totally work that way. So I just wanted to expand a little more on some of the things that I shared. The things that I shared are all great preventative measures to do. Right. There are things that will help limit and deter mold growth in the house, both from understanding if you have, like, hidden water leaks and things that you don't know about to working in areas where there is a lot of moisture to try to kind of get that water away from areas that could create problems down the road to even talking about maintenance schedules and stuff. So all that stuff is super important, right? So actually, I liked writing it because I've talked about some of these things, like, you know, here or there. Never really put them together like this before. And there's definitely value in doing all of that stuff, but I thought, you know, since I have a podcast, I might as well come on and kind of, like, go more in depth into each one of those things versus being limited by kind of like an article, you know what I mean? So that's what I'm doing. All right, so I'M going to go through. There's five things here. The first thing was about sink cabinets. I've talked about sink cabinets before. Right. The. The thing with cabinetry and sinks, and this is really a couple of the other things will be consistent with this. If we're trying to think of how we're going to prevent mold growth in a house, what's the one thing that we know is going to cause mold to grow in the house? Water. Yay. You win. I know that you just thought water, so you. You win. I'm not sure what you get yet, but maybe, I don't know, I'll talk some more. Maybe that's worth it. I don't know. So. So, yeah, so like, these areas where there's a lot of water, that just happens, right? Think sinks, showers, which we'll talk about in a second. Like, you know, these types of areas, we have to keep our eye on them more often than less. Right. I think sometimes we just, you know, you go to your sink, you turn the sink on, you turn it off, you walk away. You do that every day. Think about how many times you do that in a day. Right? How many gallons of water is going through those lines throughout a day. Same thing goes for your dishwashers and your, you know, all in your washing machine and your laundry room and all these areas where water is just a part of the everyday kind of life cycle of that space because it. Because of the appliances and what you're using it for. Right? That means that we need to. We need to keep a better eye on those areas. Right? We need to. We need to kind of have a schedule that we're looking at that stuff, and we're. And we're making sure that. That these pipes and these lines and the walls and the cabinets and all the stuff around those areas that we're not seeing signs that has a pipe failed? Is there a pinhole leak somewhere? Sometimes you can see that. Right?

So the first thing here was really, I kind of was just all about sink cabinets and what I was talking about, but the idea is really about any sort of appliance that water goes through. Any area that water goes through. Right. And so what I was saying here is basically something I've talked about before and something I do all the time is that I remove everything out of my sink cabinets at least once a month. Because, you know, I don't know about you guys, but I. I've inspected a lot of houses, and I. Most of them that I go into, I open up a cabinet under A sink, and it's completely filled with stuff. It's just filled, right? Because, you know, we get something, we get a new cleaning product. We get whatever we go. Where's it go? Goes under the sink in the kitchen, right? You stick it under the kitchen sink. Put it in there. Is there not room? I'll just sit it on top. Where do the paper towels go that I'm going to need for later? I'll just stick those on top. It's fine. I'll close the door. No one will ever see it. My house doesn't look dirty, right? But what happens is that you now have no visibility under the sink. You could have leaks that are going on back there, but you can't see anything, you know? And this actually happened to me in my bathroom sink. And because I pulled everything out, I was able to get on top of it and actually stop and address the problem before it spread to the cabinetry and the walls and created a problem where I needed to remove building materials. Right? This is the benefit of going in and pulling things out from under your sinks at least once a month if you want to do it every week, every two weeks. More power to you. The more often you do it, the better. Just to get a look, right? So in my master bathroom, not very long after we moved into this place, there was a leak under my sink. I didn't know about it. I open my cabinet, I pull everything out. I see something in the back. Mold growing all over one of the boxes of whatever it was that was back there. I don't know what the product was or whatever. I had a box in there. And the sink, like, faucet handle thing was dripping from under the cabinet. There's no way for me to see it from the top of the sink dripping down into the bottom of my cabinet. And it was landing on this box, though, right? So it hadn't actually hit the building materials yet. And from me going in there and pulling everything out, I caught it basically before. Because what would have happened is that eventually the water would have started to soak in, would have broken down the box a little bit, would have started spreading to the cabinet, to the walls. And then I would have had to call my landlord and been like, yeah, we need to rip out this whole cabinet in this wall back here. And how, you know, who wants to have that conversation, right? But that's what it would have turned into. And even if it's not your landlord, even if it's. You would have had to rip out a wall in a sink. Cabinet or you do what I did, because I was on top of it, what I did, I was like, oh man, that's crazy. I got rid of, you know, got rid of the box.

And then we had somebody come and then I put like a, like a, a bucket under there for the meantime to catch any dripping that was happening. So it didn't hit the sink. Called somebody to come out, they fixed the sink. Bam. Water problem gone. Didn't impact anything under the sink. And there you go. Like this one. This tip number one, kept my own place from having to have remediation that would have ripped out a wall and a cabinet. And you know, at that point they, you know, you know, the counters and all that stuff, I mean, who knows, you know, how far they, if that gets damaged, you have to replace counters. Like that costs money, right guys? So instead I literally went from something that could cost a couple thousand dollars to remediation for them to come out, set up containments, do everything that needs to be done, to having a, a plumber or a handyman. I don't know who they sent out here. Somebody come out here, fix the sink, cost like 40, 50 bucks for the new sink and whatever he charged in labor, which couldn't have been that much for the day, Right? Let's say they paid 100 bucks and they got the whole thing fixed and we avoided a big problem. Right? So that is the benefit from pulling things out of your sink consistently. I literally, I'm not exaggerating. Every single house I go into, I'm going to say every single house. I really want this number to be as anecdotally accurate as it can. I don't have like hard numbers, but I would probably say that 9 out of every 10 houses I go into, I find water damage under sinks. And we know that 80% of the time that we see signs of water damage, there's hidden mold behind there. So you do that math, right? So there's. Most houses probably have mold under a sink somewhere is kind of where I'm getting to on that. Right? So if you can avoid that, that's awesome. Okay. So then the second thing that I did on top of that afterwards, I was like, okay, I don't want this to happen again. It's one thing to pull everything out every month, but what if a leak happens three days after I pull everything out and then I wait a whole month and then it's too late, Right? So I went and I found like these under the sink, kind of rubber mats, like weatherproofing mat. Type things that they kind of have a lip around all the edges of it. And so if there is a leak, that, that that rubber kind of floor cover in the cabinet could hold up to a gallon of water within it before it actually impact the cabinetry. Right. So as soon as this happened, I was like, oh, man, I need to get one of these for every sink in my house. So I had, I don't know, five sinks or something in my house. I got five of them. I put it under every single one. Preventative? Yes. It cost me, I don't know, it was like maybe 40, 50 bucks for each one of those things or something. I don't know. I don't know what it was. So it cost me a little bit of preventative money. Right. But again, you spend a little bit in prevention to avoid having a problem that happens later down the road. Is every one of the things in my house going to leak at some point? Probably not. Right. But, man, I would much rather just like be prepared for that than have to deal with it later. Right. And deal with the inconvenience. And what if it's my sink one that does that? Well, there, now I'm out of a kitchen for like a week, right. If not longer, and we have all the stuff going on. I got a toddler in the house. Like, it's all these things. It's just a lot. And it costs money on top of it, right. Inconvenience, all that stuff. So that's tip number one. So that was all sink specific, but kind of think beyond that, right. Where's your washing machine for your clothing? Where is, you know, any other, your dishwasher in your kitchen? All these areas, you can look around these areas. So if you're looking around your dishwasher, around your dishwasher, you look at the bottom of the dishwasher on. It's usually kind of built into cabinetry. So there's going to be toe kick plates, which is like, if you try to kick your foot under your cabinets, you hit like this little piece of wood down there that's called a toe kick. It's where your toe actually hits when you hit it. It's under the cabinet doors and kind of recessed in a little bit so you can look down around that area on both sides of your dishwasher. And you could see, you know, a lot of times you could see water damage or you could see darkness growing on the toe kick plates. That's a clue. Something's.

Your dishwasher also has like a panel that you could. There's two screws on it. You unscrew the two screws, and you can see completely under your dishwasher. Super easy to do. And now you can actually see if there's any leaks or anything happening under there, Right? Same thing goes for your refrigerator. You could literally, there's two screws in kind of the grate that's on the bottom of the refrigerator. On most refrigerators, some of them they're at the top, but most of them is at the bottom. You take that off, and bam, you can see underneath your refrigerator. Super easy to see all this stuff, right? Just takes, literally, a screwdriver and two screws, and you can do this, right? So think about your refrigerator, your washing machine, anywhere else that you have plumbing lines that are where there's kind of water coming out at the end over there, and that's where you want to look. Okay? So that was tip one. It was sink focus was really about where water is used most often and things that you can do to try to stay on top of that to prevent water leaks. So that. That was number one. So number two was about showers. Okay? So we're just talking about sinks. Think about how many gallons of water, hundreds of gallons of water, gets popped out in your shower, right? You turn the shower on, you're in there for 10 minutes. I don't even know how much water that is, but it's a whole bunch of water. Right? And so a super common thing that happens in a shower, and we're going to talk about this for other areas, too, but you have your tile in your shower, right? And what is between all the tile grout. It's like the little grout lines. Okay? So, yes. While tile itself is, you know, waterproof, like, water's not going to go through the tile usually unless you have some weird tile that's not super solid, which some people do. Some people get, like, fancy showers that have some really cool, like, stone or something. That stone is, like, permeable, and water can soak into it. It's like, terrible idea, but it looks nice when you buy it. Anyways, most showers are, you know, kind of more standard tile of some. And then you have grout. Well, here's the thing. Grout is not waterproof. All right? And so as all of this water hits the walls of your shower, comes down the walls, and settles on the floor in your shower, there's also grout on your floor. Usually in a shower, or a lot of times, if you don't have, like, a solid shower or Something like that. That grout, like I said, it's not waterproof. So what's going to happen over time? Water is going to deteriorate that grout. It's going to. It's going to start eating away at it. Like, grout is not a forever thing. Grout is something that needs to be managed and redone and maintained. Okay, so in a shower with all this water that's spreading around, when you get out of the shower, and I didn't really notice this until I started doing it, but you get out of the shower, what do you do? Most people get out of the shower, they dry themselves off, they walk out of the shower, and that's what you do. You know how much water is still left in your shower by the time that you do that on the walls, running down the walls, on the floor.

Sitting in the grout, lines in the cracks where the wall meets the floor, all these places, and it's just going to eat away and eat away and eat away at the grout as long as that water is there. And that water's not going to dry for hours, probably. So think, if you shower every day, not only do you have all the water hitting in your shower, but then you've probably got hours after you're done with your shower. Water just keeps eating away and eating away and breaking away at the grout. This is why we have mold in our grout. This is why people say, hey, I have. I have mold in my grout. Why is this happening? It's because the grout's deteriorating. It's just going to happen, and there's nothing you could do about it. Right. It's just that. That's what it is. So the, the thing that you could do is prolong. You want to try to prolong the life of what's going on in your shower area of the grout, specifically, because you don't want water. As soon as you get holes and little, you know, tiny, little micro fractures in your grout, that's where water is going to start penetrating behind the tile and. And you're going to. You could end up with mold behind, you know, surrounding your shower. This happens way more often than people think. I've seen showers that get ripped out during remediation, and everything around there is just water damage and mold all over the place. Right. And we think that we're in this, like, waterproof room because it's a shower, but it's not. It's not waterproof. Okay. It's. There are so many areas that Water could penetrate through. We have to do our job to try to prevent that. So. So what do I do? So after I'm done with the shower, I have a squeegee. I squeegee down all of the walls of my shower. Okay. Most people stop there. Most people squeegee down the walls. All right. Where does all the water go when you bring a squeegee down the wall? All of the water. And by the way, it's a lot of water. I didn't realize until I started doing this how much water actually is left in the shower. So much. It all comes down to the joint where the wall meets the ground. And then we just leave it there. Right. That's what a lot of people do when they squeegee. Then they just leave it there. Well, you just brought so much more water now. A higher concentration of water all down to one spot, basically, where the wall meets the shower pan on the floor. What do you think is going to happen? That grout's going to get eaten away. It's probably going to get eaten away a lot faster. So you. In addition to getting water off the walls, you then need to go from the floor and pull with the squeegee, Pull all the water from the floor to the drain. Okay. This is what I do every single time I shower. I have a bench in my shower, too. I get the water off the bench as well, because that will sit there. Benches really retain, for whatever reason, they get really moldy in showers from water sitting on them. So. And when I say mold, I mean, like, underneath, like under the tile. Right. Like the. The structure of the shower. Like, it happens. So the second thing is in your shower when you're done showering. So I do. I get done showering. I open the shower, I get my towel, I dry off. This way I'm not cold anymore. Anymore, Right. Then after I do that, then I take the squeegee, I squeegee the doors and all the walls. I bring all that down to the ground, and then I take that and I bring it into the drain at the bottom, and that's what I do. And honestly, it probably takes me a solid 60 seconds. Like, it's not this big thing. And I'm not cold anymore because I dried off with a towel. And if you really think you might be cold and stick your robe right outside of your shower and then dry off, then put your robe on and then do it. Right, because you're not like, spraying water on yourself anymore anymore. So you could Be warm. Okay. So that is a kind of expanded explanation of what I do in the shower, but I think it's super important. I cannot tell you the number of showers that we see when we go into houses and we do inspections. Part of what we do is that we do moisture readings on all shower walls to see if water's getting behind the walls. So at least half of them have elevated moisture readings in the walls. Right. It's at least half of the showers that we go into and see on a daily basis. So it happens a lot. And this is something that you can do to help prevent that. All right, side note, other thing I have, like I said, my toddler, we in a different bathroom, give her a bath in a tub, right? And she loves splash water around. Loves, loves, loves doing it. So a couple things I do there too, right? So for those of you kids. So one, she doesn't need that much water in the tub. My, my mother in law comes over every now and then and, and she'll, you know, give Kensington baths, you know, to help out or whatever. And I go in there one time and she filled the bathtub like so high with water. It's just not, it was completely not necessary. Like she doesn't need that much water in that tub. What's she gonna do with that much water in the tub? She's just gonna throw that much more water all over the place. Like it's not necessary. So the first thing that I do is I don't really put a whole lot of water in there, right? It's. I'm not trying to have her like, take an actual, like, relaxing bath or I'm putting on, you know, scented candles and some nice music and stuff. Like, she's not taking that kind of bath. I'm just trying to give her a bath, right? So she's not soaking in there. She's not relaxing in there. I just need enough water to give her a bath. So if you limit the amount of water you put in the tub, then you're going to limit the amount of water that your kids could splash all over the place. And that's a big deal. The second thing, I keep a towel right next to me and I lay it on the edge of the tube and I keep it in my hands and I'm able to pull it up in the air so she starts splashing. Or if water starts going away, I pull the towel up, which basically, like, it extends the height of like the tub wall, basically. And I catch most of the water that, that would get Flown out in the towel before it gets anywhere. Right? That's the other thing I do. Then after she's done showering, I immediately wipe down all of the. The tub area. I wipe down the floor and any of the walls that might have got some water splash on them. Listen, it's fine. If water splashes on something, it stays there for a few minutes. Just when you're done with the bath, just wipe it all off. Right? Then you're not going to get a problem that starts from it. Okay? And then the other thing, I wipe down all of the walls, the tiled walls in the tub, shower area. The same thing I would do in mine because I don't use a squeegee because we're not like, spraying water all over the place. I just take the same towel I've been using to protect myself and the rest of the bathroom from her splashing escapades, and then I take that towel and I wipe down all the walls. All right, and by doing that, you're eliminating all of the excuses of my kid goes in the shower, in the tub and splashes water all over the place. You know, guys, so does mine, except I don't let. I limit the effect that that can have. Right? So that's not an excuse anymore because I figured it out, and it's been working well. Okay, so that's shower stuff. Okay, so we're going to get into number three here. Number three is similar. So we're talking about grout again, but this is grout outside of your shower. Okay, so there's grout in other places. Where do you have water? You know, other areas that you have sinks. Right? So your kitchen, your laundry room, if you have a sink, different places, Right? Kitchen is the main culprit here. Bathrooms are kind of the main culprit. So places where you're actually kind of splashing water a little more. Kitchens are number one. Bathrooms are typically number two. Like if you're washing your face or doing something like that. All right, so again, there. There is grout around areas on your counters. Okay. The biggest one is your backsplash. So you'll. You know why they call it a backsplash? Because water splashes against it, and they didn't want it getting to the walls. That's why they started putting tile on the back of walls, was to prevent water from getting to the walls and causing problems. Here's the thing, though. We've talked about grout before. If you splash a bunch of water when you're washing your dishes and. And it Hits the backsplash. And then what happens? It just kind of sits there the same way it would in a shower. And then what happens? Over time, it starts deteriorating the grout. And then what happens? Well, now there's holes in the grout. So now water can drip down under the grout and behind the grout, and then it gets into the wall behind the cabinets, and then it sinks down into the cabinetry. Okay, so in addition to, like, drying off your shower, basically with the squeegee, you do the same thing anywhere that you have a sink, where there's a backsplash, where they're splashing around. So, like, bathrooms, kitchens, those sort of things. Take your towel when you're done. Every time I'm done at the kitchen, I take a towel and I wipe all of it down again. If something hits there and is there for 30 seconds or a minute or a couple minutes even, it's not the end of the world. Just dry it and get rid of all the moisture. So you could prolong the lifespan of the grout that's there. Okay. The longer you leave, if you did dishes and then you don't dry it and it stays there, and it stays for hours before it evaporates and dries up. Think about how much more time that that you're adding or that you're subtracting from the lifespan of that grout versus if you dried it up in three minutes, right now you're three minutes versus, let's say, you know, I don't know, two hours, right? 120 or three hours. 180 minutes. Three minutes versus 180 minutes. You start doing the ratio and the math and how fast that adds up. And you could literally save years on the lifespan of your grout just by simply drying stuff. Right, so that was another one. So that was the next tip. Okay, tip four. So we're kind of getting past water now. So those are a few of the water preventative things. So this one is about dust. All right, so I've talked about dust a lot. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on this. But here's the deal. Anything that's floating around in your house is going to settle in your dust. We're not just talking mold. We're not just talking bacteria and that stuff. We're literally talking anything. We're talking insect fragments. We're talking pet hair and dander. We're talking skin fragments that break off of us while we're moving around. If you have rodents crawling around in your attic, or under your house or something or whatever. And they, you know, they have. They poop and they do different things. Like they're all that stuff. That stuff gets into the space and then it settles in the dust reservoirs. The dust reservoirs get continuously popped up into our breathing zone every single day we're in the house. It's called the human cloud effect. And so anytime that you take a step or you sit down on the couch, or you or your kid jumps up and down or whatever, you open a door, you shut a door, whatever it is, you're creating this little mini disturbance that's popping air up into the. Or popping whatever settled on the surfaces up into the air. That's dust. Dust is carrying all of this stuff. Dust is like the taxicab or the school bus or whatever that's carrying everything around. All right, so with that said, if I was going to tell you, okay, if we know that, let's roll with the school bus analogy. I'm just going with this off top of my head.

Let's say we know that we have all these school buses in the house, right? And they're all carrying all this stuff around. What if I told you I was like, all right, our goal is to not get hit by a school bus. That's what our goal is today. What would be the first thing that you would do to not get hit by a school bus? You wouldn't go where the school buses are. Like, that's the first thing that you would do, right? You would get rid of the school buses out of the equation. If there's no school bus in the equation, you can't get hit by a bus. Like, that's just what it is. Right? So how do we apply that to the house? Well, removing the bus means you can't get hit by the bus, right? So it's the same thing, except instead of us not going to where the buses are located, we're going to remove the buses from where we live. Right. That way they can't hit us. What does that mean? That means we clean the dust from our house because the dust carries all this stuff. Right. And so it's. It's just about having, like, a consistent cleaning regimen that, that you're doing on a regular basis. So don't do this thing, like, where you only clean your house once a year. Spring cleaning. Like, you're. If you're doing that, you're being exposed to so much crap in your house beyond the mold piece. All right? You really need to be cleaning your house in a. In More of a deep clean More often, I would say monthly again. You know, whatever works for you. Right. But, like, what does deep clean mean? Deep clean doesn't just mean, like, the areas that you can see with your eyes or the areas that you can reach easily. Right. Deep clean means you got to look around a room. I'm standing in my bedroom right now. Okay, we're going to play a game. I'm going to look everywhere that I can see where dust would settle, just from understanding how this works. All right? So I can give you an example. Here's a hint. Any surface that's horizontal is going to have dust settle on it. Okay. I mean, it makes sense, right? Gravity comes down. It's a horizontal surface. It's going to settle on it. Okay, so here I am, I'm in my room. First thing I'm looking at, I have a TV hanging on the wall. That means that dust is going to settle on the top ledge of the tv. It's a horizontal surface on the top. Okay, now I'm moving around. Up. I see my door trim leading into my room. Well, the very top of the door frame is a horizontal surface. Dust collects on top of that surface all the time. I look down at the floors. There's baseboards. There's a little. Little horizontal lip on the baseboards. Right. Because they stick out from the wall a little bit. All the tops of baseboards are going to collect dust. That's just what they're going to do. Okay, I'm going around. On this wall, I have a couple picture frames. The tops of the picture frames, even the interior, bottom of the picture frames have a ledge. I'm going over here. I have an air filter. You're like, oh, man. Air filter is supposed to clear everything. Yeah, but it's its own surface. Like, dust gets on the air filter. Dust gets caught up in, like, the filter grate where it's pulling everything in. So you got to clean that up. Okay, now I. Little to the left, I got a nightstand. Yeah, Stuff gets on the nightstand. Now I got my bed frame. Stuff gets on the bed frame. Cool. I have another nightstand. I have four windows on one side of the room. Each one of those windows has ledges. Each one of those windows also has, like, wooden window slats, which means that dust is going to settle on those. If I open up the window covering, then I've got the interior of the window where, like, you would pull the window up and down like the track. And there's. There's some dirt and dust on the Window track. Right now there's some dust inside the ledge of the window. There's all these areas in the window where dirt and dust collects. I go a little further to the left. I'm looking at a mirror that we have leaning against a wall. Well, there's a top ledge of the mirror. There's a bottom ledge of the mirror. Okay. And I literally just did in that second, I don't know, just a little 360 turn in my room. And I think I called out 20 places where dust is going to settle. Okay. And that's just what I could see. All right, so that's step one. Step one is start looking around in the way, like. Like geometrically, right? Like, where are there ledges that dust is going to settle? That's the first thing. Now let me turn around and look around my room again. Okay. So now I'm starting again at the tv. I'm looking around, looking around. I get to where, like, my bed and my nightstands are. Well, what about under my bed? What about under my nightstands? There's going to be collection there behind my bed, right? There's going to be collection back there. If I'm not cleaning back there, then it's going to keep adding up and keep adding up. If I'm not cleaning under my bed, if I'm not cleaning under my nightstands is going to keep adding up and adding up and adding up. The air currents will go under there. Just because it's not easy for my eyes to see under there doesn't mean that the airflow and the air currents are just going to stop and not go under there. It's not like they're like, oh, wow, Brian can't see under here, so I'm not going to go under here. It doesn't work that way. Right. Like, the stuff isn't smart. It's just it does what it does. So we have to outsmart it. Outsmarting it means we have to look beyond areas that are easy for us to see and or easy for us to access. So when you're thinking deep clean, it's not just like, have your housekeeper come and do what housekeepers do, which is do, like, basic cleaning of stuff that you can see so they don't have to work as hard as they really maybe should, and they still can get paid and you're still happy because everything on the surface looks good, Right? It's what's behind the surface, right? Under furniture, under, you know, behind areas. If you pull out a drawer, if you pull a drawer out of, like, your sink cabinet and you pull the whole drawer out. I guarantee you there's a whole bunch of dust and dirt and crap back there, right? All that stuff gets moved around the house. Okay, so closets. You pull things out of closets, you clean the closets, right? I mean, we're talking like a deep clean. And if you do this, you're going to remove a whole lot of the dust that's moving around. Dust is what carries all this stuff around. If you remove what's carrying it around, well, then you're not going to breathe it because it's not there anymore, right? So I'm not saying that you're going to get everything, you know, I mean, you're obviously not going to get everything, but, God, you might get 80% of it, you know, and if you're reducing that much of the breathing exposure in the house, then, hey, you're being exposed to that much less stuff, right? And that's a win. Okay? So that's what item four was. It was about dust and cleaning process. And then the last thing was about, like, scheduled maintenance of things. Okay? So there are certain things that you need people to come out and look at, right? Like, for example, let's talk about plumbing. There's really no way for me to know if there's a pipe, a pinhole pipe leak somewhere, right? It doesn't change my water pressure enough for me to really know about it.

And it could just happen and happen until it explodes and I have no idea about it. Right? Or what if my lines are getting clogged and there are signs that there is going to be a pipe leak or erosion is being seen and we can see that beforehand and we can avoid it, right? Things like that. So how do you know that you call in a plumber and you put them on a maintenance schedule, right? Say, hey, listen, there's nothing going on that I know of, but I want you to do full diagnostic check, a forensic check of all my pipes, all my lines. I want to make sure that nothing is either happening I don't know about, or nothing is like, almost getting ready to happen that we could try to prevent. All right? That's. That's one thing you can do. Okay, before I get into a couple other things, I've used this analogy before. I'll use it again. When my dad bought my car for me, my very first car, when I was young, the first thing he did when he gave it to me, he said, listen, you have to change the oil in this car every 3,000 miles, if you don't change the oil in this car, your car is literally going to explode. Okay? He's like, and I'm not buying you a new one. So you have to do this. It's just part of what you have to do when you own a car. A lot of us are taught something similar to that. And the idea is that you have to maintain your car. It's this working machine, it's this living thing. You have to maintain it. Otherwise things, you know, the lubrication is going to go away and things are going to start to grind and it'll create other problems or whatever it is, the filters get clogged up and that creates problems. All this stuff happens. That same stuff happens in our house. Yet for some reason we're never told that when you get a house, there's a maintenance plan that you really should be doing the same way that you bring your car into the shop every 5,000 miles, 3,000 miles. Like we're never told that. So what do we end up doing? We end up being in our house, being told, oh, a 10 year old house that's not old at all. That's really, that's a really new house. Do you know how much can happen in 10 years? I mean, it's insane how many things can happen in 10 years. Yet we think that it's not old and so it doesn't need to be looked at. And then we wait until some problem happens and then it ends up being super expensive to fix. And odds are it was happening for a lot longer period of time and created a bigger problem than we actually knew. And then you start uncovering it and realizing that the water leak that occurred from this thing that you didn't really know about for a long time and then actually spread over to this other area. And then the air moving around your house became contaminated over the course of a couple years because like you didn't even know about it. And then that air got pulled in your heating air conditioning system, and then that cross contaminated your heating air conditioning system. So by the time that you found out the source of the problem, whatever it was, not only is the source of the problem an issue, it spread from where it started in its immediate area and extending to other building materials. And on top of that, it cross contaminated your house, which means all of your belongings and your stuff, and then it got pulled in your heating and air conditioning system. So now as a result of that thing that happened a couple years ago, you might actually have to replace your entire heating and air Conditioning system because it's become contaminated. That's a lot. But you see the point, like if we wait for something to manifest and show, it's going to be so much worse than if we're staying on top of it. You know what I mean? And so plumbers are a big thing. I would say have somebody out once every six months, just do a deep dive on the house, make sure everything's fine. Roofs are another thing, right? Have somebody come out once a year, once every six months, check out your roof. I'll just think, oh, my roof is new. There's nothing wrong with my roof. You know what? A lot of times it's not your roof. A lot of times it's flashing, which are extra little seals that are around things that come out of your roof. Think about it. Your roof is a solid piece until you start popping holes out of it, right? You're like, oh, I have a chimney, okay? My chimney is a hole that's popped out of my roof. That means that there's a path for water to come down there. Unless it's. Unless there's a protection to keep that from happening. That protection is called flashing. Flashing breaks down way faster than a roof does. All right? So your roof may be okay, but if the flashing is not. Is deteriorating or breaking, then you can have water coming in from there. You know, so there's a lot of hole. Go look. Go outside and look at your roof and see how many things are actually sticking out of the top of your roof. You'll never have noticed. And you'll be like, oh, man, I've got. Okay, so there's an exhaust. There's different exhaust lines. Because think about it, your every exhaust fan in a bathroom should be exhausting out of the house somewhere. A lot of times they exhaust out of the roof. So you have multiple things popping out of your roof. Where there's exhaust lines releasing moist air from your bathroom. You're going to have an exhaust line for, like, your water heater. You're going to have one. You're gonna have some sort of drip or exterior thing for H vac system. Go look at your roof. There's going to be a lot of holes and things sticking out of your roof. So I'm standing in my bedroom right now. I'm just going to play a game. I'm opening a window. I'm looking at the house literally across the street from me or through my backyard. So I can only see one side of their roof right now, okay? And I'm going to count the Number of things I see sticking out of the top of their roof. All right, so I got a chimney. I got one, two, three other little vent things. I got one, two, Three, four, five, six, seven, eight other little things. So I said eight, nine. There's 12 things sticking out of the top of this person's roof right next door to me. That means there are 12 punctures in my roof where water could come in through. Okay, so it's not about the roof shingles. It's not about. My roof is only five years old. It's fine. It's about the rest of it, right? It's about all the. The holes that were literally cut in your roof to then allow some sort of vent to come out of there, and that can allow water to come in. All right, so it's so important to stay on top of that stuff. So that's the roof component. Let's see. Oh, and then H vac contractors, that's kind of the other big one. So again, have these guys come in every six months, have them clean everything. When we clean, it's cleaning the ducts, but it's also cleaning the air handler unit, the mechanical unit that the ducts connect to. So many times I see H vac contractors come in and they only clean one thing. Or I just did an inspection two days ago and. And I was saying that I wanted, you know, I wanted to test the H vac system. If you've listened to any of these episodes, you understand why I wanted to do that. And they were like, well, I mean, we just had the H vac cleaned two months ago. I was like, there's no way. There's no way you had this thing cleaned two months ago. They're like, no, I had it clean two months ago. I show them pictures. So much dirt and dust still inside of the air handler unit compartment. We opened the vents. There's a whole loads of dirt and dust inside the vents. They didn't clean this. Or if they did, they half assed it. Right? Like, there's no way for you to know that. So, like, it's important that you're on top of it. But in being on top of it, you also need to, like, what I would do is like, I want before and after pictures. I want you to show me what it looked like before. And then I wanted you to show me what it looks like afterwards. Right. And then in addition to that, one other thing that you can try to get them to do. Some people won't be on board for it, but when you're cleaning ductwork. If you have flex duct, sometimes they may actually tear a duct line when they're cleaning it because they put, like, a brush in, it spins around really fast.

So you could do basically duct leakage testing before they're cleaning and then after they're cleaning. Okay. And if the numbers are significantly different after they've cleaned, then that means that they punctured a duck line somewhere and got to figure out where that is and seal that up. Okay. So I know I'm kind of giving you some of the pitfalls, but the flip side of that is if you're not cleaning this stuff out consistently, you're going to be creating an environment that one is going to accumulate everything that's going on in your house. Remember, we just talked about dust and cleaning the dust out of the house and not getting hit by a bus. Like the. If you think of it that way, your H VAC system is like the bus depot where all the buses go at the end of the day, and you go by a parking lot, and there's like, 100 buses sitting in a parking lot. And then the next day starts, and then, you know, it's 7:00am it's time to take all the kids to school. All the buses leave. Well, the equivalent to that is when you turn your air conditioning on. It's like, oh, bam. Cool. All the buses leave, and they get spread out throughout your entire house. Right? And then at the end of the day, they all park in there again. And whenever you turn your system on and off, it's like they're moving and they're coming back. Right. So you got to get rid of the source of the dirt and the dust. That's the buildup in there. Okay. So that's why cleaning is important. The other thing is, from a mechanical perspective, you need to make sure filters are being changed. There's no leaks in the. In the condensation areas. You know, there's no leaks under the unit. So many times I go up in an attic or basement, wherever an air conditioning system lives, and the thing is leaked, and you can see it. Like, it's all around it. It's super obvious. If anybody came out and looked at that, they would know that. Right? But, like, nobody looks at it because you're like, well, why would I look at this? I don't need to see it. Like. Like, everything seems fine. I'm looking at the vent in my room. The air comes out, feels cold. Everything's good. Like, that's. That's not how it is. You know, so, so that's your cleaning schedule. So just three basic or your maintenance schedule. Three basic things. Plumbing, roof, H vac can have a really, really big difference on stuff. Okay, so that, that was the article that I wrote. The article I wrote was not a 35 minute dissertation on all of this stuff. It's a shorter read. So what I want to do, like I said, is that I wanted to kind of expand on that, explain all those things, give you the thought process on why I'm talking about that stuff. Understand that this isn't like five things that will stop mold from growing in your house, like at all. That's not what it's meant to be. But it's five things that you can do that's really going to help to prevent, you know, problems from occurring and maybe more problems that might already be happening from maybe other leaks and things that you're not aware of and other problems in history and things like that. So this isn't the end all, be all, but it's a really, really, really good preventative kind of checklist that you could do for yourself. Alright guys, so anyways, hope you guys found that helpful. And if you did, you might want to like bookmark this episode or something so you could kind of write down the different things or make yourself like a cheat sheet of things or like schedule in your calendar when you're going to go through and empty stuff out of your sinks and when you're going to set up phone calls to get people to come out or whatever it might be. All right, so I hope you guys take this stuff to heart and thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.

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