97: Do I really need to clean my house after remediation?

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

All right, everyone, what's going on? Welcome to another episode of Molefinders Radio. So today I'm going to talk about this question. I've been getting a lot from clients, and it's really specific to remediation, and it's about the different phases in remediation, sort of like what we need to do and what we don't need to do. And I think. I mean, the reason that this question gets asked is because if you have a lot of problems in your house and there's a lot of remediation that's needed, obviously there's an expense to that. Right? And so that's really why the question is getting asked. What I try to do when I write remediation plans, and this is what our company does. For every project, I take myself out and we have. We take ourselves out of making the financial decisions for you. Okay? Our job is to tell you everything that we found that's going on and what we think needs to be done in order to fix it properly. Right. If I looked at something I was like, oh, to do this is going to be more expensive. So instead of writing it in here the way that it should be done, I'm going to, like, modify it and make it either take it out of the plan completely or do some, like, lesser version of this thing that I know isn't going to be as effective. But I'm doing it because I'm afraid of what the cost is going to look like. And so I'm making that decision instead of you. What I'm doing is I'm taking that power away from you to do that. And if you were someone who's like, listen, Brian, whatever you tell me to do, I'm going to do. And then I send you a plan that I've modified from what I really think it should be to something that I was afraid it might cost too much, so I didn't do it. But you were of the mindset that you were going to, you know, follow the plan because you're committed to this, then I've just done you a huge, huge, huge disservice. Right. And so That's a very big thing about we inspect about when I'm working with folks and Corey's working with folks and some of our other consultants are working with folks is we don't take that control from our client, right? We share with them everything that we think needs to be done. And then obviously we have conversations and phone calls, walk through options and we can talk about those things. Sometimes folks are completely fine doing it.

And that's great. Other times, people, for whatever reason, maybe it's a finance thing, maybe it's a convenience thing. Maybe they just don't want to take all the stuff out of their house because they feel like that's a big to do and they don't want to do it for whatever reason. There might be parts of the plan that they don't want to do. Maybe they just.

That you guys found some stuff in here. But honestly, like, I don't want to do that again. It's not my place. It's not our place to tell you to do that or not do it. Right? It's our place to tell you what we think is best. Right? So that's kind of where I want to start. Everything. But the big thing that I want to talk about here is what we call the home cleanse, right? So let's take a step back and let's talk through kind of the phases of remediation and how this works. So I use this analogy all the time. You've probably heard it if you listen to the show. Mold is like a factory, right? And so here's the deal. Mold, if you think of it, is no different than if you're driving down the street and you look and you see this factory on the street, right? You can't see what they're making inside, but smoke is coming out of the top of the factory. The smoke is creating air pollution that gets in the air. If we walk out of our house and stand on our front yard and there's a bunch of air pollution here, now we're breathing that and that's impacting us, okay? The thing is that the air pollution isn't actually the. The problem. I mean, yeah, it's a problem. It sucks. You're breathing that stuff in. You shouldn't be doing that. It's a problem. It's not the problem, okay? The problem is the factory over here that was pumping it out in the first place, right? That's the problem. Our entire inspection and remediation philosophy and plans and everything are built around that concept. So if you take nothing away from how we go through a house, take this away from it, we find where we think the sources are, and. And we test and validate those. And then we test basically the occupied living spaces through the house, which are your exposure pathways. That's how you breathe stuff in, right? It's not that you're breathing in mold that's behind a particular wall. It's that you're breathing in mold that's worked out from behind the wall and has gotten into your living space, right? So we have to know that piece of the plan or of the equation so we can write the correct plan. Okay? So we identify where the sources are. We tell you what we think needs to be done to handle the sources. Then we identify how those sources have impacted the living space, which is the, you know, when you walk around the house, whatever is getting popped up in your breathing zone. This also includes your heating and air conditioning system, which is a component that's forcefully moving air all over the place, right? We're putting all those things together, okay? So now that we know what all this stuff looks like, so now we come with a plan, and let's just make something up. Let's say you got three rooms. Let's say there's a bathroom that has to get, I don't know, gutted. And let's say there's a kitchen where there was a leak under the sink. You got to remove the sink and the wall behind the sink. And let's say you had a roof leak in a bedroom or something. So we got our. You got to remove some ceiling or something like that. Let's say that's what you have to do. Okay, See if I can remember that. What did I say? Gut. Master bathroom. I said sink, cabinet, and I said master bedroom ceiling. All right, we're going to work on this. Okay? So let's say that's what's going on, right? So our remediation plan is going to address all those areas, right, Those three areas, and tell you exactly what to do and how to do it and how to clean it and what not to and all that stuff, right? But in addition to that, it's going to include what we call a home cleanse. Okay? Now, because there's only three areas here, and let's say your house is like 3,000 square feet or something, right? You might be like, why do we have to clean the house? Like, I don't get it, right? Like, what if we just remediate these couple things? It's not like we have problems everywhere, right? All we Got are these couple rooms. Let's bring somebody in, contain the rooms, remediate it properly. It's going to be the best remediator in the world coming in and doing that piece of the equation. We know for a fact that there is no more source level mold growth. There's no factories left in those places. Right. Let's just make that assumption that we know that that's happening. Why do I have to do a home cleanse, Brian? Why do I need to do things? Why do I need to move things out of the house potentially? Why do I need to go through the whole house and clean everything? That part could be expensive, it could be time consuming. It'd be really freaking annoying to have to move things out of your house. Right. Well, go back to what we talked about on how this whole thing works together, the ecosystem inside your house. Right. The reason you have to do that is because if we tested throughout the house and we found that there was elevations of mold, there was elevations of, let's say, actinobacteria, actinomycetes, let's say there's mycotoxins, whatever it is, that stuff is in the house. Okay. It's not just in those three rooms where the problem happened. Right. Because we did a collection throughout the living spaces of the house. We didn't do collections from behind walls directly on top of colonies. In order for us to figure that out, we're doing a sampling collection from the living space of the house. So if you knocked out a couple walls and gutted this bathroom and took out the kitchen sink cabinet and removed the master bedroom ceiling. Yes. If you did all of those things, sure, you got rid of the source. But go back to the analogy of the factory with the smoke coming out. You did nothing for the smoke that has come out of those that has settled in the house. That's one reason you have to do home cleanse, okay? Because there's still stuff left over. So if you do that remediation, and let's say you spend like, I don't know, 15 grand, let's say on that remediation or whatever it is, you spend that money, it's a lot of money, right? You spend that money on those three places, you walk back in the house, you haven't cleaned the whole house, you're going to feel the same way that you felt before you did that source remediation. Why? Because everything that's still in the house is still getting popped up into the breathing zone as you're walking around. It's this Thing called the personal cloud effect. I used to call the human cloud effect. And then I reread the research study and realized that I just named it something that I liked better. So it's actually called the personal cloud effect is what it's called. But here's what I tell clients. If you ever watch Charlie Brown, you know, as a kid or whatever, and there was that one kid in the show that just always had this cloud of dirt around him no matter where he went. He's like the stinky kid, right? The dirty kid. Well, that happens to us every time we walk around the house. We basically create this invisible cloud, this personal cloud of walking around. I sit down on my chair, I bump. Well, you know, I'm in a video. I just like punched a wall. I'm trying to look for a table. I didn't have one in front of me. You get on your desk and you. And you bump a table. You do whatever. You walk on a piece of carpet, you jump in your bed, you. All these things, they stir up particle in the house. The particle is what's containing all of these issues that we found because we're doing dust samples, which are particle identification samples for these particular. Whether it's molds or chemical compounds or whatever it is. So anyways, you walk in the house, you did nothing to clean the house. You walk back in, here comes the dirty kid from Charlie Brown popping up, stuff all over the place, and bam, you're breathing again. Bam. You feel just the same way that you felt before. And now you think remediation doesn't work. You have to burn your house down. And that's not really the case. It's just that you didn't do a full remediation plan. That's the problem. You just didn't do the whole thing. Okay, that's one reason. One reason is there's stuff left over that you didn't get. Okay, here's the other reason. This is the other reason that nobody ever really thinks about.

The standard protocol for when you're remediating a source level area. So again, we've got. We've got a bathroom that we're gutting. We've got a kitchen sink area that's coming out, and we've got a ceiling and a bedroom that's coming out. Okay. Each one of those rooms is going to build a containment. Those containments are basically. Think of it like a. If you ever watch a Dexter, think of it like a Dexter kill room, basically. But it's plastic walls and everything. You're Creating a room that's contained. What's the other thing that's included in these spaces is something that's called negative pressure. Okay. What negative pressure means is that you create basically a suction inside of the containment that's sucking air in just a little bit. Sucking air in. Sucking air in. So when they're doing all the demolition and removing walls and doing whatever they need to do, they're creating all this disruption, this big disturbance, right? All this stuff is getting spread everywhere. The purpose of the containment is to not cross contaminate. I don't know why I did that in quotes. It's a real thing, is to not cross contaminate into the living spaces of the house. So what they do is they create what's called engineering controls. These engineering controls is basically negative pressure. They also include air scrubbing machines in there or whatever. But the negative pressure is a big component of it. This is what I want to focus on. All right, let's think about what negative pressure is. Okay. Negative pressure is basically this suction that's being created that is. You know what? One second, I got to do a little airplane mode on my phone. There we go. I'm recording this on video, by the way. So I'm going to try to put this out, But I just realized if somebody called me would stop the whole video, I'd be very upset. So two seconds, airplane mode. I'm good. Okay, so we're talking about negative pressure. Negative pressure is creating a suction. Okay. Now this ties back to bigger conversations that I'm usually having with attorneys, more so. Like, I was just in a deposition for four hours the other day, which I don't even do these anymore. So this is like an old, old thing. But I really. I don't really do them anymore. But anyways, I'm going. I'm in a deposition for four hours, and I got this woman who's the attorney, basically trying to.

Somehow convince the record that mold can't impact the space from behind walls. It's basically what she's trying to do. And so I had to explain this whole process of how airflow moves from behind walls. And I have these research studies and all this stuff that proves that. Here's the short way for you guys. Listen. This is just common sense. If mold didn't get out from behind walls and from behind sinks and ceilings and all this stuff, then you can have mold growing all over the interior walls and all under your house and all these places, all that you want, and you could walk through your house and you would never get sick because it would never come out. Right? But we know that it comes out because we do testing. That shows it. Right. Part of the way it comes out is through air currents that move through the house. Okay? So this is how I explain to clients a lot of is.

Anytime that you. Well, let me say this. If you've ever. If you've ever opened a door and you. And you, like, heard a door somewhere else slam shut by itself, that's happened to you raise your hand, I can't see you. I'm raising my hand. Anyways, I know that happens to everybody. So you open a door and all of a sudden you hear like, a door shut, or you open a window, and then a door somewhere else just like, slams shut. What's happening is that you change the airflow in the house. You change the air pressure. Okay? And so the slamming of the door is a visual representation of how forceful these air currents are moving through the house, are literally slamming a door in your house. Right? These airflows and air currents change all the time. So anytime you open a door, you open a window, you turn on your heating or air conditioning system, you turn on the exhaust fan in your bathroom, you use your clothing dryer, which is sucking air out of an exhaust fan. There's so many things you could do. And you turn on your cooking and you turn on the hood vent over your oven, and you're sucking air out. You're creating suctions and negative airflows, or not always negative, but you're changing the airflow, I should say. And the air currents start moving all over the place. Right? That means that's how all the stuff gets out from behind the walls. Okay? So basically what's happening is you're changing the airflow and you're sucking stuff out. Okay? You're sucking stuff out from behind the walls. So that's the point that I want to get to. Now let's take a step back to. We created this beaut. Containment that's in place. We put engineering controls in this containment because we don't want to cross contaminate out into the space. Meaning we're creating a suction that's constantly pulling into the containment. How is that suction any different than you turning on the exhaust fan in your bathroom? How is that suction any different than you running your clothing dryer? And the exhaust line from your dryer is pulling air out and changing the airflow? How is that suction any different than you cooking and turning on the hood oven over your Oven and sucking air in a direction. When you do source level remediation, you are inherently creating a negative airflow that is going to pull stuff out of walls. Okay? So even if you didn't find a whole bunch of problems in dust testing throughout the house initially, right. You still need to do a level of cleaning throughout the whole house. Because the remediation that you're doing in the bathroom and in the sink under the kitchen and in the bedroom ceiling in these different areas, that is actually going to pull things out of other areas of the house, right? The house is a living system. This idea of containment we talk about all the time, and it is really important. The benefit of containing is far, far outweighs the negative of creating a negative or the negative. The downside of creating a negative suction that might pull things in from adjacent walls and stuff, it's definitely better to be containing. I'm not telling you not to be containing, but we have to understand that every action has a reaction, right? There's a consequence to every action that you do. There's nothing that's perfect. And so if you're coming in and literally forcefully changing the airflow within your house, because that's what you're doing, Think about it. You're doing remediation in a room that doesn't happen in like an hour, right? You might have remediation going on for days, for weeks. You might have these negative air machines running for weeks in this room that's creating this negative suction airflow for weeks. Where's that air coming from? It has to come from somewhere. Okay? So you think of this way. Your house is a big box, all right? It's made to have. I'm just gonna throw a number out 10 units of air in this house at all points in time, right? That means that if five units left the house somewhere, five units have to come back in from somewhere else. The house has to be equilibrium, has to have an equilibrium state. And I'm just putting out a number 10 units just so we can use this for visual, right? So this is the same thing for a heating air conditioning system. There's a certain number of airflow that has to go through. There's this kind of equilibrium that's created, right? And if you're removing some of that air, if you're sucking it from one place, it's got to come from somewhere else. It's got to rebalance itself. And that's what happens when you're doing containments. And you know, even if you're just doing two or three rooms, and you've got this 3,4000 square foot house. And you're like, brian, why do I have to clean the whole house? This is why you have to clean the whole house. All right? You have to clean the whole house because you're going to. You're going to pull stuff out of other places. And guys, it's not just mold, right? I mean, I know mold finder radio, I'm talking mold all the time. Do you know what other crap is. Behind all the walls in your house? Is freaking gross. You guys have ever opened walls and seen what's back there? I've seen it. It's nasty. There's like old degraded insulation. You might have termites, you might have rodent droppings that are back there. You got all this other stuff that's back there. You don't want any of that crap getting into the house, Right? Air quality from big picture perspective is not just about mold, right? So this negative air flow that we're creating in these containment spaces is going to pull all of that crap out of these walls. You're not going to see it because these are tiny, tiny particles that you can't see. Right? And so. But it's going to get in the space. You need to clean the house, right? You have to clean the house to some extent. Okay. And you know the level of what you clean it. So I'm not going to slap your wrist until you have to do it a certain way. I'm going to tell you the way that I think it needs to be done. For example, if we're going through the house and initially I find that there's toxins in the house or the bacteria loads super high, I'm going to give you our more aggressive cleaning plan, which might mean you're removing things from the house in order to clean properly. If we do all that testing and it really doesn't show, there's a whole lot going there. Yes. When you do source remediation, you're going to be pulling stuff out, but maybe you don't have to do as significant of a cleaning, right? So, like, there's options, there's different ways you could do it, but you really have to clean the whole house afterwards. All right? And that's really the point of this episode. The importance of full home cleanse, how it integrates into the overall remediation plan and the strategy. And just real quick to give you the order of how this goes, you do. If you're going to. This is called the order of events. For entire remediation, I'm literally giving you guys, like what I write in my reports for people. So step one, if you're. Whatever you're doing with your heating air conditioning system, if you're cleaning it, if you're removing it, that happens first. It's the very first thing that happens. Once you're done with it, you then seal it all up. If you've removed all of it, you're sealing up the holes where the ducts used to be and all that stuff. If you're cleaning it, you're cleaning it all up. You're sealing all the vent covers and everything. You're sealing off the system after that so it's protected from that point forward. All right? So that's everything that you're doing.

The second step is then to handle the source area. So in this scenario we're talking about, this is the bathroom that you're gutting. The kitchen sink area, the ceiling. This is where the mold is actually growing. That's step two. Step three, then, is the cleaning of the whole house, which is basically what we've been talking about this whole time. Why it's important you do it at that point. Because any mess that you made that from the H vac cleaning or removal. Listen, when you're cleaning or removing it, you're disturbing stuff. It's falling down, it's getting all over the place. Even if you don't think it is. Like, there's stuff getting out. So that's going to happen and settle in the space. Then you're going to do your source level remediation. You're going to have these negative air machines in there. They're going to be pulling stuff out of the walls into the house. All this stuff's going to settle in the house. So the home cleanse you do at the end is really to clean up the mess from those two things. Right. And so the home cleanse handles all of that. And then once that's done, ideally at that point, you're doing retesting to make sure that the remediation that you had done actually worked. Meaning if I was gutting a bathroom because there was mold in there, I sure as hell better be sure that the mold is gone before I spend all the money to put a new bathroom up. I cannot tell you how many times remediators come in. They just rip stuff out, but they don't actually remediate the building materials. And they leave mold in the framing and the studs and all the stuff. And they put walls and they Rebuild this beautiful bathroom over the top of it. And then you find out that there's still a mold problem back there later. And then I come in and I'm like, listen, you got to remove all this again. Right? You don't want that to happen, right? So you retest those areas. The retesting, which I've talked about in other episodes, but it's air sampling because they're disturbing a bunch of stuff in the containment. So you do an air test in the tame and the containment. You do have to make sure all that gets cleaned up. But the other really, really important piece is surface testing. The framing components and whatever building components are left over to make sure that the growth that grew into them is removed. Right? So you want to make sure that the source is actually out of the building material. The mold doesn't just grow on drywall and floor and stuff, Right. It grows in the subfloor, grows into framing, all this stuff. You have to remediate that stuff. And so many remediators shortcut all this stuff, and it's a problem. There's other things that need to get done. If you actually. If you go to remediation mistakes, I made a list, like a little mini ebook of the 10 most common mistakes that I see remediators do. So if you're, like, more interested in, like, the other things you want to make sure that's happening, you can go download. Download that. It's remediationmistakes.com. you can get that. Anyways, post testing. Let's make sure everything worked. After that, you bring in the new air conditioning system is step four. After you know that all the mold problems are gone and the house has been cleaned. Right. You don't want to bring in a new air conditioning system, turn it on and cross contaminate it because there's still crap floating everywhere, right? So that's always the last thing that you do. And that is the order of events, guys. All right, so I think that's all that I got for you guys today. I just wanted to share that with you. And, hey, just to let you know, I'm testing something out right now, so I'm going to put something in my story about it, but I'm testing out what's called a live.

Why I can't say this. I'm basically trying to figure out a way to turn this podcast into a live radio show. And so what I did is right now I'm actually recording this live on an app called Green Room. Green Room is an app that's Created by Spotify, it's basically a live audio app. So it's like super similar to Clubhouse. If you guys have heard of Clubhouse. The only difference is you don't need a special invite to get here and it's completely free and you could be there immediately. Right? So I'm in here right now. I'm the only person in this room because I've never told anyone about it yet. But I'm going to start giving you guys heads up when I'm going to go in and do like a live show. So there in the future, there's going to be molefinders Radio Live and I'm going to give you guys a heads up and all you have to do is download this app and follow me on the app and then you'll be able to pop right into this room. The room looks like this. Again, I'm doing video, but that's the room. So you can see I'm the only person in here right now. But you would pop in here and then you all take questions, interact with you guys, you could get on, we can chat and it could turn into more of like a real live radio show, which is something I want to do more of because I want to be interacting with you guys a little more directly, to be frank with you. I don't know how, how much more I could just talk about stuff for hours at a time. I would love to have some questions I can answer here. So anyways, this is my first test of that. Additionally, I'm also testing recording this while I'm doing it. So I'm actually looking at a video right now. I'm going to see if maybe I could post the full video episode too and try to give this to you guys in a couple different ways where you can access things a little more easier. Anyways, there's some things I'm tinkering with so you can see where my head's at. But anyways, I know I've been gone for a little bit on paternity and kind of getting some things handled behind the scenes. I do have something super, super exciting. If you saw my Instagram story the other day, you saw that I'm working on a secret project. It should be done by next week. This secret project you are going to freaking love. And honestly, it's going to. It's going to cause a lot of rifts in the industry.

And I'm kind of excited about it. So anyways, I'm not going to say anything more about it right now, but just keep an Eye out. You could text the mold phone and I'll give you updates on that. The phone number for the mold phone. Hold on. I forgot. Let me see if I could find it real quick. Otherwise, it's on my Instagram profile. In the bio is the phone number for it. I'm trying to pull it up right now. Let's see how fast I could get it up. If not, then. Oh, no. Almost, almost.

Almost. All right. Sorry, I can't find it that fast. Go to my Instagram account, Oldfinders. Phone number is in the bio. You can text the mold phone. I'm going to be updating everybody about these live radio shows, like these live podcast shows and the new secret project and everything through text message first. So if you guys are into that stuff and you want to know everything that's happening first, go to the text community, do it there. Or I should say just opt in. Literally just say, hey, Brian, like, I want to know stuff. I'm not going to immediately respond to you with here's where it is, because I don't have it yet, but it will. It'll let me know that you want to know. And I do share things periodically about stuff that's going on. Little tips that I'm hearing, different things I'm not putting out to the masses because honestly, they're like little tidbits. But I think these little tidbits can be super, super helpful. Right? So that's what the text community is all about. So you could jump in there, get that. And that is the end of this new era. Maybe I don't want to guarantee this new era of molefinders Radio. There's video, there's live audio, there's all this stuff. Anyways, guys, that's what I got for you. So 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, 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.