Mold Smell Explained: What You Need to Know

In this video, we're going to talk about mold and smells. I'm Dr. Diane Mueller. I'm a Lyme and mold health expert. And this common misunderstanding of if I don't smell mold, it does not exist. Wipe that from your mind. Molds can emit smells. When they emit smells, they are a chemical that's being admitted, and this chemical is being emitted is a volatile organic compound, a voc, similar to the compound you find in some paints. Now, what's interesting about mold is not all species of mold will emit VOCs. And even if a mold is emitting VOCs, it will not do so all the time. It oftentimes will emit VOCs when there's a huge amount of humidity in the air, for example. But if there's less humidity, the VOC emission can go down and it can be undetectable. A lot of people are starting to use things like mold dogs to recognize if mold is present. These dogs can be fun and useful, and typically, if they smell mold, it is present. And sometimes they can find mold that has been missed by inspectors. However, because molds are not always going to emit VOCs, and not all molds have them, dogs will also miss vocals, the smell. So even if a dog's been trained to smell mold, it can miss mold as well. And so while a positive, a dog reacting like, there's mold here, there's mold here, I found some, right? And they're barking, they're going crazy. While that oftentimes is a positive, they don't smell anything. We can't rule out that mold is there. So the answer to the question is this, that, yes, sometimes molds do emit smells, but not all the time. Not all molds emit smell. So if you're trying to use smell as a way to determine if mold is present or not, the way to look at it is this. If you smell mold, if you smell that musty VOC type of smell, then yes, it is present. If you do not smell that, it means nothing. It does not mean present. It does not mean not present. It is just a zero, like data point. It has no value at all. So you definitely want to use really good quality inspectors. Remember, just like the dogs, the inspectors oftentimes miss a lot of things too. And they miss a lot of things because of how they are sampling. So there's quite a few mold videos on this channel where I talk about different inspectors. Look for the videos on how to kill mold, on how to get mold off the ceiling, on does vinegar kill mold those videos. I talk a lot about mold and about the problems with standard mold inspectors. How to find a good inspector because you definitely do not want to use smell as the only way you are testing for this. Although if you do smell it, like I said, you can probably go straight to calling a really good quality remediator because it's present. All right, that's it for this video. Please do subscribe and check out the other videos on this playlist to help you with all things mold. If you're interested in helping resolve any health issues that have come from mold, please do check out my free Discovery Call link in the Show Notes. I'll see you in another video.