Indoor Air Quality Solutions and Implications for Health: 80

Everyone, welcome to the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast. Today I am joined by David Milburn of HypoAir, and I'm really excited to share his knowledge with you guys today. I've heard him on a few different podcasts, and he's just such a wealth of knowledge on air quality and filtering. And I just thought you have so many interesting things to say that I'd love for you to share it with the Heal, Nourish, Grow audience. So welcome, David. And if you could just kind of introduce yourself and, uh, let us know how you got involved in this space.

Well, it's very kind of you. I do not like listening to myself speak. Hopefully we can help some people. We're basically on this journey with you guys. We've been doing air quality for about 15 years, and basically every week we hear about a new situation we've never heard of before. So we're kind of in that same process of just trying to discover solutions and trying to basically unmake how unnatural our homes are. And try to bring them into a more natural state. So we're kind of on that journey with you. We love having these conversations. We learn from you, we learn from our customers, we hear the situations they deal with, and then we just try to find solutions to that. But yeah, our guiding principle is basically how can we bring in what's happening outside? So what are the natural processes outside, bringing them inside to make our homes more natural because they're very unnatural and that's leading to a bunch of unintended consequences.

Yeah, the indoor air quality, uh, conversation, I'm sure we'll get to that later in the podcast, but I think one of the things that's top on my mind today is because I couldn't sleep very well last night, which is unusual, thankfully, but I ended up listening to yet another podcast because that's how I keep up to speed on all the latest news and all the latest technology. And, um, they brought up the mold conversation again, and I know this is something that I've heard you talk about before, so I think it's really important for people to know that there are some ways that they can deal with it, that they can improve their indoor air quality above and beyond what their HVAC system is doing. So maybe you could start by just kind of sharing with people a little bit about why the way we build houses now can create this situation and the things that you've sort of found that can mitigate that.

Absolutely. So the understanding about mold is growing kind of across the board, and one of the reasons for that that we're finding is basically humanity, we're kind of in this experiment of modern construction. And then one of the biggest consequences of that is very unnatural concentrations of mold. And so mold, you're going to find outside, you walk outside in a forest, you walk outside in a city, you're going to find mold, but the concentration is really small. So with a lot of air quality issues, it's the dose that creates that poison. It's the, it's the concentration that begins to overwhelm the body. And so if our homes are made of materials that mold loves to grow in, drywall and whatnot, and then we seal them up as tight as we can for energy efficiency, what we're doing is trapping mold inside, both the living and the dead spores. Both can carry the mycotoxins and then, um, it's able to grow outta control. There's no natural predator, there's no natural process that's suppressing it. And so especially if you're in a place with humidity, you don't even have to have leaks in the house to have mold problems. It's just how the home was built and where it's built. So, you know, we have clients where new construction, top of the line, really expensive home in Florida, within a couple months it's just fully contaminated with black mold. And, you know, it's, it's really sad because we hear all the horror stories. And so mold is not, you know, the end-all be-all, you know, burn your house down and start over. If you find it, you're gonna find mold kind of, you know, in new furniture. You're gonna find mold in, mold sampler test kits, you know, before you even take a sample. So mold is going to be all over the place, but it's the concentration that matters the most to us. And then all of our bodies are going to interact with mold differently. But you mentioned the HVAC system. A lot of people know— no one ever taught them about the HVAC. So maybe you move into a house you're renting, or maybe when you buy a house, no one ever even told you to change the filters. So we have people that have spent, you know, $100,000 on biohacking equipment, and then they've never changed the filter in their HVAC system, or maybe they've spent $5,000 on plug-in HEPA air purifiers and they've got the cheapest possible filter in their HVAC system. The problem is that HVAC system is moving exponentially more air than thousands of dollars worth of HEPA plug-in products. And then HVAC system is a damp, dark environment that is prone to harbor mold, or at least distribute mold. And then one of the other challenging things that we find is the HVAC system is almost always located in an unfinished part of the house.

Yeah.

So, you know, you might have this nice new home and then you've got this unfinished attic and that's where they put your HVAC system, or you've got an unfinished basement that floods, that's where the HVAC system is. So a lot of times these HVAC systems are, you know, it's kind of a outta sight, outta mind, you know, you don't really see what's happening behind that vent. But a lot of times that's gonna be the kind of the root of your air quality. Either benefits or problems. And with something like mold, a lot of times mold's gonna be growing in or around the HVAC system.

Mm-hmm.

Or if there's any type of leak, any type of, um, humidity issue, then that mold can take root inside the HVAC and then be distributed through that system. Or in the case of maybe you have a leak in a bathroom and sometimes that mold can then get back into the HVAC system. So if you have an unhealthy HVAC system, That's a hard thing to overcome. So if someone has central air of any kind, we say start there with the air quality conversation, 'cause you can undo that, you can mitigate it, you can take steps to be preventative in the future. And then with our technologies, you can upgrade that into the air purifier. But not everyone has central air. So central air is relatively unique to North America for homes. And so a lot of places you might have like a window-mounted system, maybe you have no AC, maybe you open your windows. And in many cases, that's great., you know, to cool off your house. But maybe you live next to a train station or a steel factory. So we have those clients too where it's, um, your unique situation where your home is, how it was made, what's going on there is gonna kind of dictate the steps you need to take to make it a more natural environment. But to us in North America, at least mold is the single greatest air quality problem that we're facing right now.

Yeah. And a lot of people, I think it's an interesting thing to just bring more awareness to because I think a lot of people hear, oh, mold, and And, in this one interview that I was just listening to, and it's actually a really high-level, really popular podcast, and he threw out the word, it's like a conspiracy really that there's that much kind of hiding of what is happening and what you described, like the more efficient the homes we get, the more mold problems we're seeing and nobody really wants to take accountability for this. And then, people hear that and they think, "Well, I don't have allergies or I'm not sensitive to mold." But, some of these health problems, it runs the gamut, right? So, I've heard, like you were saying, the horror stories where people are just completely debilitated and having all kinds of very, very serious health problems, or it can just go to you're really fatigued all the time and that's it. And you don't know why. And it could be something as simple as that your indoor air quality is poor. So I do like to bring that up because if you've ever been experiencing a health problem where, you know, your diet's dialed in and you do all these things that we talk about on this podcast, right? You're pretty darn hardcore. Well, your air might be one of the final things that you just really haven't addressed yet. And so that's why when I heard your interview before, I got so excited cuz I thought, oh my gosh, of all the things I've addressed, I do have the HEPA filters and stuff like that, but I didn't even know that a solution that could work at the HVAC level even existed until I heard your podcast. So that's why I was really excited to share this.

Yeah. And air quality typically is kind of maybe the third piece on the journey. Like maybe you start with food and water and then air quality is this kind of distant nebulous third. But we breathe the equivalent of a swimming pool every day. And the way we try to describe it is the air quality is one piece of the puzzle. For some people, it's gonna be a really big piece. You know, you were sleeping poorly last night, maybe because you were worried about, you know, whatever, or watching too much news, or maybe because it was air quality. So it just depends. It's a, it's not the silver bullet for everything, but if your air quality's bad, then there's a lot of other consequences to that. And air quality takes a lot of different forms. Sometimes it's chemicals. Sometimes it's you've got an old throw rug and every time you walk on that rug, you're breaking off little pieces and those particulates get, getting into the air and they're irritating you. Sometimes it's mold in the HVAC, sometimes it's a musty smell that's indicating mold. Sometimes you can't smell it at all. So yeah, air quality's tricky. And so that's why a lot of people, it's kind of, uh, further down the list or they wait till they have a problem or they wait till there's a wildfire or something along those lines. But as much as possible, we'd want to just be preventative. And the majority of our clients, yeah, probably 80%, we're installing and situations that are really, really unhealthy. So really bad situations, but probably a good 20% of our clients, there's no problems and they're just trying to be proactive. And with something like mold, you set aside all the health issues, it could be really expensive. So just trying to get ahead of that so that your house doesn't get contaminated with something that's going to cause you money down the line. But just by introducing natural processes, into this relatively unnatural indoor environment that can then combat mold continuously. That's our approach.

So one of the things that I've heard you say, and it's interesting because then you brought up the wildfires, which unfortunately we've had a lot of in North America this past year. But so for example, one kind of like low-level thing could be open your windows more often, right? Just get some circulation. Because one of the issues with the houses are now they're built too tight, so they're just holding all that in. So open your windows more often. What about for people that have allergies or live in an area where there's a fire going on? Well, then what's kind of your next suggestion after that?

Yeah. Yeah. One of the biggest pieces of this whole puzzle is just connecting air quality with how you're feeling and just educating yourself on what's happening inside and around your house. Because air quality is not like a green, oh, you have good air quality, and then it's red, oh, you have bad air quality. It's, Well, the green, but there's pollen in the air and now you're reacting to the pollen. Or maybe, you know, there's mold or there's particulates or chemicals. There's a lot of different pieces to that and a lot of times we oversimplify it. And so with the outside air in general, across the board, it's cleaner than the indoor air statistically. But that air quality at rush hour in close proximity to a road is 50 times worse than an hour before. So it's very dynamic. So there could be a part of the year where, yeah, you open the windows and you're getting a specific type of tree pollen that you're reacting to, or during a certain time of year, maybe there's a lot of boats at the port and you're kind of near the ocean and the wind flow is pulling that to you. Then the air quality outside could be worse than the indoor air, especially if you're taking proactive steps. So part of that is educating yourself, you know, wildfire being an extreme example. Maybe it's 1,000 times worse than normal. In that emergency, you're gonna seal up the home as tight as you can and try to mitigate it until you can get through that emergency. But in general, fresh air is gonna be a good thing. Our ideal scenario is to try to filter that fresh air as it comes in, in some way. So we have nanofiber window screens for clients that maybe the only way they cool their house is to open the windows, but you know, they live near a high traffic area or they live in the desert and there's high particulates. So you can try to trap some of those particulates on the outside and still get the fresh makeup air in and vent some of the bad air because it's not just about bringing air in, you have to actually push air out. So you wanna push the bad stuff out, you know, like a kitchen exhaust fan. You wanna exhaust humidity like in the bathrooms, but sometimes air purification is simply exhausting the bad and bringing in better air from outside. But yeah, being aware of what's happening outside, it's gonna change throughout the day, throughout the year. It's very, very much related to proximity. There are new systems, relatively new, not real new, but newish, where the HVAC is going to incorporate bringing in outside air in. And that's commercially required by law in most of America. But homes are going to have HRV or ERV systems that are pulling air in from outside and then mixing it in with the indoor air. That's a good thing most of the time. But we have clients where the place where they're bringing air in is where their neighbor smokes. So now they're bringing smoke in from their neighbors as a— the goal was to bring in fresh air, but now they're mixing it in with cigarette smoke. And so you're kind of getting a net probably problem with that indoor kind of makeup air. And so, yeah, it changes a lot depending on where you live, who's around you. And one of the things we haven't touched on yet at all is multifamily because you know, you mentioned like you're being really careful, people listening to this podcast are being really careful maybe with what they're eating, what they're drinking, maybe cleaning products they're using. But if you live in a condo, you're breathing the same air almost that your next door neighbor is. And so their decisions are affecting your air quality. And there's ways to mitigate that. But sometimes you're gonna be having cigarette smoke or marijuana smoke coming through the floorboards. So as much as that floor feels solid to us, to chemicals and air, it's not, it's gonna eventually penetrate. Demonstrate that. So yeah, there's lots of unique scenarios and that's one of the things we often say is just hypeware.com/consult, reach out to us, we'll give you specific individualized recommendations because yeah, for some people it's opening that window. It's literally, that's all you're doing for air quality. Don't buy our products, just open your window and you know, you're, you're renting the place for a few months, you don't have a lot of money. There's ways to mitigate that. For some people that's not really an option. You gotta keep that window closed or you have to only open it maybe at nighttime and then you've gotta purify the air the rest the time. So there's, there's different kind of challenges depending on where you live. Obviously, temperature is going to be a problem for a lot of people during the winter. You can't just open the windows to get fresh air. And so there's lots of factors that come into this. But yeah, our indoor air in general is much more contaminated than the outside air. And the big reason for that is outside, there's all kinds of processes that are breaking down chemicals, that are removing particulates, that are killing molds, killing bacteria, killing viruses. But inside, there's almost none of those processes in most of our homes.

Yeah. So you mentioned— let's see, we've mentioned mold, we've mentioned forest fires, you mentioned particulates, viruses. Any other kinds of air quality issues that are maybe things that people don't think of? There's off-gassing from some furniture, and that's why, you know, now it's a big thing to go with organic mattresses because your mattress actually off-gasses, and they're spending hopefully 8 hours a day in there getting some good sleep. Sleep. But what other things have you— just in your research and your designing these products to deal with certain scenarios— are there some unusual things that people don't think of in terms of air quality?

Sure, and I'll address some of those. And real quick, just to use mold as an example though. So mold is going to be something that's living, so it's growing, it's reproducing. As it grows, it's going to be off-gassing chemicals. So you've mentioned off-gassing. Mold is going to off-gas mold VOCs. We like to describe that as the body odor of mold. Not true, but it just kind of helps with the kind of the analogy there. So it's off-gassing this body odor and then it's also sweating. And again, that's not true either, but it's creating liquid mycotoxins. Those are chemicals. It's not a living thing. And so you can kill the mold, but then you would still have the particulate. So the piece of the mold that's left, you could potentially have the off-gassed VOCs. Those don't last too long, but then those liquid mycotoxins can last for years. So even if you killed all the mold in the house, you could still have a liquid chemical that is literally used as a bioweapon that can be there for 2, 3 years later and still be toxic. So even though mold is like one thing, it's actually composed of living, dead, particulates, off-gassing chemicals, and liquid chemicals. So it does get rather complicated. And for each of those things, sometimes there's a different approach on how you deal with it. Maybe use an enzyme cleaner for like, um, leftover liquid mycotoxins or, um, you know, use carbon for the mold, the VOCs. So there's different approaches maybe to the different components. But as far as unusual contaminants, I mean, we hear it all. I mean, like the neighbor next door is making spices in the bathtub and it's, and she says that's just what they do. And so there's spices coming through the HVAC system or, you know, you know, carpets are gonna be a really big one. Homes are built in really weird ways. So sometimes a bathroom doesn't have an exhaust fan at all, or maybe the exhaust fan pumps the humidity up and into the wall. And so it looks like it's working, but it's actually just pumping the humidity into your wall. Or we had one of our research team was able to help a lady that was really sick in our house and discovered that the water heater had no functioning vent. And so you can purify that air, but really the water heater is pumping toxic fumes into your house. And the better way to do it is to fix the vent. So they fixed the vent and it cleared up the air quality issue. So sometimes it's not necessarily about purification as much as kind of putting on your building inspector hat and getting to know your house. In trying to address where some of these issues might be compounding or leading to problems. Yeah, I mean, we, we see a lot of kitchens where maybe the kitchen was built on the, the bottom floor in the middle of the house with no vent. So you've got bedrooms above it, you've got living rooms and everything around it. And so everything you're cooking in the kitchen and the gas stove is producing particulates, chemicals,, and it's just going throughout your house. And so it's just not a good situation. Maybe there's ways that you can mitigate it. Maybe you open a window, you know, in the living room or you kind of cross-ventilate, but you're getting that bacon grease, you know, you're getting all those fumes kind of in your house. And so like there's lots of those things that, you know, I think intuitively a lot of us understand after time with your house, but being a little bit more intentional with that, um, is a good thing. But yeah, I think a lot of people are understanding the problem. You know, you buy a new car and you got the new car smell. I think people are now realizing, okay, that's a chemical, maybe that's not good for me. Or, you know, you add a, you know, fresh rain smell to your detergent. Well, that's not actually fresh rain smell. That's like a synthetic chemical, right? So I think the understanding of, okay, a lot of these things are contributing to air quality problems, but then the gap is really how do we practically deal with that? And same with something like mold where it's like, yeah, I know it's a problem, but okay, you live in Florida. What do you do? You know, you're just gonna remediate the house every few years. That's, that would not be our approach. You know, we just wanna have active mitigation. But yeah, I mean, almost everything you're bringing into the house, including the people and pets, are gonna be contributing to the, that air quality problems. And then we just need to add that natural mitigation.

Yeah. Speaking of, uh, you brought up odors, which I think is an interesting one because some odors might just be annoying, but some of them could be, you know, potential health hazard, but are there ways to deal with things like odors, whether it's, you know, say you moved into, you know, you gave a scenario of an apartment might be the more common one, but there might be smoke smell or pet smell or something like that. Is that really related to air quality? Is that just more like an annoyance kind of thing?

I mean, yeah, I mean, to your point, there's odors that are not gonna cause you any health issues, but are definitely not gonna be pleasant. You know, you could have a bunch of like ammonia basically from a lot of, you know, cat pee or something like that. You know, maybe it's not going to cause you health problems, but it's not going to be very pleasant. And so, yeah, there's, there's all kinds of ways that you can deal with that. And as an aside, we have over 250 free articles on our site that go into very kind of niche scenarios and including things like pets or carpet care. You know, someone, you know, we hear this story actually somewhat frequently where someone bought a home or they're renting a home and the person before them didn't smoke, but the person before them did. And maybe that's 10, 20 years ago and maybe they just did kind of like a mediocre job painting over it or something, but you can literally have nicotine in the walls that's still causing you problems 20 years later. And so there's sometimes there's unique either products that you can use to address that specific contaminant, or with something like pet odor or a lot of like cigarette smells, um, you know, marijuana, just natural smells as well. You know, we do have a product that's an iodine and copper-based patented formula, non-VOC, non-toxic, that would actually break down those chemicals. So when it comes to something like odor, you kind of have a couple options. One is to exhaust it. That's probably the easiest. And well, actually the first option is source control. So if you can address the source of it, but aside, aside from that, the next one is exhausting it. So if you're cooking or you've got an animal, if you can exhaust those odors, that's the quickest. The next one is absorbing it. So that's where something like activated carbon come in. So activated carbon is good, but it's costly. It has minimal kind of longevity because once it absorbs the chemicals, then it's full. We recommend carbon for the HVAC system because it's minimal cost, but you can have a big benefit from it because of the amount of air going through your HVAC. And you're only looking at a couple dollars a quarter, and yet all, almost all the air you're breathing is going through that. So you can get a little bit of chemical absorption there, and then you're going to throw away. So it's going to basically capture it, you know, throw away. The third option is basically breaking it down. So breaking it down on a molecular level, you can use something like the iodine copper formula of ours. Just total clean. You can use something like our Air Angel, which has the APCO technology, use hydroxyl radicals to rip it apart. So you can use natural process to, to actually break down the chemicals that are the source of those odors.

Awesome. Yeah, I, I think we— you knew this a little bit. I have a new house, so I'm learning some of these things about this particular house, and there's a few very interesting things with the HVAC systems, the some leftover pet odors, some different things. So some of this is definitely well-timed to deal with these things. And again, I think some of them are not really a health hazard kind of thing, but then on the other hand, the kind of HVAC things that have been pointed out so far are essentially a health hazard. Yeah. So when it comes to that, do you— does any of your technology— so most of your technology, I feel like, that I've heard in the past focuses on mitigation or, um, or just keeping it clean to start with. But is there anything that deals more like with detection or warning you of problems, whether it's carbon monoxide or other things that I'm not even thinking about?

Yeah, that's a, that is a hope and dream of ours, but I'll tell you what we have now. Um, one of our, and I didn't really talk about this much, but our background is with commercial applications. So large-scale hospitals, sewage plants, casinos, aerospace. Um, one of our aerospace clients spent $15,000 on one room trying to find a chemical and they couldn't find it. And they're one of the biggest companies in the world. They know their stuff and they could not find the odor. So trying to find chemicals in a house is very expensive and not really practical. We've rented multi-thousand dollar VOC sensors. And taken them into a casino on a Friday night, and they've registered 0 parts per billion VOCs. Um, and so definitely wrong.

Yeah, yeah.

So not quite accurate. Um, I think we can be safe to say that. Um, so anything that says TVOCs, so total VOCs as far as the sensor, I don't think there's any way that it knows. Um, when it comes to what is available on the market, as far as what we have, we recommend a $5 humidity sensor. So cheap and affordable, but get an understanding of how the humidity in different rooms of the house, not just in one spot, but different rooms in the house is changing throughout the year. That's gonna be to us one of the best mold detection tools to get to know a house, especially a new home, because that way you can determine, okay, this bathroom here, it's not venting sufficiently. Maybe I need to run the exhaust fan more. Maybe the exhaust fan doesn't work. Maybe you've got a teenage daughter that showers twice a day and it's just too much humidity. So then you can take further steps. There is a lot of more sophisticated moisture meters. And with something like mold, a lot of it comes down to moisture management. So mold management, moisture management. You can't always get rid of the humidity, but at least if you know where it is, you can take steps to mitigate it. So we're big fans of humidity meters. We certainly recommend carbon monoxide detectors. You know, it's a small cost, big benefit potentially, right? That's something, a great example of something you can't smell, but could have obviously very dangerous consequences. And that could come from something like a water heater. But yeah, so carbon monoxide detectors, smoke detectors, obviously really good ones. A CO2 sensor, not quite as affordable, but CO2 can be an indicator of ventilation problems. So sometimes in like high-rise apartments or places like that, that might be a bit more sealed, or you're trying to, you know, reduce the amount of outside air. Maybe you get a CO2 sensor and that's just basically gonna give you an indication of are you getting enough of outside air? Are you getting enough ventilation? Particulate sensors are pretty good. So you can find particulate sensors that look for PM10 or PM2.5. Those are kind of a bit more buzz terms, but to kind of put it into perspective, the human hair is around 50 to 100 microns in diameter. A PM10 sensor is looking for 10 microns. PM2.5 is 2.5 microns. In general, those 2.5 are gonna be the ones we're most concerned with. Because the larger particulates, your body's gonna be able to handle them. They're gonna be heavy, they're gonna fall outta the air, they're gonna be able to vacuum them up. But the smaller ones in general are gonna be the harder ones to capture our own bodies as well as to filter with an air purifier. So something like a PM2.5 sensor, especially if you're in like a city, could be a really good one because those, those PM2.5 particulates are the ones linked to like lung cancer from cigarette smoke or from diesel exhaust. And so yeah, particulate sensors are gonna be good ones. When it comes to mold, we do like Got Mold. It's a company that does sense-based, like an airborne sampler. And so if you're trying to prove to a spouse or a landlord that you have mold and how much you have and the types you have, we see that as probably the most practical option for like testing. And then so Got Mold, and I think we've got a discount, Hypeware or something like that. Hypeware 10, something like that. Gives you 10% off maybe. But we've known them since they founded and they really know their stuff and they're trying to make it accessible because a local mold remediator might charge you $1,000 and they're charging like $300 or something like that. And it's at least the same quality, if not better. But yeah, chemicals are tough. Anything biological, So bacteria, viruses, you can take little Petri dish kits, tests, but really you need a lab. And the sample collection process is just hard for a layperson. You know, you don't do this all the time. It's hard to get really an accurate reading. And a lot of times those kind of surface swab tests are gonna lead to a lot of false positives. Not to say that they aren't an excellent tool, but we just see them kind of misused a lot. And people coming back with like really high readings that don't give an accurate view of their home. So I guess that would be a few, but we've for years explored some of the best sensors on the market, like multi-thousand dollar sensors that go on your house, you know, to measure the outside, you know, nitrous oxides, you know, sulfur dioxide and particulates and all this kind of stuff, but they're just not practical yet. So the human nose or a dog's nose is far better than what technology can achieve right now. And even those can be easily fooled by what you're around all the time. So it's tough. It's tough. We hope in the future to have more devices that can give people actionable data. But the reality is that those devices, even though they don't work that well, are far more expensive than solutions.

Yeah. And so for people that I know, I love that you have on your website, basically just schedule a consultation. You can describe your situation and you can help them choose the product match that's best for them. But if you just had to describe, you know, you mentioned the AngelAir already, and then I know that you have also an HVAC unit. Can you kind of describe both of those a little bit and address what they actually do for you? And this is outside of, obviously, like you said, very specific Yeah.

So general advice, we're gonna say if you have central air, so any type of vents in the house, let's use that. Even if you're renting, that's gonna be the most effective and cost-efficient way to purify the air throughout the home. So, and we can dive into that more, but that aside, we're gonna say start with the bedroom. This whole conversation can be a bit overwhelming. At least try to create a safe place in that bedroom. You mentioned mattresses. There's a lot that you can do in the bedroom to try to create minimal exposure to toxins and contaminants, and then try to create that safe place where the body can naturally detox. Because if that bedroom is bad, then sometimes, you know, trying to figure out how to purify the kitchen and your car and the garage and your office and everything is secondary to you getting that bedroom right. So start with the bedroom. Something like the Air Angel would be a good fit for basically any bedroom in North America to give you a broad spectrum of coverage. But if you do the HVAC, our hope is that you don't need any plug-in units at all. Um, that's not always the case. Sometimes you have a bathroom with mold problems, or you've got an unattached garage, or you've got, you know, two dogs that sleep in the laundry room and you need extra effort there or something like that. So, but in general, if you've got that HVAC system, we want that to be the purifier for the house. And so, um, to put it in perspective, if you buy a $1,000 HEPA air purifier, plug-in one, and you run it on turbo speed and it sounds like a jet engine. Your HVAC system of its average home is probably going to move 10 times as much air as that turbo speed $1,000 HEPA air purifier. And yet the HVAC industry basically looks at your HVAC purely for the purpose of energy and temperature change. With some somewhat minor modifications, that could be your primary air purifier, and the volume of air that goes through that is so much greater partially because the fan is bigger, partially because you've got a duct system, partially because that fan is further away from you in general. So it could be louder and yet you don't hear it because it's further away. And so if you do have that central system, one of our units, you know, $900, right now it's on sale for $630. So we can lock in that price for anyone listening to this. But that one unit can cover up to 2,400 square feet. And so with no replacement parts for life. And so you're basically taking the kind of the bones of your HVAC system and then converting that into the air purifier. And you just have such a bigger scale of benefit than having a bunch of plug-in units. Now we have those plug-in units and we have different types. Our units typically don't have any type of HEPA or mechanical filters. We're not trying to do what everyone else is doing. We would probably make more money if we just put out a big bulky HEPA air purifier with a lot of bells and whistles and made it look cool. But, that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to basically move the kind of conversation forward. So, our units are typically very small. And right now, we're focusing on polar ionization for the core technology for the home. And that basically requires no replacement parts for life. It can kill something like mold in the air and on surfaces. It can help particulates that carry the mycotoxins. It's just very broad in its application.. But if you don't have the central air, you're basically gonna have to look at each room as a separate zone. And while if you bake cookies in the kitchen, you might smell it in the master bedroom, you could have really bad air quality in the master bedroom and relatively okay in the kitchen or vice versa. And so each room is gonna be separate if you don't have that central solution. So we would prefer that central solution, but we work with people around the world, Singapore, Dubai, you know, Europe, you know, you name it, South Africa. And most of those places you don't have central air. So in those cases, you're looking at the bedroom priority, and then any type of AC system or heater that has vents, like a window-mounted system, you can convert that into an air purifier because a lot of times those are very prone to mold growth, um, to poor air quality. So you wanna try to make sure anything that's blowing air, we wanna kind of piggyback on the airflow and improve the air quality going into the system, inside of the system, and coming out of the system.

I think one thing it would be important to mention, because you did mention the sale, and I do have the link on my website for that, or you can use Heal, Nourish, Grow if they're— if you happen to hear this later down the road and that sale isn't available anymore. But the thing I heard you say is about even if you're renting, even if you have a central, like, that's the preferred one. I think I heard you tell somebody before that you can actually take that with you. Is that— do I remember that correctly? So even if you installed the central solution in a place that you're renting, you're, you're not throwing that money down the drain. And because it's a system that's no replacement parts for life, you just keep taking it with you to wherever the next place is.

Yep. Yep. So there's, there's a couple ways to go about it. So, um, let's say you're in an apartment that's 800 square feet. Typically that's below the cost-efficient coverage of the installed version. Not to say it's not done. We have smaller rooms that have it installed, especially in medical facilities. But if you had, say, like an 800 square foot apartment or less, Um, we still wanna make sure that HVAC system is healthy. And so what you can potentially do is put an Air Angel near the intake where the filter is for that HVAC. And that's kind of a way of, um, kind of modifying that system without even installing inside of it. And so you're kind of where the air is going back into the system, you're purifying that, you're sanitizing it, you're, you're getting into that airflow. And then as the air's coming back out of the system, now it's cleaner. And you're able to mitigate some of that problem. So sometimes it's not even installing an HVAC, but it's just being aware of where it is, what it is, how can you make the most of it. And sometimes it's as simple as turning your thermostat to be a fan on or have a minimum amount of airflow. And maybe you don't buy anything from Hypeware, but you just change the filters more regularly, maybe add carbon there, maybe run the air more often. Sometimes just that alone can help distribute humidity and dry out surfaces and help mitigate potential problems. So it's just kind of being aware of that HVAC system. But getting to your point though, uh, we have people in, in New York, they're renting an apartment, their HVAC system is shared with the floor. So it has like a common plenum. They don't even have an isolated system. So they have installed in the ducts leading into their apartment, And typically it magnetically attaches. It does need power. And anyone that wants to get into that, we can help. About 50% of our clients install it themselves, but it does require being wired into a source of power. There's easier ways to do it as well, but it magnetically attaches. So you're not cutting anything, you're not screwing anything, no special tools. You're not permanently damaging or having any sign of ever being there other than the system should be cleaner. So if you're renting or you own, you can put it in there while you're there and take it with you when you leave.

And then in the more permanent situation, so for example, I would say I'm moderately handy, like I just installed my own reverse osmosis water. That was the first thing I did. Nice. Talk about the levels, eating, water, and then air quality. So if I'm moderately handy, could— is that something I could install on my own or with the working with the HVAC? Do you just not recommend that for people?

Yeah, we have a partnership with a master electrical company that virtual consultations and we cover the cost of that. Typically we're going to say as a company policy, we recommend a licensed electrician. We don't want you to shock yourself, but probably 50% of our clients do it themselves. And so it's, it's probably a 10, 15-minute install, but it does require you to turn off the breaker and kind of some basic electrical safety steps. And so we kind of leave that to our clients, what they're comfortable with, but we do recommend someone that's licensed and, you know, has the knowledge just for safety of the person installing it. But that virtual electrician has been very successful in helping a lot of handymen, a lot of, you know, neighbors, you know, son-in-laws, you know, like mother-in-laws, you know, like all kinds of people to do it without problems. But if you don't want to touch it, you don't want to do it yourself, we typically recommend a handyman, licensed electrician, smart home installer. Thousands of these have been installed through HVAC contractors, but they're charging upwards like $2,500 apiece. And typically their time is very expensive and their skills are unnecessary for this type of install.

Okay. Good to know. Any other— oh, I know we talked a little bit. You mentioned before that your, a lot of your products have patents, and then you shared with me before we got on the call that because I just asked if you had any exciting news come up. And I know you said some you can share, some you can't, but what is it that's making you get out of bed lately that you're working on? It's new, it's exciting, and taking you somewhere different.

Yeah, and I'm going to have to think about how I can share some of these things or maybe what I can't. But our focus right now at Hypeware is modifying existing systems in the home. And in the future, we hope to work more in the design of systems. So when you're installing a new HVAC system, when you're building a new house, the materials being used, you know, how you set up an HVAC system could be exponentially more powerful for air quality with minimal changes when it's installed. But yeah, right now the patents we're filing are more along the lines of modifying existing systems and, um, I guess, uh, one of the things we're trying to tackle that I think I can share, uh, because we already have a patent on it, is, um, when someone installs an HVAC in, in a house, or maybe you just buy one, there's almost no information about what type of filter you can put in that HVAC system. So as an example, one of my colleagues in Vegas just put in like a $25,000, $30,000 HVAC system. He has no idea the tonnage of the HVAC. The, him or the contractor have no idea the MERV rating of the filter that it can handle. It's just silly. It's just, it's just silly. There's ways that an HVAC contractor could tell you the quality of MERV rating, but we've developed a solution to give people the data they need to make that decision. And to know if their HVAC filter even needs to be changed, when it needs to be changed. But to us, almost as importantly, is what rating of MERV can they put in that HVAC. And there's ways that you can increase the MERV rating without adding strain on the system. So just to step back a little bit, um, the filter you have in your HVAC, it's kind of like you're sucking a milkshake through a straw. So if the straw is too small, it's not going to work. So you don't want to put too much strain on that fan system. You're going to get decreased airflow. You're gonna potentially damage the fan. So you can't just throw in a HEPA filter in there because it's too dense. Maybe you can't even handle like a MERV 13. Maybe you can't handle MERV 10 because of the straw size for your HVAC was too small. But we're going to be able to give you a simple and affordable way to determine what that is and when you need to change your filter. So we're really excited about that because that's going to affect potentially hundreds of millions of households. Like it's a really large scale.

It's very exciting because yeah, half the time you move into a house, you don't know anything about any of the systems. I mean, if you're lucky, they might have left a manual or something, but there's almost nothing.

You crawl in there and there's like a bunch of numbers on the system, like serial numbers and stuff. Try to Google it. You're not going to find hardly anything. We've Googled it. Like we've, we've, we've tried to find it for commercial clients. They do not make it easy. Um, the tonnage is one of the simplest things on the system, and a lot of times that's not even apparent either. So the tonnage is kind of like the horsepower of your system, and if you had the horsepower, the tonnage, the dimensions of your filter, and the square footage of your house, you can get a pretty good estimate of the MERV rating that you can handle. Not super accurate, but even if you could do that, that would be better. But right now, most homes, even with new HVAC systems, even with people that are really handy and they get in there and they crawl around, they don't even know what the tonnage of the system is. So there's no way to calculate it using the existing data. And that leaves a lot of people just either going too high on the MERV rating, so it's putting too much strain, or maybe they're going too low. Maybe they're changing the filters too regularly. They're wasting money, or maybe they're not changing enough. You know, statistically it's something like 80% don't change 'em every 3 months, which is kind of the, kind of the bare minimum recommendations for a 1-inch filter. So most people aren't changing them enough, and then you're getting a bunch of dust in the system, which can increase the energy cost. So forget air quality, just the energy cost. You get dust in there, it makes it harder for the coils to work. So we wanna make sure those HVAC systems have the appropriate filters and that they're being changed regularly. Can we make that as practical and affordable as possible and hopefully save people money? And so that's one of our goals this year. And some of the other ones we're still— some of the other ones I'm most excited about, we're about to file the patents, so I could be super vague on those. But there's a few other systems in your home and in the majority of homes in America that we're going to try to make into air purifying devices. And I guess I'll leave it at that. But we're really trying to think outside the box. And we've got probably another 20 or so that we're prioritizing, but we're just taking it one piece at a time. And so we'll continue with our current products, but we're existing, looking at other existing systems in the house that can be modified with great benefit.

And before we wrap it up here, I want to, I do want to be respectful of your time, but it made me think of something that you said in the past too that I think is really could be relevant to a lot of people that are possibly listening to this. They tend, you know, a lot of people that are into this stuff could be in the healthcare space. And you mentioned that you do a lot of commercial applications. So I think that your product, the way that you've described it, is really unique. And that for places that need a higher level of purity, like a hospital or a clinic or a, you know, any kind of space like that, people hearing this, they should definitely connect with HypoAir because I think that they do have, you know, a product that's far superior and that does a lot of interesting things with some— we didn't even talk about like a lot of the virus, bacteria, those kind of things that the way your system addresses those, I think is also really valuable for a lot of people.

Yeah, you talk about air quality problems and then you talk about hospitals and it's next level. And we have, yeah, we have products. So like the HVAC product we have, we use sometimes the same product, but sometimes a different shape of the same products for commercial ice machines. And so, um, for years we were focused on these commercial applications because we saw how big the problems were. Uh, the thing that we didn't understand was how difficult it is working with these big corporations, and that in general they don't care that the ice machine is green with slime, but they do care that they have to pay for someone to come and clean it.. And the same is true of hospitals. You know, even ice machines in hospitals, they're feeding people really sick. They're heavily contaminated. But the way that we were selling to them is to save them money on maintenance. So we can apply the same technology to a home and yeah, potentially save you money on maintenance, but you're probably more concerned with not having slime grow on your HVAC system, you know, mold and, you know, all this biofilm and everything. So, um, the corporations were hard to work with. But kind of over the last few years, especially when the COVID craziness hit, basically we got too busy. We're, we made the decision. We're not going to try to convince any business that they have a problem. If a business owner knows they have a problem and wants solutions, we're there. We're happy to help. Um, but for years we were having meetings with hospitals and big hotels and everything, and they knew they had. I guess individuals knew they had problems, but as a corporation, they did not care to really solve them. And like, literally, I remember one phone call with a hospital. They contacted us. They had a C. diff, like an infection breakout in their hospital, and they contacted us for help. And the person in charge of the hospital for infection basically prevention reduction, said that they were not interested in reducing their rates of infection. And we said, okay. It was like a really awkward—

Why are they calling?

It's like a bunch of people on the call, like different companies, and we're like, okay, well, we're here if you need us. It's just like super weird, like the mentality there. And so instead they ended up getting like a couple $80,000 kind of R2-D2 UV robots that they would wheel into a room after the patient left and zap the room maybe once a week. But in the interim, you know, all the people coming and going, all the sick people in the room, there's next to no mitigation. They're just pumping in fresh air, which is a good thing. But just the mentality of all these, these hospitals and businesses are really tough. But yeah, all that to say, if there's individuals, you got a medical practice, dental clinic, a biohacking facility, gyms, apartments, offices, we love working with those people because yeah, it can be very cost-effective and beneficial and simple. But yeah, it's a hard thing to see. And so, we hope in the future, so with hotels, for example, we've worked with some of the most famous hotels in the world. And what they often do is they'll install our products in a couple rooms or a couple floors or a couple maid service carts. And then if someone complains, then they can move that person to the healthier room. And so our number one tip with traveling is just ask if they have any options, because a lot of times they didn't want to spend the money to do it for the whole hotel because they don't think people care. And a lot of people don't. And so they do it only for a few rooms and they use different mattresses, different cleaning products, maybe products like ours, maybe they have HEPA air purifiers available, but they only do it for a few rooms and they typically don't advertise it because they don't want it to seem like the rest of the hotel is dirty and you have to pay extra for the clean. And sometimes you don't have to pay extra, but just ask. And so as, as kind of the mentality of consumers, us, changes and we say, I'm not going to stay in your hotel if it has mold. Then they'll take more proactive steps to change it. Yeah.

And that's a really great tip. I never even thought of asking the hotel if they have a, what would it be like an allergy friendly room or something like that?

Or yeah, for someone with sensitivities, hypoallergenic rooms, you know, things like that. A lot of times they have those. A lot of times they have even like Costco air purifiers available. Like it doesn't have to be anything fancy, but anything that can help cut the contaminants. Because the highest VOCs we have ever measured is in a hotel room after cleaning. And so a lot of times hotel rooms are gonna have all the same issues of your, of your home and then a lot more. So obviously you have all the people coming, you know, bacteria and all that. But you have a lot of cleaning products that you're not gonna be familiar with. A lot of synthetic fragrances, potentially a lot of mold. You stay in a really nice hotel that's by the ocean. A lot of times they're leaving their windows open. They have a lot of moisture problems. They get a lot of mold. One of them, I forget who it was, made the point that she is on a search for a hotel with hard floors. And I never really thought about it, but basically all the hotels have carpets. And so carpets are little kind of filters that don't actually get rid of the contaminants. They just kind of absorb and you go walk around on it. So yeah, I mean, a lot of hotels are basically designed for poor air quality. And then you also have the added complexity of when you're in a new environment, your nose is going to kind of be on high alert. And so a lot of times people have the experience, even those that aren't super sensitive, in a hotel room, they're going to have that heightened sensitivity. They're going to be really reactive.

So yeah, that's really interesting.

Yeah. Asking for a cleaner room is the first step. You can also take an Air Angel with you, plug it in, go out to dinner, give it a time to cut the concentration. But yeah, a lot of times hotel rooms are going to be one of the dirtiest places.

I wonder if malls are too, actually. It's not— I mean, I rarely go in a mall anymore, but I often notice when I do go in that my eyes and my skin almost just feels like itchy. But my eyes especially, it's just like really intense. And I feel like there's got to be something going on with the air.

Yeah. Lots of going on in those places. A lot of times in the bigger commercial spaces, at least there are laws that require outside makeup air, so they're forced by law to bring in outside air to exhaust the indoor air. If it wasn't for that, it'd probably be a whole lot worse. So something like a hospital, it depends on where it is, but they might have to change the air 20 times an hour. They got to pump a lot of air out, and something like a mall would be required to do that. But the smaller spaces especially, or Obviously the more extreme examples would be like a, like a perfume store, you know, you know, where there's a lot of fragrances in there, a lot of heavy concentration of chemicals, things like that. Especially if someone is dealing with like a mold issue at home, for example, they tend to be in that heightened state of reactivity to something like those fragrances. And yeah, so yeah, ice machines, restaurants, like there's a lot of problems, but Again, our, our goal is not for you to live in fear of these things. Our hope is that your bedroom, your home is a safe place to detox, to build your resilience, and you can go out into the world and not be as reactive. But any place that you're spending longer periods of time, ideally you're gonna be getting some, some sort of air quality solution there so you're not overwhelming the body.

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. And I like that you brought it back to the positive cuz often these things, when you go down these rabbit holes, It's so easy to be like, what can I eat anymore? Where can I go that's safe to breathe? And so I think the take home here is obviously just do the best you can with what you have to work with. You got to work within your budget and you got to work within— but you gave several great tips for much less expensive options and simpler things like just when you're getting your yearly, you know, HVAC or you have somebody come to service it, making sure that, you know, that everything's flowing properly and that you've got, you know, changing the filter. That is the number one thing to take away from today. You're supposed to change it every 3 months. So learn where your filter is and definitely change that to start with. So yeah, David, I just want to really thank you for taking the time today. Don't forget about the sale if you're hearing this right after it comes out. They might still have that going on. I think that's an awesome price for far less than what you normally charge. And thanks for taking the time today. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely. And, and just reach out to us. So the current sale we're ending pretty soon, but reach out to us and we'll extend the sale to you just for— Awesome. Making it this far and actually caring that much. So yeah, we'll extend the sale to you and just reach out to our team and we'll do that. We never want it to feel like, oh, you rushed or, you know, you're super rushed to make a decision or you missed out, especially during the holidays here.

So yeah, just reach out to the team and we'll extend that sale price. Very generous. Thank you. All right. Take care.

Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.