Matt Kelly explains how mold from one room can get pulled into your HVAC system, grow on the coil or in ducts, and spread throughout your home. You might need professional duct cleaning or full replacement depending on severity, but inspection with ERMI sampling comes first.
All right. Liv asked how to clean ducted air conditioner. And the duct work in your house can absolutely become a catastrophic problem when mold's involved. And I do cover this in my mold proof your home course. So if you haven't looked already, go to moldproofyourhome.com and there's over 100 video lessons, over nine hours of me walking you through that from the outside of the house, from the ground, to the slope, to the roof, to every room inside your house, almost showing you what can go wrong, where, and how you can prevent problems. So check out moldproofyourhome.com but I do cover H Vac in there, because what happens is say you've. Say you don't have a problem in the H Vac to start with. Okay? That's not the problem. Say it's running fine, it doesn't have a leak. It's not installed improperly. Everything's fine. But. But you have a mold problem in your ensuite. Okay, but you have forced air. So all those mold spores, say you have a bunch of stachy behind the shower. All those mold spores, as they come into the air, get sucked into the cold air return in that bathroom. And where's the cold air return? It brings all the air from all your rooms back into your H Vac, back into your air conditioning unit. And then as it goes through the coil, those spores can get caught in there and also get caught anywhere in the ductwork. And. And then when you have humidity or right at the coil where you have a drip pan to catch moisture from evaporation, from condensation, that moisture can be enough to feed spores that are caught in the coil. Then all of a sudden, you have mold growing in your coil where all the air that's going into your house goes through that coil. And now you're blowing that mold into every single room. So it can start as a localized problem, end up growing in your H Vac, then once it's in your H Vac, it literally blows in every single room of your house, making everyone sick. So H Vac is a massive problem, and that's why people end up. You can get your ducts clean. You can have someone come out, and hopefully your coil comes out or is easily accessible so it can be checked number one, and if there is a problem, cleaned. But sometimes people have no choice. They end up having to remediate the home. They end up having to pull all the ductwork out of their home, replace the H Vac unit itself. It's a bloody expensive mess sometimes, but you start with just checking to know is there a problem in there. You can do an ERMI by swiffering inside of those register vents and trying to get a reading from just the H vac itself, which some people have to do. But yeah, I mean, you can have, you know, duct cleaners come out, but I would first have someone check for any signs of mold, possibly test it with an ermie. If you. If it seems okay, then just get a regular cleaning done by a company that has the big HEPA trucks that come in, the big bags that blow out the top, not someone with just an air compressor or something in the back of their van. You want the full HEPA trucks with the big filters, the bags that shoot out the top. All right, I hope that helps. Liv.
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