Effective Mold Remediation: Key Practices and Red Flags to Watch For

You keep your house clean and dry, you will never see mold growth in a million years.

Hello, everyone. My name is Kendra Seymour and I'm joined today by David Merrick of Valor Mold Removal. And today we're going to be demystifying remediation process. Listen, it's not a very regulated industry called five different companies. And you're going to have five different solutions for your problem. And it's really frustrating as a consumer. So truth be told, there are a lot of practices that pass as remediation that are insufficient and I would even argue unsafe. So how, how do you tell a good process from a bad one? Well, it starts with understanding more about what good remediation is and isn't. So that's why I want to thank you so much today, David, for joining us.

Absolutely. Yeah. Because I will jump into this presentation just right off the bat because I am under the gun and I do not. I have so much good information to share. I just don't even want to. Don't even want to take any time about discussion.

No nicety. Yeah, let's jump right in.

Yeah. So I have this presentation created. You know, the thing is what we're looking for with remediation, a lot of people don't realize, but there actually is a standard of care for the industry called the S520. And so this thing is actually an ANSI standard. And ANSI in this country is a big deal. Right. You have a little symbol down here, little ANSI symbol, because in the pecking order of things in the U.S. number one is a federal regulation, which there is, there is none for mold. And so number two are private industry standards. And ANSI runs all those private industry standards. So pretty much if it's an ANSI standard, it's gospel. Now, there's some that would argue that the S by 20 doesn't go far enough. And I understand what they're saying, you know, for some of the really highly mold sensitized cr. But point is, we can't even get our remediation industry to follow this thing. Right. Let's get the basics down first and then we can get into advanced topics. But, you know, this is the minimum standard of care. But you know, I'm sure you're familiar with Michael Pinto and he said this off the record. I don't know if I can say this or not, but he said he believes there's probably only 80 companies in the country that can do remediation from mold sensitized individuals. Right. And so how Many follow the S520 in terms of the total population of remediators, I don't know, but it's very small. So anyway, sorry, I got off on tangent. So third down on the pecking order are guidelines. And so these are the EPA guidelines on mold, CDC guidelines on mold. These are the free ones that you see online that everybody reads, everybody shares. But they don't realize that because, you know, it's the epa, it's the cdc. So they think this comes from on high. This is the end all, be all. They don't realize that that's actually third in the pecking order. Number two in the pecking order is this S by 20. The problem with this thing is that one, the public has no idea it's out there, even if you did. Number two, it's 100, and I think $125 to download or buy. And three, even if you bought it, it's written in our language. And so there is an accompanying reference guide, the R520, that kind of explains the S520 in more plain English, the reference guy is actually a lot more pages than the, than the S520, than the standard. But this thing is another $125. So you're talking about sinking in a 250 so you can understand an industry. I doubt that. Right. Most people, Most people want to move on with life, right? They want to keep things simple. They don't want to get deep into it. You know, if I need the tires changed in my car, I don't want to learn about tire manufacturing. I just want to go get it done.

Right.

You know, so, so I had these diagrams created. And basically what this is, is the S520 in a picture format. Because I'm all about education. You know, I, I feel like mold scares a lot of people, and so they, they rush into things. They want to get this done tomorrow. They want to get it done fast instead of getting it done right. And as, as a result of that, they get taken advantage of a lot. So I just believe that, you know, knowledge is power. Knowledge kind of, it raises up your. Your, just to be frank, your, your BS meter, right? So that way you, you understand what makes sense and what doesn't. So whenever you see mold growth, you know, growing across a drywall or framing or what have you, what it looks like under a microscope is it looks like a ivy spreading across the surface, and an ivy that both grows roots into the material to decompose it. And also, too, there's roots, they're called hyphae. But the hyphae grow both into the material and then out of the material. And at the tip of this are the mold spores, right? So if you took a cross section of a mold colony, you, you would see rising up are these high feed at the tip of the mold spores. So if the mold colony is the apple tree, the mold spores are like the apple seeds. So the mold colony is visible. The mold spores are microscopic. The mold colony, when it's wet and eating something, it will emit that moldy, musty odor, whereas the spores have no odor whatsoever. And so you have no idea how many spores are in the air without having mold testing done. Right. And the problem with these little spores is that if you disturb the colony or you wipe it, or you spray it, or you scrub it, or you put a fan on it or tear it out, then these spores go airborne by the billions. They behave just like dandelions. And that's billions with a B, like Bravo. Because depending on the species of mold, but there's up to 1 million spores per square inch of visible mold growth, right? So the numbers are just astounding. And people always ask, well, how many spores do I need to breathe in before I get a health reaction? And the answer is, nobody knows, right? Really, it's a matter of genetics. And so if you're going to react to mold, you're going to have, you're going to fall, generally speaking, into four different categories. So you're going to have an allergic reaction, chemical reaction, toxic, toxic, toxic response, or a fungal infection. Now, the toxic response, people, these are what we would call mold sensitized. This is going to be the circumstances. Lyme pans, Pandas, mast cell, right? Immune compromise. You know, generally speaking, if you're going to a doctor and they're doing mycotoxin testing for in your blood or your urine, and you're, you're having this kind of thing going on, chances are you're gonna fall into the toxic response category. Now, I like to, in this chart, I like to give numbers, because out of everybody who reacts to mold, I would say 80% are going to have an allergic reaction to mold. 10% are going to have the chemical reaction to the VOCs, 10% are going to have a toxic response. I would say less than 1% are going to get a fungal infection in their body. So very rarely do people ever get a mold infection in their body. Where you're having a mold colony grow in your lungs or in your brain, because you're going to know it, you're going to be in the hospital for three months or six months while they're trying to kill this colony and not kill you at the same time. It's a bit like chemotherapy. But very rarely do people ever get a fungal infection. And so the thing is, if most people have an allergic reaction or a chemical or toxic, you're having a reaction to a substance you're not. What I'm trying to get at is you're not trying to kill mold. From a medical standpoint, killing mold does not make very much sense. Right. This is not the goal of remediation. And I'll get into this in the, in the standard, in the S520 as to what it says about that one thing I'll note about the toxic, toxic response. God, I can't talk tonight. You know, if you're seeing a naturopath or homeopathic doctor and they're you're seeing a doctor who's testing you for mycotoxin in your blood, chances are they in some way, shape or form are a disciple of Dr. Richie Shoemaker, who was one of the original doctors who discovered the link between genetics and mold sensitivity. Right. And Shoemaker says that the population that has this mold sensitivity gene, these markers, these genetic markers, is up to 25% of the population. Now as a remediator, I try not to scare people and so I lowball that number. But I defer to the doctors on this. Right. You may, it may be 25%. Here we have a typical remediation setup. So you know, if there's mold on the wall, we're building a containment barrier around it, right. And up in the top left corner you'll see this thing goes in four phases. So you build the containment, negative air pressure. Then you do the demolition, then you do a cleaning, right. I call it immaculate cleaning, sometimes deep cleaning. Some people call it a fine particle cleaning. They have many different names, but this is the same thing, right? This is a fine cleaning. And I'm going to come back to this slide in a second. I'm actually going to jump ahead to this one. So if this is a top down view, right. Bird's eye view of that same containment chamber. So up top we have the moldy wall around it we have built 6 mil containment barrier, right? So this is 6 mil plastic held up by tension poles. So that way you know, it's floor to ceiling. We tape it to the ceiling, walls and floor. So it forms a physical barrier around the mold. And the thing is, before we start work, we'll set up this little blue thing there called a negative air machine. And what this thing does is as you're. As we're tearing out the mold, right? If so we're tearing out the mold up top, it's releasing these spores by the billions. That's what this. These red dots are. And what the spores job is to fly off into other parts of the environment and grow a new colony somewhere else that's wet. And so we don't want that to happen, because the worst thing that can happen in a remediation is what's called cross contamination, which is we have torn out mold in one location, and the spores have flown off and flown into other parts of your house. And now you're breathing those spores in, right? That. That completely defeats the purpose for hiring a remediator, is them spreading it around your house, right? You want it removed, not spread around. That's really bad. And so the negative air machine, as we're tearing this stuff out and the spores get released. So we have this negative air machine set up that has HEPA filtration inside of it. But most importantly, it has a duct connected to the exhaust, and it ducts the exhaust outside, and people go, well, why in the world you guys have a filtering air just to blow it outside? And the reason is, as these spores are trying to make their way out, with this machine exhausted outside, it collects all this makeup air where all this air is coming into the containment. So as these spores are trying to fly out, they're being met by a wall of air coming in. And basically it keeps the mold in our chamber. So this is a critical, critical concept in mold remediation. We have a machine called an instascope. I don't have enough time to get into this thing, but basically it does instant airborne molds pour counts. And so in the D.C. metro area, the average mold count in a room where there's no mold, it's at rest. There's nothing fancy going on. There's nothing abnormal going on is 4600. We got curious when we first got this machine to find out, well, what are the multiport counts? When we're actually tearing out mold and we found that it ranges anywhere from 1.5 to 4 million. So there's a incredible, incredible increase in the spore counts when we're in the midst of tearing stuff out. And the scary thing is this is whether we're tearing out 100 square feet of mold or we're tearing out one square foot of mold, right? Because going back to the guidelines, remember, the thing Where I was talking about the pecking order in the first slide. You know, EPA guidelines and stuff. The guidelines don't specify any. Well, no, I'm sorry. They specify that if it's under 10 square feet, a homeowner can do it. And what's interesting is the S520 doesn't have that in there. It just says if you see visible mold growth, you need to do the whole containment negative air pressure setup. And so it's very, very risky for people's health just to go ahead and attack mold because they think it's five square feet, and that means it's safe. And I could do a whole nother presentation about where that 10 square foot thing came from. It's fascinating. Fascinating. We get into the history of it. But anyway, going back to the slide, this One here, the S520, says that this containment needs to be under negative 5 pa of pressure. Now, we like pascals because it's easier to measure. Some companies use inches, what's called inches of water column. That's fine. Similar. I like pascals because it gives you more fine, fine detail about where we are within that range. But anyway, in this negative five, by the way, is not in the standard itself. That's actually in the reference guide. The standard just says it has to be under negative air pressure. So the reference guide is where it says negative 5 pa. So as a homeowner, I tell people there's two things to be on lookout for when you have a remediator begin their work. So. So one is you're looking for this little yellow thing here called a manometer. Now, it doesn't have to be yellow. That's the most common one, but it could be any color. But point is, it's a little gizmo that measures the pressure differential between the two spaces. And you have to actively monitor this because as you start cutting open walls and ceilings and stuff, your pressure will drop because you opened up new pathways of air to flow into that containment. And so your pressure drops. So you need to be able to know that. So that way you can crank up the machine to start sealing up holes or whatever. So that's the first thing you're looking for as a homeowner. Second thing is obviously the ducting going out of the window. And, you know, I'll tell you one thing that you can do. Well, a little bit of some definitions first. So this little gizmo here, this is called an air filtration device. That's the generic name for it. Now, you'll really hardly ever hear any remediator call it that. More often, this thing is either called a negative air machine. If you have a duct attached to the exhaust and it's going out of a window, that's called a negative air machine. If you have no duct attached to it, it's called an air scrubber. And what this thing is doing is just recirculating the air. So it's almost like a. Like a big air purifier. Now, one tip off, whenever you're looking at proposals, if your remediator says if all over the proposal, it says air scrubber, that means that unless they just really don't know what they're talking about, that means that your containment is going to be under no pressure whatsoever. Now, to be fair, to have a remediator come out and build containment and have them have an air scrubber running, that's still far better than having your local handyman come and tear out the mold with nothing set up. So, yes, I will agree that's a step in the right direction. However, it's not proper remediation. Right. Again, this pressurization is critical. What this thing is, by the way, is an isolation barrier or an isolation room. So if you are. If you go to the hospital for Covid or tuberculosis, you know, you have something infectious that's easily airborne, easily spreadable, and the hospital puts you in the isolation room. Same concept, right? Same concept. Because you'll see this with some remediators. Oh, negative air pressure is the old way of doing things. Yeah, well, hospitals still do that. So I think they're on the cutting edge of technology now. That's, you know, I like to. I want to. I want to give you something that actually shows what negative air pressure looks like. Right. Not just this amorphous thing that diagrams and stuff. So I took this video, and this is a containment setup we built. This is under negative air pressure right now. So this is the thick 6 mil plastic, and these are tension poles that you see. It almost looks like ribs where the plastic is sucking in, and it's just straining against these tension poles. So you really have to have a lot of these tension poles to hold back. The. The. If this containment's under proper pressure, to hold back and give it structural rigidity. So this is the manometer. It's at negative 6 pa right now. And so what I want to do is just show how this thing changes. So if I take the zipper down, I've actually closed that makeup air window. And what happens, what will happen is yeah, the negative air pressure goes up and so this thing climbs and you know, it's not very quick, right? This is, it's not like it's an instant drop. And then. So now I take the zipper back up and you'll see the pressure drop. And again it takes a little while. It doesn't, it has to equalize with the cubic footage and all this other kind of stuff. So this is what it looks like in real time. And this, this manometer, by the way, you can set this up inside the containment, outside the containment. Usually we like it inside just so that way we can see what the pressure is as we're doing the demo. But some clients, they want to see the pressure as we're working. So we'll set it up outside, you know, and on the far right you see the tube. That's the tube for the manometer because you actually have to punch a hole and then put the, put the tube in for the machine to have a reading. Want to press the keyboard? So there's many different forms of containment barriers. And by the way, the reason I'm hitting containment so much and negative air pressure is because this is critical to a good remediation. Your remediator could completely mess up the remediation inside the containment. And as long as they have proper pressure and stuff, they're not hurting your indoor air quality in the rest of the house. Yes, they're wasting your time, but they're not, they're not making things worse in the house. I'll say. So on your left you have a good door containment, right? This is a door frame where we're building a containment barrier over it. This thing is solid. You know, we're using really heavy duty tape, double sided tape that is strong, right. Has a strong adhesive. So we can go in and out of this thing 50, 100, 200 times and it still is going to look like this. On our right we have a, that's a good door container. So I don't really, you know, this is, this is in the wild. This isn't like something we built and set up. Like this is going on estimates and finding stuff like this, you know, and so this is common and a lot of remediators, they, their fear are customer complaints, right? Where they built a strong containment and it took some of the paint off the door frame. And they're trying to avoid these, these complaints. And I go, okay, but does the client really want mold in their house and spreading through their house or do they want some damaged paint? I would think they want some damaged paint. So freestanding barriers. These are barriers that are going between an open space. So if we're setting up between two walls or we're closing off a section of a room. Right. These are, I would call these freestanding barriers. So on our left hand side, we're standing inside the containment chamber. So you see the negative air machine on the lower part of the screen? Right. The tube going outside. We have the window sealed up. Now, we haven't started working here yet because the chandelier is not plasticked over. The cabinets are open. Right. So this is just a picture of, you know, this isn't active work going on yet, but anyway, you see the barrier behind you. So this. The tension poles holding up for structural rigidity. And then you see on all four sides of this thing, this thing is taped up. Right. So there's no gaps. Yeah, we need makeup air to come through, but we want to control where that makeup air comes from. So this thing has no gaps on the sides on the right. This is literally taken from a competitor's website. This was in their showcase gallery because they were proud of this thing, I guess. I don't know. And I'll go ahead and zoom in on this picture because it's. It's hard to see. Right. This isn't a very good picture, but I loved it because, I mean, this is exactly what I'm talking about. So on the top, you'll see that the plastic is drooping. So, you know, it looks like a wave going across there. A couple pieces of duct tape kind of holding it to the ceiling. Same thing on the bottom. They don't have anything. Right. It's just laying there. And then on the sides, this is hard to see, but there's like one piece of duct tape holding the containment to the wall. So I see this and I go, is it possible that they could have negative air pressure set up? It's possible. Proper pressure. I don't. I doubt it. But, you know, maybe they had, you know, six different negative air machines inside the containment, and they just manhandled the pressure. Sure, maybe. But it's just. It's. It's doubtful. Right. There's a million different venues and pathways for air to come around this chamber and through this chamber. So I just. It's just sloppy workmanship. Chip here. This is again, something I ran across on a job site. You'll see this a lot with remodelers and waterproofers where, you know, you'll have mold. And they go, oh, yeah, we know mold. We Set up containment barriers all the time. Well, there's a huge difference between our version of containment barriers where we're using 6 mil plastic versus these guys, where this looks like 1 mil plastic is what they used. And they stapled and taped this thing to the ceiling. And so of course this thing falls down, which is kind of bad. If your containment falls down in the middle of remediation, that's not a good thing, right? So it's just, it's just, it's like, I don't know, we can say we're going to build a containment. Some another company can say they're going to build a containment. And you know, the proof is in the pudding, right? We're both building the same thing. Yes, that is factually correct. But it's, it's two totally different things that we have in mind. Here's another one where, you know, this thing, I believe these guys, I want to say they use spray glue for the edges, right? And spray glue is, it's a very pungent, heavy VOC thing. We always, we, we've really never used it. We only use it on very specific projects because a lot of the mold sensitized clients, they're also too chemically sensitized. So you never want to use these heavy VOC things. But anyway, the thing that stood out to me is that there's no tension poles, right? Zip poles are the most common ones in our industry, but their generic name is tension pole. And so if you remember from the video, the proper negative air pressure, that plastic was just straining against the poles, right? And the poles are what give it structural rigidity. And so there's no way that they had this thing under proper pressure. You know, this thing would just cave in on itself, right? You'd have holes appearing or if it, if it just collapses in on itself. So there's just no way. Now that was all about containment, negative air pressure. Let me move on to the meat and potatoes of demolition, what we actually do to remove mold. However, let me just talk about something that the S520 says. And I take this straight out of the S520. This isn't, you know, I just like to quote this verbatim. Physically removing mold is a primary means of remediation, right? The, you know, attempts to kill it are not adequate. People don't realize this. The S520 says this literally 10 times throughout the book in some variation of this. 10 times. You cannot read the S520 without this thing smacking you in the face 10 times. And the thing is, you know, people don't understand this because we're so used to dealing with bacteria, we're so used to dealing with viruses and pathogens, where if you're dealing with coronavirus or you're dealing with E. Coli, if you kill it, then it can, it cannot infect you. Right? That math makes sense, I agree. But again, people forget allergic reactions, mycotoxin reactions, you're reacting to substances. We're not trying to kill mold. It's. It doesn't matter. And so that's. The next thing it says is, you know, killing mold, killing, killing the. With biocides does not destroy the allergenic or toxicity properties. And what that means in plain English, antigenic is another name for allergenic. Right? Allergies. Toxigenic is talking about the mycotoxins. So kill it all you want. Spray your magic fufu juice in the air, right? Do anything you want. Cast a spell, whatever, right? Wave a magic wand, kill all the spores in there. And guess what? The allergic reaction that you have is still going to be the same tomorrow, right? So what? So using this chemical approach is neither safe because you can react to the chemicals and it's not effective. Why are we doing this? Right? And the thing is this S520 verbiage, right, whatever you want to call these words in the S by 20, it's been this way ever since I read this thing with like, I think the first one I read was the 2008 edition. You know, it said this thing, it said this terminology for what is that, 15 years, right? So this isn't anything new, you know, but I don't want to say anything more. I'll get to this later. So this is a diagram on how we actually do demolition. Now, everything in your house, to us fits in three separate categories. So it's either a porous material, semi porous material, or a non porous material. Now, in this diagram, I ran out of room with the graphic designer, so it doesn't list non porous. But that usually doesn't apply to most of our projects, right? If you have moldy metal or plastic, you know, you can just wipe the mold off with soap and water. You don't, you don't need us for that. But porous material, this is going to be drywall, carpet, insulation, right? These materials, the mold grows a root structure deeply embedded in the material, and you can never salvage it. You can never get enough of the mold out to say that this has been restored to what, to borrow a term the industry uses the insurance industry, a pre loss condition. Right. You can never restore this thing back the way it was once the mold's grown in it. Semi porous material, on the other hand. Let me go back to that for a second. There's a lot of misconception about this. And when people read the EPA or the CDC guidelines, the EPA says clear as day that non porous materials, the mold can be wiped off. And what happens is your, your regular average person, they think that drywall is a non porous material. And that is not true. Right. Non porous is glass, metal, plastic, porcelain, ceramic. Right. Your outdoor patio furniture grows mold. Sure. Wipe the mold off. Right. That is not drywall. Drywall is absolutely a porous material. So anyway, semi, semi porous material. This is going to be wood framing. You know, solid wood framing, studs, joists, subfloor, things like that, concrete, plaster, you know, this kind of stuff. And so what happens is the mold grows a small root structure into the wood. Now I'm not talking about rotted wood. That's a different story. But you know, if you're talking about, you know, you, you had a flood, you have some old growth on the drywall and then there's mold on the framing behind it. It's grown a little bit into the wood. And so what the standard says is that we can totally save this wood. We just have to physically strip out the top layer. Now we're not stripping out like one inch of it. Right. We're not reducing the structural integrity of the wood. We're going in about 30 seconds of an inch, right. To, to strip them, mold out, to get the roots out. And so we have to do some kind of physical abrasion. So sanding, wire brushing, or on big projects, we'll do blasting. Right. Soda blasting, dries blasting. But on the right hand side, you see this diagram, the chemical. I say shortcut. I was trying to be very nice about this, but you know, if you spray, if you go down to Home Depot and you buy bleach or you buy the mold killer and you spray it onto mold. And especially if you're scrubbing it, what's occurring is you're sloughing off the top layer of the growth on the surface and then, but then all the mold that's embedded into the material, either it's too small for you to see with the naked eye or you're bleaching the color out of it with an oxidizer like bleach or like hydrogen peroxide. And so the mold is still there. The roots are still there. The mycotoxins are still there, but you can't see it. But because the mold is visible before and that's what alerts people to mold being present. But then if you don't see it anymore, then people go, okay, look, I killed it and I'm safe. And they have no idea that they just took in a lung full of mold spores and that they just cross contaminated this all over the place. You know, so it's like trying to convince, you know, doctors from the 1500s not to do bloodletting, you know, because they can't see germs. Well, you can't see spores. Right? The final phase of this, the cleaning, this thing is, this is by far the hardest thing that we do. This is the hardest thing to train new technicians on. So even though we've had negative air pressure running in this chamber the whole time, that negative air actually does not clean the surfaces in the room. That negative air is meant to keep the mold spores in our chamber so it doesn't leave. But there's still, that room is incredibly dirty after we're done. Even though you don't see any more visible mold growth, right? We've done the tearing out, we've done the sanding, we've done all that. Now what happens is that there's billions of spores that, that have settled on all the surfaces just like dust. So the ceiling, the walls, the floor, horizontal surfaces, all the pipes, wires and ducts now have a coating of spores on them. And so it's a three step cleaning process called a, this is called the HEPA sandwich. So you have a vacuum first, damp wipe and then HEPA vacuum. Now some of my, some of my guys, they like to HEPA vacuum, damp wipe, damp wipe. And that's fine. But point is, this is a multi round cleaning process and this is why unfinished basements, utility rooms, right? These are like the bane of our existence because all the pipes and the wires and the ducts in there all have to be cleaned by hand, right? They have to be, they have to be white glove clean. And so that's, that's, you know, if you go into a job site of ours and do utility room and you take a white glove and you go touch all the wires and stuff. I'm not gonna say we're, we're perfect, right? We're not. God. There'll be a surface or two that you'll pick up some, some residue and, but for the most part all those wires are all clean. So it's just a very detailed Cleaning. And furthermore, people, you know, the reason I had this thing created was people kept telling me, okay, we're going to hire you guys to tear out the mold. And it's like, well, anybody can tear out mold. That's not a skill. Really, what you hire us for is our skills. The negative air pressure setup and our skills at the cleaning. That's really where we earn our money. So let me get into the actual good versus bad remediation. So on our left, we have a picture of a really good remediation. You know, this is the viewpoint of you as a homeowner walking in, right? Just. Just surveying the scene. You're right. You have the drywall cut out, you have the containment in the background, and on the right is a picture of a really bad remediation. So the point of this is, as a homeowner, you have really no idea what you're looking at, right? You can't tell what a good versus bad remediation is. For the most part, these projects are going to look the exact same. And so the, the. The judgment is in the details. You would never know. And this is why having a very persnickety iep, AKA mold tester, right, Indoor environmental professional is absolutely vital because they do this every day. They know how this is supposed to look. They can be the ones to obviously say the project failed and it needs to be redone. And so it's just, it's vital to your health because you, as a homeowner trying to judge a remediator's work, you never know. You would just go, the mold was here. I don't see any more now. Things must be good now. That's half the battle, actually. You know, the other half is judging whether the. The spore count is low enough. So I like to put in some red flags. So first one is actually, of course, if there's visible mold behind, you think that's an obvious one, but my next picture shows how it's not so obvious. And then if baseboards and door trim are left remaining, and then if there's visible debris in the containment area. So here's a picture of, you know, they did a remediation and obviously there is. Well, not obviously, but right, there is visible mold remaining on the drywall. So these guys, they focused on the major walls, right? So the wall on the left obviously must have had a ton of mold on it, and they totally forgot the mold the wall on the right. And so you see this a lot with low quality remediators where they miss the small Areas, you know, the corners and the insets and the areas around doors and stuff where there's small slivers of drywall, where they're focusing on the main stuff, the big ones, but they're forgetting the little ones. And then this cleaning is just absolutely atrocious. Right. Visible debris. I mean, this is just terrible work, you know, terrible work. From a mediation standpoint, there's just debris everywhere, right? There's. If there's visible debris, please tell me how they were able to clean up all the spores in the space. No way. There's no way. Here's another one. This looks better than the last picture. I'll say. At least they got all the drywall out. But again, you know, visible debris. Right. And these are. These are easily accessible corners. Right. I'm not going to roast remediators where they miss a spot that's around a corner inset and, you know, okay, yeah, our vacuum, our HEPA vacuums are not magic, Right. They don't have heat seeking, you know, nozzles on them. But these are easily accessible corners. So again, if you're meticulous, you know, if you're doing good remediation, you would never see this. Right. There'd be no debri in these areas. This one's obvious around, taking a picture across the floor, you can see clear as day drywall dust on this. And then the other red flag is the baseboard left behind. You know, you have to realize if you have a flood or a leak or whatever, water for, you know, water goes to the path of least resistance, water goes to gravity. And so the bottom of the wall is always going to be the worst of the mold growth. 90% of the time, it's going to be the worst of the mold growth. So either between the baseboard and the drywall or between the drywall and the wood framing. And so anytime companies leave behind the baseboards and the door trim and stuff, again, this is a red flag that they really didn't. They didn't get anything. So if we pop this baseboard off and guarantee there's going to be mold back there. Now, I'm not going to say a water damage company doing remediation is not a red flag in and of itself. But because some water damage companies are really good at doing remediation. However, they are two completely different skill sets. So water damage work is more like violent manipulation of air movement and dehumidification. Right. It's like walking into a tornado because they're trying to drive this place out quickly. Mold, remediation is more very controlled, meticulous demolition. And so there are two different skill sets. And so if you have a water damage technician unleashed on your mold remediation project, you know, this is an example I found actually it was from the previous picture. You know, they had an air mover, a fan blowing directly onto visibly moldy wood framing. Like, you can't make this up. You can't make this stuff up, right? This is, this is stuff I see all the time, every day. It's crazy, you know, but again, you as a homeowner, you don't know this stuff. You don't know that. This is just. This is our version of malpractice, right? So, yeah, number two, encapsulation before prv. Now for the people who don't know PRV is post remediation verification. That's when you have a third party tester come in and verify remediators work before the containment barriers come down and the rebuild occurs. Very important step, in my opinion, to have independent, unbiased judgment of our work to, you know, is this good enough? Are we done? You know, encapsulation is a tricky one because there are good remediators that will do it, but they have to do it in a very specific order. Because what the S520 says is that if you're going to encapsulate, it should be done after the PRV is completed, right? So after the multitaskors come in and verify this thing is when that encapsulation should be done. Now, we have a lot of clients who ask us to encapsulate. And I go, well, if you're having testing and we pass testing, why pay mold remediation prices to have a supply and encapsulant? You just have anybody apply. You could have a painter or a handyman. You don't need us to apply the encapsulant. The reason it's, it's. I won't say frowned upon, but the reason it's. People are. People are skeptical of it when it. When a company just encapsulates everything is because if you. It's far more, it's far more profitable. And you have a. You have basically no chance of failing a job if you encapsulate every surface. Because if a mold tester comes in, they tape sample all these surfaces, how is this going to fail? You just covered everything that was moldy with a layer of paint, right? And so that's why it's, it's, it's more, it's frowned upon because what Most remediators do is they use it to cover up shoddy workmanship because the tester can't test anything. Right. They're not, they're not going to be able to shave 3 microns down of the paint. So that way they can test this thin layer in between the paint in the wood framing. You can't do it right. So you just, the tester just goes, well, I don't know, you know, I'll pass the job for now because, you know, you can't, you can't. I mean, that ship has sailed. So, yeah, encapsulation before PRV is a, is a red flag. Number three is fogging. You know, fogging hasn't been recommended, hasn't been recommended since the 22008 edition of the S520. And this is what it looks like. There's so much chemical thrown into the air that actually makes a fog. Now, don't think we walk on water. When I first started doing this, we did it. Fogging and encapsulation and all this. So I know exactly what it's like. And you can't walk into these spaces without a respirator on or you're going to hack your lungs out. You know, a lot of these companies, they, they mandate that the homeowner leaves for a day or two days because they don't want to risk the homeowner going to the emergency room because they just breathed in all these chemicals. They want it to settle. And the mold standard says clear as day in black and white. Do not fog in lieu of source removal. Right. Again, remember the very first slide, right. Physical removal is the primary means of remediation. Physical removal, source removal. Right. So again, and people, they just don't realize how stacked up the industry is set up against them because they're still fogging companies out here that, that's their only line of work. They just fog, you know, oh, well, we don't have to tear apart your house. And you know, it's going to take a day, you know. Yeah, man, it's just, it's total smoke and mirrors. So, you know, if you believe that, I have oceanfront property in Arizona to sell you. I have a diet pill that's going to work while you sleep. It's going to make the fat melt off you and you're going to build muscle. You know, it's just, it's, it's too good to be True. Red flag four N95s and half faces. I can't say this is a total deal breaker because they're not doing anything wrong per se. If you do look in the mold standard, they, the standard says that you have to wear it minimum, you know, the N95. And I would argue Niosh, there's actually a government branch, there's a branch of, I want to say OSHA called niosh. And they do all the respirator metrics, right? The testing and stuff. And so they have something called protection factors. And, and if you're a remediator, it's just, there's no way you should be wearing anything less than a full face respirator. And if you've been doing this for years as a remediator, you should know this, right? And so what I view this as is that they are willfully going, I'm not worried about this, mold isn't real. I won't say mold isn't real, but they're not worried about it. They don't think it's a big threat. And so my point is, if they don't care about your own health, if they don't care about their own health, why would they care about yours? Bad sign. I love this cartoon, right? The client thinks this is what's going to be done. The tattoo artist is back there making some kids squiggly drawing. As a homeowner, what's really, really hard is telling companies apart. All these remediation proposals are going to look very similar. If I give you a remediation proposal and you compare us to a low quality remediator, it's going to look very similar. Very similar. Now I'll tell you one big difference is, you know, we're going to, we're going to take them a week or we're going to take a month and this other company is going to take three days. Something's wrong with that, right? Why are we taking a month to do something another company will do in three days? So that's one tip off. But you know, if you go line by line item as far as building containment, setting up, you know, the, the negative air machines tearing out multi drywall, right? All this stuff looks the same. And then another cartoon. I love this cartoon. I absolutely love this cartoon, right? So you have the simple but wrong solution on the left from people who are just falling off the cliff, like falling off the cliff, like lemmings now on the right or the complex, but right. And you know they're going up the mountain of enlightenment, right? And it's far fewer of them. And so there's this thing, if you ever heard the phrase the Simplest solution is usually the correct one. Well, the name for that is Occam's Razor. And so when it comes to mold, Occam's razor does not apply. Does not apply. Right. Mold is very in, in some ways it's very simple, but also too, in other ways it's very complex. And, and some things that you think are common sense are actually not true. So, you know, there's all kinds of ins and outs to this industry. So. So, yeah, thus concludes my presentation. So how. What's my time like? Did I do this fast enough? You're good.

I do have a couple questions though, because this was wonderful. I think what's hard, you said it like it's hard for a homeowner or a renter to understand the difference between contracts. The standards aren't written for them. They're not accessible. And so they'll say things like, well, they put up containment and they put in an air scrubber and they're going to clean. And it all sounds right. So it's like, how do you tell. And it's sounds like you're telling us the devil is in the details, right? It's. It's all these little things. So I do have a question about a detail because I've seen this before. People will say something like, well, they put in an air scrubber. And I want you to just reiterate for anyone listening, while putting in just an air scrubber is not the same as a negative air machine or putting the containment under negative pressure, because I see that all the time. Well, it says an air scrubber. Okay, well, that's not, on its own sufficient. Right. So just one more time reiterate the difference.

And to be fair, right. Still the containment, the air scrubber is still better than your local handyman coming out and just tearing this out. Right? With no protection, just butt naked, just, you know, exposing you to what, Whatever. Right. That's terrible. But, you know, I struggle with this sometimes to give people, you know, I love analogies. The best analogy I've, I've come up with is if you take a bathtub full of dirty water and the negative air machine is the equivalent of just pulling the drain, letting all the water drain out and pouring clean water in, the air scrubber would be the equivalent of draining a little bit of the water out as the same time as you're filling it with a little bit of clean water, eventually that water is going to be filtered. Yes, I agree, but how long is that going to take? And furthermore, when guys are going in and out of the containment are they, you know, they're going to be tracking stuff out on their clothes and in their hair and all that stuff. You know, every time you open up the zipper is, is, you know, are mold spores coming out with the, with the opening, right? Whereas with negative air pressure, especially if you're using decon chambers, and I didn't get into that, but decon chambers are great because that's, that really controls the pressure where that we, we never lose pressure, right? We can go from one, one zipper to another and, and maintain pressure the entire time. So, you know, it's just not good enough, right? And the thing is, people, the public has no idea what this is supposed to look like, right? You have to realize molder mediation has been around for maybe 15, 20 years, right? This isn't like buying a car where cars have been around since, you know, 1880. You know, this thing is very refined, right? Mold remediation is, is, is, it's a young industry. The public has no idea how this is supposed to look. They don't know what's important. That's another one. They don't know what's important. We get in these debates all the time. People are like, well, this company says they're going to run their aero scrubber for 72 hours and you're just going to run it for 12. You know, they're doing it. You know, listen, it's the, you're looking at the wrong thing, you know, you're looking at the wrong metric of trying to judge what's good and bad. So.

Well, I appreciate you've laid out some standards, the standard of care, the S520. I love that you gave us some red flags. So, last question, then we'll wrap it up in a contract. Is there, are there some specific things that people want to see that might help them, you know, differentiate companies a little bit more? Is there something they're looking for.

In a contract? It's harder. I mean, I'll say there's, there's two, two things that come to mind. So one would be guarantees, right? Guarantees are completely worthless in the mold remediation industry. And you'll see this, right? People go, oh, this company offered me a five year warranty, so that meant a lot to me. And so I, you know, hired them. When you read the fine print on these guarantees and warranties, every remediator has a ton of fine print that, that basically nullifies the warranty if there's another water damage event or there's a high humidity, right? Or condensation, dew point. Well, guess what? This is what grows mold in the first place. So what I tell people is, you know, because they go, well, do you have a warranty? Yeah, we have a one year warranty, but it's completely worthless. Right. We just put it in there because some lawyer wanted it in there one time. Just, you know, so we just threw it in there. You know, if you keep your house clean and dry, you will never see mold growth in a million years. Right? So again, this goes back to the concept, remove the water, you will never see mold growth. But again, people, they get caught up in the, you know, well, this company's applying their magic foo foo juice, which has enzymes and it's, you know, fragrance free and it's, you know, part of the environment, it's environmentally friendly. So what? Right? So what? It's, it's, there's no, there's no man made product that's going to hold back mother nature. How about that? There's a sound bite for you.

Love it.

And so that's one thing that stands out to me in contracts. The other one, the other one is if they do not guarantee that they will pass PRV testing, you'll see this a lot, right? People will talk to the remediator and then they start asking questions about the prv and then the remediator starts to backpedal. Oh, I didn't know you wanted that. Well, I'm going to need to change the pricing. Red flag, red flag. Because in, in our contract we actually specify what to us passing prv, what the mold level should be for us to pass prb. Right? Because we want to have something in black and white. And that's kind of revolutionary in our industry because remediators, it's such a gray area about what passing testing means. Right. But I just want to put something down just to just, just have something in black and white. And so that would be one. The other one is, you know, that they do not guarantee passing prv, you know, because it usually means that they're doing shoddy work and they fail over and over and over again.

Yeah. So no, that's super helpful and I want to say for anyone listening because I know there's gonna be questions. The purpose of this, we were really focused in on that containment piece. We did not have time to talk about the rest of your home or your H VAC system. Those are all parts of the equation too. Those are other talks, other resources on our website. The point of today was to really focus, focus in on that source area removal. And David, I think you did a really amazing job kind of helping people understand how and why it matters. So thank you so much for joining us.

Absolutely, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

And for everyone listening, if you found this helpful, do me a favor, head on over to changethearthfoundation.org and sign up for our newsletter because it really is the best way to get great interviews like this directly to your inbox. We'll see you next time.

Thanks so much, Sam.