Flooding Water Damage & MOLD. What Can Be Done?

So I'm coming on today to talk about flooding in particular, but also mold and water damage. So the reason I'm doing this is because, well, I'm actually in Florida now and I have relatives who live in Florida, so I know really what happened. My relatives live in Naples and also in Bradenton. And yeah, so I got first hand accounts of what was going on there. I've seen pictures. My parents actually their condo flooded, they lost one of their two cars and they had basically four feet of water in their garage. And we've all seen a lot of pictures online. And so I wanted to come on and do this live to talk about what the implications of all that could be because one, it is really scary to go through that and three, and survive. I'm sure there's a lot of trauma, but there's also going to be a lot of cleanup, as people know. And I understand that there's stuff everywhere. I haven't been to that part of Florida yet. I'm in the north on the other side, but on the other side of the state, on the east side of the state right now. But we will be working our way there. And so it's good if people are pulling stuff out. The operative word in these situations is dry, dry, dry, dry, dry, dry. And when we have materials that are an assembly of materials. So think of it as, say you try to dry some towels and they're not all dry, they're actually damp, maybe some is even wet, but you fold them anyway and you put them in a pile. Is the towel that's wet in the middle of the pile going to dry? Well, it'll try to dry through the other towels, probably wick into the other towels, but it won't completely be able to dry without wetting the other towels. And it will take a very long time to dry. And then if you put a plastic bag over that or something and you opened it in a couple days or weeks, it probably would smell awful because you would have prevented drying. And so I use that analogy because when we have an event, and it could be a flood, it could be a hurricane where we have leaks through roofs, through walls adjacent to our walls, from windows could leak. There's a lot of places that our buildings could leak. But it could also be that we have a plumbing leak. And that could be an event, something that happens, or it could be something that happens a long time over a long period of time. I'm primarily going to focus on the events today in keeping with my goal of giving back to those of you who have suffered. And I know Kentucky had floods last year. There's a lot of parts of the country that end up with flooding. We even have flooding in Arizona. So they have a monsoon season and can end up with a ton of water at a short period of time that nobody was expecting or planning for. Well, so when we have water, we have to dry. So if materials have gotten wet, they need to be removed. Anything in storage, anything in your home, any, anything that is layers of material. So obviously we don't have to remove concrete if it's on a concrete slab. But anything over the concrete, if it was underwater, has to be removed. It's going to trap moisture. Drywall in particular is a material that will grow mold in 24 to 48 hours and it can take up to two weeks. So don't totally panic. But it can happen in 24 to 48 hours. Because the backside of drywall in particular is recycled paper. The front side is too, but it's got a paint coating on it. So it may be a little bit more resistant, but the backside never does. So if you can imagine recycled paper is pre digested mold. Food and mold can be very toxic to our health. I see it day in and day out. It's. It has happened to me. So I'm Cheryl Cecco. If you don't know who I am and you're just stumbling onto this video, I'm Cheryl Ceco. I am a licensed architect. For more than 30 some years, I had an issue in my family where we were exposed to water damage and mold. In our case, the time that I knew it, we were exposed many times. The time that I knew it and one of my children was sick was mold in our ductwork. And I will admit I didn't know why. Why would we have mold in our ductwork? It was metal ductwork. But so the important thing to know is that mold will actually grow on any material. So I had mold in my metal ductwork. Mold will grow on metal, it will grow on plastic, it'll grow on wood. Yes, it will grow on drywall, It'll grow on anything. It'll grow on fabric, it'll grow on leather. So it'll grow in carpeting, it'll grow in carpeting pad, it'll grow in insulation. That's really hard to find because the insulation has got so much fibers, which is a little bit like carpet. So just know that the food source can be dirt and dust, which can be anywhere. So when people have mold in their ductwork, the mold is not Feeding off the metal, the mold is feeding off of the debris, organic debris, which is dirt. And dust, which is in the ductwork that comes from just dust, is dead dust mites or alive dust mites, their fecal matter, their excrement. It could be dead skin cells, could be hair. All those things are biological matter that can be a food source for mold if the humidity, if water, if condensation is there to provide the water source. So the thing to know is that really to have mold, we're all in a temperature as human beings, anywhere between 40 and 130 degrees that we can tell that mold can live. The one thing, the two things that mold needs to live is oxygen, and it needs water. Now people say, oh, but it needs a food source. And what is a food source? Wood is a food source. It's even more of a food source when it's highly processed. So think particle board, think paper. That comes from wood. So it's like pre digested. It's so crunched up and processed that it's very easy for the multipores to digest it. Solid wood does not get moldy as quickly as particle board. And particle board, I'm meaning not that usually not used in our construction of our buildings. That would be in furniture, often cabinets, shelving. So in a water event, any of those things should are going to have to be removed. So I got some questions here because we put this out that we were coming on live to do this. And it's been 15 minutes past the hour. So I'm going to go through the questions and then I'm going to look at the chat. And my assistant, hopefully Crystal, is here with me and hopefully she'll be able to help. I have to keep clicking because I keep getting these messages. It really doesn't like the FPS, whatever that is. So Alicia had asked what was. What is the best way to test your home to see what the mold levels are? The ERMI doesn't seem very accurate. Is there a better option? Thank you. Okay, so just know that any testing is a screening test. So it's a little bit like saying, what's the best test for me to know if I'm going to get cancer? What's the best test to know if I have an autoimmune disease? What's the best test to know if I have any disease? Usually there's multiple things we have to look at for our health, and the same thing is going to be true of our buildings. And so I always start with, are people sick? Do you see Water damage. Do you know of an event? Do you have symptoms that could be associated with exposure to toxins in the air? And those symptoms are very wide ranging. So they include things like insomnia. One that's hard to identify oftentimes is mood swings. So there's something actually called mold rage, where people's. People's personality actually changes. It does turn into a rage. Brain fog would be another one. Rashes, inability to focus and concentrate, fatigue, add, ADHD in children, migraine headaches was one of the ones that my daughter had when we were exposed. Lots of autoimmune diseases could be connected. In fact, in my family, I believe they were connected. So know that mold in the air is an immune system burden. So it's preventing. It's giving our immune system something really huge to deal with toxins in the air. Air is ubiquitous. We need air to survive. We need a few things. We need air and water are probably the biggest things. Food after that. But air we breathe day in and day out. And so if that air that we're breathing is toxic or somehow harmful to our bodies, and then that's the only thing our body can work on, is getting rid of that toxin and managing that toxin. And so then it doesn't address other things in our bodies. And so my family, including me and my husband, have had Lyme disease. And I know it was connected to mold. I didn't know it at the time that it was connected to mold, but people often find that connection because the immune system is so burdened by the mold that it can't address healing from the Lyme or even fighting off the Lyme bacteria. So that's the challenge with mold in terms of testing. If you've had a water event, I would just assume that there's a good chance you have mold unless you've opened everything up and gotten everything to dry. And even then, you might have missed something. I work on buildings. They're really complicated. They're as complicated as a human body is only built by human beings, which have a lot more potential for mistakes. So know that all these tests is an interesting test. If someone needs to be convinced with a test, it's a dust sample. It's a screening test. If you find nothing in your ermi, it doesn't mean anything except you didn't find anything on that day with that test. When you test. And it is kind of expensive, but for some people, that's helpful to have that test. It doesn't tell you where to look in your home. It doesn't tell you where you might have mold, it may give you some indications of which mold are present. But like I said, if you find nothing, it doesn't mean that you don't have mold in your house. So false negatives, which means you get a negative result on an irbie test says that you don't have mold. I would never believe that. I had that. That's why I know. And I had it on other people in my family's homes that I tested who came back with really low ERMI scores. But I could see a roof leak, evidence of a roof leak. I could see their health issues. In one particular case in my own family, I knew that our blood work was suggesting. So blood work is something that I would recommend if you're really trying to figure it out. We had some blood work that did suggest that we were being exposed to mold. And so then. But the ERMI testing, the air sampling, that's another way to test, is air sampling. They didn't show anything. The most reliable mold test is if you see something you think might be mold or you think there's an area that might have mold on it, is to do a swab sample. That would be the most reliable because you know where you tested, you know how you tested, and you're testing a certain area. The other thing that I recommend is checking humidity rates, humidity levels. If your humidity levels are above the recommended levels. And so in the winter, that's going to be 40%. In a mild winter season, the colder the temperature gets outside, say it's getting down to 15, then 40 is too high. Maybe you're going to be at 30 at that point. So as the temperatures drop, the humidity needs to also drop. As the temperatures rise in the summer, warm air can hold more humidity than cool air. So we I'm here in Florida, the humidity has been 91%, 92%, 93%. So it's very humid. That's another problem to manage because our air conditioning systems in that kind of temperature have to pull that humidity out for us to be comfortable. But that wouldn't be normal in our homes. So unless you have all your windows open, then you could have that humidity. But if you are trying to condition the air, your air conditioning, for instance, that's way too high. And in fact, in my own home, when we've had, say, the temperatures and this is summer and it stops raining, and so we're. It's 70 degrees, should we open the windows? I'm always checking to see what the humidity is outside. If the humidity is above 80%, we don't open the windows. We wait until it drops below 80 in the 70s, 60s, 50s before we open windows. Even though it's cool outside, I just don't want to bring all that humidity in. So for Alicia's question on the best way to test your home, one, if you had an event you already know, I wouldn't bother doing any testing. I just assume that there's places that need to be addressed because if you don't have mold now, you will have mold soon. If you see mold, test the mold itself and I have some links and maybe Crystal will be able to put it in the chat for some mold testing that you can do yourself. So feel free to do that. They actually do ear samples as well. Ear sampling is a lot like ermi. It's a screening test. If you find something, I would consider it significant. If you don't, then you just didn't find something that day, that time in the way you tested and where you tested. So I always recommend looking for where you had the problem. Make sure you're testing in the area where you think you had a problem or where you know you had a problem. They usually don't recommend testing. Ermi's in bathrooms because there's so much, so many problems in bathrooms anyway. There are other moisture meters you can use and there are videos that I am on where I'm talking about the surface moisture meter. That's very inexpensive to check. Tile. I found tile in my own, I found water damage in my own home with that and I found it numerous times on my clients homes. So it's a very inexpensive meter. It could make a mistake. But if it's so, I recommend testing over and over again. And if you're getting the same high reading over and over again on different days, that is usually not a mistake. So it's not. It's unlikely that a machine like that would make a mistake over and over again in the same location. So. And in my case there was no plumbing. So know that water travels and so. So moisture readings would be way I'd check humidity. The other situation that I had was we had a plumbing leak and that bathroom had higher humidity than the rest of the house. So that's why I'm saying is monitor your humidity room by room. Go around with the moisture humidity monitor. Buy the little square ones that are 10, $15 and buy a couple of them and put them in different rooms and see if you can identify that one room might have a significantly more humid humidity. Higher humidity rating or level than the others, and that would be a clue. So a lot of what we do is detective work. But since we're talking about water damage from an event, we already know something happened. So again, I wouldn't bother testing at this point. If you've had an event, I'd be looking for water, looking for moisture, and trying to dry things out that you can know that water is going to follow gravity if it came in through the roof. There's all kinds of branches that the water of routes that the water could have taken coming in a roof. So you want to open up whatever's been WET at least 18 inches beyond what looks to be dry, and know that dry is a measurement. So there are different kinds of moisture meters. If it's wood that we're testing, I usually recommend a pin meter. Mine is a professional meter, so it costs about 3 to $400. I do recommend that if you have a big. A big situation to get a good one. And I do have a moisture meters webinar that I offer. So I have a bundle of webinars. It's called Mold Experts, a Mold experts bundle@avidingmold.com and you can see videos of me explaining everything that I try to explain to my clients and in the most affordable way possible, with pictures and with PDFs, including going over molding defects that can cause mold. Because we do have to prevent, like if water got in, we got to figure out how to make sure it doesn't get in again. In addition to opening up anything that could have gotten wet and beyond, remember, drywall is not expensive. If there's one thing you want to not save, it's going to be drywall. If you're not sure if water got behind something, just remove the drywall. Sometimes if there's nothing there, you could put it back. But you want to measure dry. Don't look at the wood and say, oh, that wood's dry. No, measure it with a pin meter. What? Dry has a definition. And then you can measure the wood there against wood that clearly didn't have any exposure to water or flooding, whatever it is. And you want to know what those numbers are, and that's how you know if something's truly dry. So because we are covering up a lot of wet materials. So, Alicia, I answered a lot of things in that question with your question on the best way to test. And basically my answer is, in an event, I wouldn't bother testing anything that usually is something that's going to come up later. Once you've tried to do a good remediation, sometimes you don't need remediation. You just need to get rid of stuff. Get rid of everything that's wet. So Anna's asking about safe residents finding locations and what to be aware of. So I have some courses on this. Moisture Basics would be the one mini course that I recommend for everyone, even if you're a professional. I recommend it because I made it including things that were surprising to me that I didn't know. So we break down that's not just a webinar that is actually into modules. And there's over 25 defects in there with pictures. There's a list of those defects plus a lot more because everything I discuss is with pictures. So you can start inspecting your own home and looking for these things. And if you still need help after you take that, then that would be a good time to do a consult with me and we can go to the next level because you've already listened to me talk for it's about 90 minutes of content. There's also another three part webinar series we have called before youe Buy or Rent. Those are. That's basically over three hours of video with pictures. Two on the outside are focusing on the outside, one on the inside. Basically people sent in pictures and I talked about what we're looking at here and why this would be a red flag and why that might be okay and why this would be something you should be thinking about. So the idea is to train our eyes to see. Train your eyes to see what I see because I've been studying buildings for such a long time. But we can all see these things. And the disclaimer on this is that once you see this stuff, can never unsee it. So just know that it's everywhere. Commercial buildings, hospitals, schools. But we have to start somewhere. And knowledge is power. I truly believe that. So Michelle has asked. We have consistent flooding in our 100 year old basement. Mold is found there and all over the house. My husband won't move. Is it worth remediating? So the question is, are you going to be able to fix the flooding? Can you stop the flooding? It's always worth getting rid of mold. Always. I mean it's. There's no reason to leave it unless you're going to burn the house down. Especially if you're going to live there. I would try to clean as much as possible and get rid of mold. That's what remediation is, is getting rid of mold. Know that remediation does not include fixing. Why you had the mold in the first place in most cases. And sometimes I hear a lot of remediators that don't fix find the cause. That's a recipe for disaster. There's no reason to spend a lot of money on remediating mold only to find that it's coming back the day they walk away. Because we didn't fix the cause. The root cause of why it's there. Consisting flooding in a 100 year old basement is a tough one because that means there's been a lot of humidity. Every situation is different. So it's hard for me to say yes or no whether that can be worth saving. Some very old buildings are built so well that they can withstand a lot and there's a lot of ability to remedy what has gone wrong. Other homes I've seen are really close to just walk away and let someone either sell it as is, let someone else deal with it. And there's an occasional couple that I just say, yeah, burn it down. There's nothing you can that go. So they go so far gone. So what we don't want to have is that situation where we ignore problems. We know something happened and we just don't do anything about it because it's out of sight and out of mind. That's not going to end well. So I'm sorry about your situation. Hopefully you can maybe share this with your husband that he can understand that the health issues are real and. But without seeing the house individually, I don't know. I'm sorry, Michelle, but I could do, I could do a consult with you guys to discuss that. Megan's asking, is there a preference on which type of foundation a home should be built on? This is a great question and I talk about this a lot. I have a lot of people who are saying, oh, I want to live on a slab house. So then I don't have mold. That couldn't be farther from the truth. Lots of slab homes have really bad mold the same way any other building does. Know that in a slab. In many parts of the country the slab has walls. It's just full of dirt underneath and the dirt is still collecting water and that water is wicking up into the slab and that's not a good thing. And there's nowhere to go. And we could have plumbing leaks, we could have our toilets leak, we could have flooding underneath the slab. I've seen bathtubs that have flooded and there's basically a hole under the slab. So it's filling up with water under the slab. It's actually Very expensive to rip up a slab and try to dry that out in a basement. You can go down there and look and you can see exactly what's going on. So you should be able to correct problems faster. The walls of the basement may be leaking, but believe me, the walls of your foundation may be leaking under your slab, too. Neither one is going to be safe in a basement. You can go look. A crawl space, in theory, if it's big enough that you can go look and that you will go look, it could offer that as a possibility. I generally would personally never buy a house on a crawl space because most of the time the crawl space is not easy to view. And a lot of the houses that are already built, they've gone on too long without having proper containment of the moisture. So it's hard to fix and hard to clean. There's not enough space. And there's some climates where you have to have a slab or a crawl space. So Florida is going to be one of those. There's no basements here. There may be an occasional building that's on a. Has a walk out of some sort of. But know that you kind of have to start with what's possible. But know that any foundation system can be moldy. If. If just living on a slab was a solution, then people wouldn't be having the number of problems that they do, because the whole state of Florida is living on a slab. The whole, you know, most of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, anywhere South Texas is all living on slabs. And there's plenty of mold there. So just know that the key is building the foundation well. Drainage, proper drainage. They do have a build a safe home master course, and we talk about all things related to building the home from scratch and that the first one of those is site and climate. So figure out where you live and your site, what's important about your site, and how to get your site to drain. And then we go into foundations and building design to make sure that the decisions we make will have water flowing away from our building and not soaking in. So. Good question, Megan. Rachel's asking all her toilets are all toilets. She's having toilets that have a pink bacteria ring. A week after cleaning, certain areas of the home remain more dusty than others, despite a whole house dehumidifier and air purifiers throughout. Could this be a cause for concern? It is a cause for concern. So know that whole house dehumidifiers and air purifiers are covering up a problem. They are. We shouldn't. We shouldn't need a whole house dehumidifier in most climates. And we shouldn't need an air purifier if we're running heat that's dehumidifying, that's drying, no one is running heat. Should be needing a dehumidifier. Now, I will say in lower levels, basements always should have a dehumidifier running, but it shouldn't run 24 7. So we should have one in those places. In garages that are attached to homes, I recommend a dehumidifier just because we're not heating and cooling, conditioning that space, and we bring in cars that either have rain on them or snow on them, and then all that drips in the garage with nowhere to go when we close the door. So. But in general, I would say that our air conditioning and our heat systems should be managing our humidity in most climates. Now, the very south of Florida, you may need a dehumidifier as part of your air conditioning because it's so much of a burden with the amount of humidity outside. But you shouldn't have that pink bacteria ring or ring around your toilet. That means there's a lot in the air that isn't good stuff that's looking for wet places to land. And the toilet is a prime spot. That rim around the edge of the water is oxygen and water and some sort of dirt. So dirt, dust, debris. Okay, so we have dust everywhere. Now you're also talking about more dust. Dust. Dust mites love humidity and moisture, and so they reproduce more when there's too much humidity and when they have a good food source for all the things that they do. So I do recommend if you have a sensitive family, if you're worried about mold, the one thing I would start with is treat it like you have a dust allergy in your family. And clean, clean, clean, clean air purifiers. Again, this is all like a band aid. Cover up an infection. We could put a bandage on our arm and pretend like we don't have an infection. And that's basically what an air purifier and a dehumidifier is doing. But there's some reason why we need those things, and that's the root cause of what's going on in our homes. So for that, I would recommend the moisture basics. Get started with that. Start looking around your home. Get to know your home, know the humidity room by room. And look at your house when it rains, after it rains, right after it rains to see what is going on. And you might See things. I'll tell you where to look in that class. You'll see things that you maybe didn't think that were going on. But there are things oftentimes that you can fix pretty easily. All right, so Amy was asking about mold remediation and cleaning, especially wood materials. So whether you're under construction or whether you've had an event and you could end up with mold growing on materials, that is surprising and shocking. And it's also dangerous for health. What do we do about it? And so she's asking about different products. You want to dry. So there's going to be no point in cleaning wood if it's wet. We need the wood to dry. So we're gonna. But you can clean whatever is on the surface. But know that you're gonna keep cleaning every day because it's gonna grow back until we can dry wood. And wood in particular. Drywall is another material that you can measure moisture content in. They have different scales. So I go through all this in my moisture meters webinar with Eileen Cohn. She is a technical salesperson who is actually working for Domhorst. And that's the kind of meter I had before I ever met her. And she did a great job on that webinar. And so we have that in the mold experts bundle. And so I'd start with that. Really. You can clean mold with detergent, any kind of detergent. What you want to be concerned about is you just don't want to add a lot of water. The water is going to soak in. And we are trying to dry. Mold won't grow on dry wood. It will grow on wood that's wet. Know that wood can be wet at the core even though the surface is dry. So that's another tricky detail to know about. And we do talk about that more in that webinar. But in terms of cleaning, I use thieves cleaner from young living. And that's not the oil I use the. I mean, I use the oil too. There's another protocol for the oil, but I use the cleaner. And the reason I like it, there's a lot of other products that people use is because it has an essential oil component. And the essential oils that are in it are rosemary, clove, eucalyptus, cinnamon bark and lemon. And mold just doesn't like those. You can go on PubMed, you can put antifungal essential oils in your search engine and you can find out what all kinds of science they use it in food processing. Know that the, the essential oils you're gonna get though from, from the grocery store, from a drugstore may not be pure because this is, this has turned in to be an industry that everybody's trying to make money off of. So I use the young living brand because I am convinced in terms of, compared to anywhere else that they have some of the best quality and they're doing a really good job in their science and in investigating the different kinds of oils that they make. And they make a lot of their own. I've been to their labs, I've been to their farms. It was impressive. So the reason I like the cleaner is because the cleaner has these essential oils in it. So these plant based products that mold just doesn't like and that soaks in. So it's. The cleaner has an emulsifier in it. So oil and water don't mix. So we're not going to just put a couple drops of oil into water, it's just going to stay drops of oil. So we want to be able to have something. The emulsifier, it's kind of a chemical process of distributing the oil throughout the water. And the cleaner does that. It's very inexpensive, really inexpensive to try. If you use my sponsor Number, which is 3243004 if you're new to that company or you've been expired and you want to reactivate an account, use my number and I'll be happy to share with you my other resources that I have on this and also happy to support you. So Dr. Ed Close was my mentor on using the essential oils and, and he did that for me. So I do that, pay that forward. The whole point though is that it's got this oil in it. Oil soaks into most porous materials, in particular wood and so the water evaporates. That's the reason bleach doesn't work. Bleach will clean the mold off the surface. Don't get me wrong. Hydrogen peroxide I think is very similar. Bleach in particular is very toxic to breathe and it evaporates immediately, leaving the water behind. So it may have gotten rid of the mold on the surface, but it's fed the roots of the mold a big drink of water and so the mold will come back bigger and better. And so what I like about an essential oil based cleaner in particular the young living thieves cleaner, is that it does soak in to wood in particular and mold just doesn't want to be around it. I'm not exactly sure what happens to the mold, but the mold looks at it and goes eh, I don't want to be by that. I'm not going to grow there, I'll grow somewhere else. And that's what we want. We want that something that's going to soak in. And what my experience has been that it's. And I use a scrub brush, I use a stiff scrub brush. Amy was asking about what kind of wiping process I would use a scrub brush, light rinsing, use a spray bottle for the cleaner if there's large areas. Because we don't want to drench wood again. It's going to have to dry once we've got it wet. If it's been in a flood, it's already drenched. In many cases, if wood has been completely saturated below ground or below water level, it's going to just all need to be replaced because the amount of time it's going to take to dry that out is significant. And also we usually have materials touching other materials. Even if it's this, the base plate of the wall on a slab that are going to be really hard to draw in between there and we will end up with mold in between there. So there is ways to do that. Your remediator probably cannot do all that kind of removal. Most remediators don't have insurance to remove anything structural, but architects can tell you how. So you need a structural engineer or a licensed architect to give you a plan and, and instruct your contractor on how we're going to support the walls that are load bearing and remove the bottom parts of them and basically create build something new there to support the part of the wall that was in good shape. So that's my questions on this list. I'm going to go down in. So Amy, let's see. I'll see what I got here. I may be going from the back to the front, Amy saying don't you need to remove the mold spores, even the dead ones? Yes, 100%. You need to remove the mold. Asking about removing the mold spores from the wood materials. Yes, that's why we're washing them away. Dead and living mold is an immune problem. I agree completely. How to remove the mold spores from raw wood. It seems like just spraying. No, we're scrubbing and we're wiping them away. My point is that so anything on the surface we're wiping away, it won't regrow in my experience. My understanding is that the plants that are in those essential oils are not conducive with the mold spores. Most mold, the mold kind that is growing in buildings, they don't want to be around it. So but yes we do want to clean. This is not about if you see mold you have to remove it. And so HEPA vacuum once you get things dry will remove mold. Damp wiping with a white rat dry with a damp rag, a scrub brush and then wiping with a damp rag on sawn lumber across the grain. It's not going to usually be you'll be a little bit smooth. The end grain is not going to be good. It's going to be very rough and so that will catch on rags. So all you can really do is scrub and try to rinse and you do the best you can. So but that's going to be the same with any detergent. The EPA even says on their website any mild detergent you can use dish cleaning soap if you want. I just prefer the essential oil based ones because of the resistance that they seem to have as the science suggests and that's in the mold experts bundle. I do have a video on the science of all that. So if you that's a great value that five videos in the mold experts bundle. And so I do recommend that highly. Let's see Rachel's saying current Home is a 1972 mobile home with visible mold. We're trying to move and it looks like buying land and building may be the best option. We're thinking of putting up load bearing straw bale home in the high desert. What would be the best maritos for interior walls? You know what I recommend my build a safe home course. I've had clients that have straw bale homes and they were disasters. So I don't care. I live in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It's high desert. I personally would not build a straw bale home. Straw is grass and if it gets wet it turns just into a mess of mold. And so personally I wouldn't recommend that. I know there are people that do do that successfully. So if you want to follow their advice I recommend then you follow their advice. But then you still need to follow. I would recommend still following my advice in the build a safe home course on site drainage because we still need to keep water away. We still need to keep water off the walls. The the best way to keep straw bale or any material dry is to have big roof overhangs. So we talk about that in that course. That is my master course. And so people who are in that course and get in the moisture basics you get one month free. Also in I have an online private community that is usually this is being gonna go there as well but that's Facebook has gotten very Crazy. And so I developed an online community that is subscription based where it's a smaller group. It's getting back to really where I came from when I started on Facebook. Smaller group, easier to have conversations, easier to keep track of conversations and without all the advertising and, and everything else that comes so that you can come. There's over 70 videos there. We do. We've been doing about four videos a month. Each month has a master class and so those have become a huge library, a vault, if you will, of great information that complements the Build a Safe Home course. So we do give several months free for the Build a Safe Home students. One month free with the Moisture Basics course. So you can try it out. If you want to continue, then you can continue as long as you want. We hope you stay because we come out with a lot of good content and I do these kinds of Q and A is there once a month. So we're kind of doing something different here and going public with this. But that's called the Dwell well Institute. You can join without the courses. I recommend joining with the course at least the Moisture Basics or the Build a Safe Home. But yeah, come and come in. See how much you can see in the 7, 50, 60, 70 videos we have there and for a very affordable rate. So I'm, I do have assistants that, that need to earn a living. I need to earn a living and this stuff all costs a lot. So we do have to charge for the content we share. But we are doing our best efforts to have it be as affordable as possible and give you guys the maximum amount of information. Also check out Instagram. I do my moisture minutes there my YouTube videos. Another source that I have a lot of free content. Don't forget to like and subscribe and, and keep checking this Facebook group or this Facebook page. Let's see, Gold is saying no sound. I don't know. Hopefully you got the sound figured out. I, I see here you can find in the chat my tools. So check those out. Amy's saying open everything under containment only. Yes, 100%. However, if you just had a flood yesterday, I wouldn't bother with containment. I would just start getting, you know, pulling stuff out. Hire someone if you must. Now you may find that there may be something that you didn't know that you're going to uncover that even though you had a flood event, you didn't know that there was. You had water damage that was concealed. That can happen in any situation. So. But know if you have a big flood event that that air is all going to be all over your house anyway. So if you can do some containment. I talk about that in the found. I think it's got mold now what? Or found mold now what? That's in the moisture mold experts bundle. I go through basically remediation and containment best practices there. I also have some cleaning videos and in that bundle, including how to remove carpeting. So I recommend that for people. Megan says thank you. You're welcome. Megan. As we, Jeffrey's saying, as we tighten up homes thermally, right size or mechanical systems, they run less and we do lose drying potential. That is true. That is a good point, Jeffrey. Most people are not right size in your mechanical systems. Unfortunately, however warm air does, it holds more moisture than cool air. So that is a good point. But I think in really cold climates you have heat. You're right. In the climates where it's like 50 degrees out and you don't need much heat and it's 65 in the home, that can be a challenge. So, so that's, I mean, I'll, I, I agree every climate is different, every situation is different. But I will say generally that if you're running Heat 247 and it's forced air and you don't have a brand new house that's super tightly sealed and you have high humidity, then I think there's another problem I'd at least rule out. Could there be another problem? Is there another source of this moisture that's causing us to need a dehumidifier? I would at least rule that out. Most of us with heat in cooling in cool climates and cold climates where we run heat a lot need to humidify our air because it gets so dry. So yeah, let me see what other questions I can see here. This thing kind of. Jeffrey, I think that's all the questions that I see here. Oh, Chris is saying, is it inadvisable to use underlayment when installing tile in a concrete slab in case of a future flood? Well, all right, so it depends on what kind of underlayment. Charis, I think is the name. You never want to put wood over concrete. So sometimes over concrete slabs we have, we put like a topping to level it. And someone I know had asked a question about cracks in concrete slabs. So, so there's often a topping that can get adhered to the concrete that creates another layer of concrete, so to speak. That would be a good solution because in theory there's no oxygen there for air to get under there and it'll absorb water the same way to slab Oil, which is better than nothing. Tile is best on concrete slabs because that tile can usually dry between the grout joints. That doesn't mean that it's completely immune from mold. Definitely vinyl laminate and any kind of vinyl laminate flooring. Even wood. Hardwood over slabs often have hardwood often has a plastic vapor barrier underneath. Usually we get the mold under the plastic vapor barrier. So anything that can have oxygen get underneath it that's not adhered to the concrete can be a problem. See, that was a good one. My list moves on its own here. So Yvonne says please address removing dead surface mold from wood. You know the final thing you can do with dead surface mold, if it's really dry and you've measured it dry and know that the dry number is not 19. Mold grows at 20% on wood and you. Everyone needs to figure out what their equilibrium moisture content is for the location that they live. Usually somewhere in Arizona it might be six or seven. There's probably six or seven in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where I live in Florida it might be 10, 11, 12, maybe 13. But not more than that most likely. But this is published from the Forest Products Lab. You can research this on your own. It's all free put in Forest Products Lab Wood Handbook. There's a. There's a couple chapters on moisture and wood. You can read all about it there. So but if the wood is it truly in effect, if the mold is dead on the surface of wood, you can do a light. I would suggest a light. A light wet sanding which means. Or damp sanding just so you don't create too much dust. So the dampness meaning to keep the dust down. But you can do a light sanding to remove what's on the surface. That would be another way to do that. Building materials when building a home, depend on the location where you build. Looking to build an arched cabin Steel. Yeah. The materials Megan, depend on where you're building. So a lot of people are looking at these arched cabins of steel in places like. Like Texas. You have a lot of sun in Texas, you have a lot of humidity. Metal in a sunny place or that's got a lot of high temperatures is going to be an oven. So when I was in Girl Scouts, we could fry an egg in a coffee can or we could bake muffins in a coffee can that we cut a little door in just with the sun beating on it. So know about. Know that steel and concrete both. But steel even more so is very conductive of temperatures when we have high humidity regions like here in Florida. I was noticing our temperature this morning was 73 outside. The humidity was 92 and the dew point was 71. So dew point is a temperature that if a surface has that temperature, you'll get condensation on it. And so that's the challenge we have with steel in particular, a little bit in concrete and concrete block, but mostly with steel, is that we use steel. We use metal to cook our food on, to make pots and pans. It's very conductive of temperature. If you make it hot on the stove, you can cook your food. If it's cold, it's going to be super cold. It's going to be whatever the temperature is outside. So if you're going to a soccer game outside on a really cold day, you probably don't want to sit on a metal bench because without padding, blankets. So we. The challenge with anything that steel frame is the condensation potential is that warm, moist air could hit that surface and then end up condensing and having a lot of water. So Chris is saying, oh, hardy board. I'm not sure what that was related to, but hardy board is basically. It's a company proprietary name, but it's basically cement fiberboard, and I don't think that can be in concrete. So cement fiberboard means it's got wood in the cement. So it's a product that's made, but it's still read the installation requirements and instructions for any material you're going to use. I'm pretty sure that it doesn't. It. It's not supposed to be. I know I've read this. It's not supposed to be in contact with concrete. So if you do hardie board siding, if you just fiber cement siding, it needs to have a clearance of a couple inches from the concrete. From concrete slab concrete walkways, it needs to be kept clear off of a roof as well. So anyway, it's a reservoir cladding, you know, hardie board. That's a good. Jeffrey, you're pretty smart. I wonder what. I'd love to know what you do because you definitely been researching a lot or you're in the industry. A reservoir cladding would be primarily things like stucco, brick, concrete block are definitely reservoir claddings. Hardie board or fiber cement siding, if you read the installation instructions, are supposed to be primed on all sides. When they cut the siding to put it up, they're supposed to have a can of primer there so that they can prime and seal the cut edges. So, yes, it can absorb moisture, but in theory, if it's been primed and installed properly. It won't. So that's the theory of it. But reservoir cladding is something that is storing moisture and the biggest culprits for that will be brick, stucco and concrete block. So Megan's saying so steel. Yeah. Jeffrey need to. Yep. And use furring strips. So that's a Jeffrey saying need to paint all field cuts and use furring strips. Yes, absolutely. The furring strips allow drying. So stuff siding is going to get wet. We just assume it's going to get wet. We assume it's going to leak and and we just need to manage the moisture behind there. Megan saying thank you. So steel is not recommended. Stick build is the way to go. There's places for steel. Just manage that. And it depends on your and again depends on the climate that you're in. If you're in a humid climate it might be better to go with with wood or concrete block. So look around at indigenous buildings. Stone. I spent a lot of time in Texas last year and and did some videos you can look online of of buildings have been around for 100 years or 50 years and are doing really well. So it's always interesting to see what indigenous products were used. And that could be stone, it could be clay, brick of some sort. And oftentimes in those hot, humid climates, those materials actually store the cold of the night and transmit the cold of the night throughout the day. And it's not until about 3 or 4 in the afternoon that they start taking on the warmth of the sun and then need and then they'll be reflecting warmth for the cool nights. So there's a lot of cool things that that people have figured out in indigenous architecture that I'm fascinated by and that we have a lot to learn from that our ancestors did a good job. We do have wood frame buildings that are hundreds of years old. The stave churches in Norway are from I think oh I think the 11th, 11th, 12th century. The the temples in Japan their wood frame but both of those have big overhangs and the buildings were up on elevated off the ground. The wood is separated from the dirt by stone and also there's good drainage away and the buildings are not sitting in a hole that's going to be a giant puddle. So it's not always the material as much as is how we use the material material and steel can be used while it needs what's called a thermal break which means it needs just like we have a hot pad to touch that pan handle that's on the stove we need to prevent the steel from either transmitting cold temperatures to a warm to warm air or allowing kind of basically allowing condensation to happen. It's kind of like having a cozy on your ice water so that you don't end up having condensation on that glass. So Charis is saying the Florida CO doesn't require a shower pan on recessed shower floor and a slab. Yeah, that's leak prone. It's going to soak into the, into the concrete. So know that all codes are bare minimum. Codes are known to have made lots of mistakes and then they change the codes when they figure it out that they made a mistake. They never put up a flag and say, oh, we made a mistake for 20 years and we told you you could exhaust your dryer vent in the attic. No, they just quietly changed the code. And now the code says you can't exhaust your dryer vent in the attic. But I can tell you, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, the code, there are codes that said you could do that. And so all these things are human beings doing their best. And building codes in particular are bare minimum. Best practice is often exceeding what's in the building codes. And so in terms of a shower pan, just because the code doesn't require it doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. It would be better to do it. Somebody has lobbied the code officials in the state to say that people are too poor to be able to afford to do that or the builders need to not do that. And it's not necessarily, I suspect over time, if I have anything to do about it, that will change that and it will be required. But yeah, it's not a good thing. So exceed the codes and do the best practices. Timothy is saying, my company, my friend's company, Dwell. Earth is made from soil right on site. Means very constant humidity and temperature. Ingredients are added depending on the soil content of the clay. Yeah, I think all that is really interesting. I think no matter what it is though, there's going to be some basics that is drainage, roof overhangs, getting water to flow away. There's no type of material that could, is going to end up doing well. If the water from rain, which it rains everywhere, even in the high desert sometimes, or snow, if that's allowed to sit in next to a building. We need our buildings to stay dry. And then a lot of materials will be great. So. But yeah, definitely look at indigenous materials and what people are doing successfully in the climate where you're at. Megan says we're gonna Shut down here. We've been on over an hour. We are planning to build a home. Should I book a consult? A consult with me. We want to go back to our humid state Cape Cod. That sounds great but build the right home to avoid moisture. Yes, yes. Megan. I recommend the Build a safe home course for anybody who's building as the best value to listen to me talk about all the most important things related to building for Well I think we have over 14 hours in there now. You get a bunch of bonuses including Moisture Matters which is my precursor webinar before I made the building Moisture Basics course. I think you get before you buy or rent with that. So I and, and people are often concerned that they don't have, they don't have time to do that kind of a course. It goes pretty fit. It's, it's in modules. It goes pretty fast. I would say schedule an appointment with me in your mind and sit down and watch me for an hour and six times and that's the best value you're going to get out of my, out of me because I'm going to have pictures there and then do a consult with me. There are some people who work with me on retainer going forward in their builds which is allows me to be the phone a friend and and so we only charge for the time that gets used. But the best thing to do is to is to basically virtually schedule. You can be anytime that you want to fit it in while you're making dinner. You can listen to me over and over again through that Build a safe home course. That was where I put the stuff I was finding myself repeating over and over again and and, and aggregated it in a way that I think is that I'm really pleased with in terms of getting you started. It's not going to be everything and there's going to be unique situations. Amy's let's see So I but I'd be happy to consult with you. Yes. Amy's saying gutter extensions underground draining to daylight with a clean out. How risky if you keep an eye on them if they're draining. Okay. So the thing about underground drainage is there if you have it just depends on your climate. Amy so if you have freezing temperatures and snow where water could get stuck in the elbow where the underground downspout mix a turn to go to daylight. It does always go straight down and then it has an elbow if water can sit there and turn to ice. So if you're in the south and you don't get freezing temperatures then it could be fine if you're in a place where the, the ground could freeze for the top foot or two feet and there could be water sitting in there that could freeze. And then it. And then there's more rain comes and it adds to that. Then ice expands when it freezes. Water, when it turns to ice expands. Ice breaks mountains apart. It will break apart your pipes underground and you will never know. That's the problem with underground drainage pipes. What I do recommend for people, if you want to do that for the way it looks in a freezing climate, in a climate where you have freezing temperatures, is to put a diverter on it. And I recommend the kind of diverter that they use for rain barrels. You can look that up and so that in the winter you go overground so you pull out some drain extensions and you go overground in the winter and you don't bother with water going down there. In the winter when the weather warms up, spring, summer, fall, you can go back to going below grade and you can put away those extensions. So that's an alternative that I do suggest for people. So check out my website avoidingmould.com under the Education tab for more and be done for today. And if you'd like to do an individual consult, you can schedule through my website there as well. Online. I am traveling. I am in Florida for the whole month of November with some pretty significant travel for me to get here from Wyoming and also to go back. So I do take clients, especially emergency clients. What I recommend is schedule anything in the future and then email us and we'll get you in sooner. It's hard for me to have a regular schedule when I am traveling because I don't always know that I'm going to have good cell service and I don't know which times of day I'm going to be able to make that happen. But I do work when I'm on the road, as I am in this case, and I'll do my best to get you in. So Crystal, was there anything else? I'm looking at the chat here. Crystal's done a great job with the links and thank you guys for being here. I will see you on the next video. Don't forget to check out the Dwellable Institute. I do monthly Q and A's there if you just want to do that. One thing. But I hope this is helpful for those of you dealing with water events and I look forward to seeing you on the next video or at YouTube or on my Instagram. Thanks for watching. I'm Cheryl Seco.