How to Maintain Your Indoor Environment

The majority of our life is spent indoors, so it's really important that we focus on the indoor environment.

Ryan, thank you so much for donating your time here today to be with us. You know, for those that don't know, Ryan is one of my favorite inspectors out there, really doing a deep dive inspection on not just mold, but all things regarding the home. And so I can't wait for you to present, you know, the uniqueness and the holisticness of. Of the home and the ecosystem in which we live in. So, Ryan, thank you, sir.

You bet. Thanks for having me on.

If you wouldn't mind. I know you presented a. You prepared a presentation. Go ahead and share your screen, and let's dive in.

All right, Got that.

Perfect. The indoor environment.

Yes. So this is all about the indoor environment and why it is important. Very important stuff here. Let me go down. So I've been doing this a while. I'd say about 25 years. I've been dealing with environmental toxicology. I'm a building biologist, electromagnetic engineer. Been dealing with anything. How the home, how the environment affects the body has always been very interesting to me. And so I've made a good profession out of that and helped a lot of people get their health back by teaching. Unfortunately, this isn't something that's really taught in mainstream. You know, when I was first going through the building biology courses, I was amazed at how good and important the information was that I just had never learned a lot of this stuff. I feel like everybody needs to. To learn these things. It's so important for our health. So that's kind of my background and where I came from. So I believe the indoor environment is probably one of the biggest contributors to our health overall. Dr. Joseph Allen recently gave a speech at the White House, and he said the. The person that controls the building environment has more impact on your health than your doctor. That's a pretty profound statement to put that out there. But, you know, from what I've seen from going in and doing these tests and helping people, I would have to agree with that. You know, we spend 90 of our lives indoors. That's between our work, our home, our car. You think about it, how many. How many. How often do we actually get outside? You know, go to the beach, go to the mountains, go for a hike? The majority of our life is spent indoors. So it's really important that we focus on the indoor environment. I like to call it our second skin. You know, we got our first skin that holds in all of our. Our meat and everything inside of us. And then we got our walls that hold in the. The indoor environment. And those have a lot of correlations to it. You know, we have chemicals inside of our body. We have chemicals that are in the air in our environment that we breathe. We have water that we breathe in that needs to be clean. Our bodies made a majority of water. We have EMF lighting, electronical exposure. Our bodies are electrical beings. It runs off of little electrical impulses that control our bodies. So, you know, we like to focus on six main topics when we're talking about the built environment. And that would be mold, air quality, chemicals, water, EMF exposure, and lighting. And these all have a huge impact on overall health. First one we're going to talk about is mold, which is something you know quite a bit about. Mold, I think, is probably one of the most underrated pandemics of our time. If there could be several different things you want to look out for in your home if you think you might have a problem, one of them is, is in humid climate. So we need. We need about 60, 70% humidity for mold to start growing on the walls, on the surfaces. So if you live in a humid climate, this is one thing you want to keep an eye out if you see any kind of growth or anything on your walls. Also, if you live in a drier climate, some people say, well, I live in the desert, so I'm not too worried about it. But we have leaks that can come from the roof, it can come from pipes, it can come under the sinks. So if you've ever had any kind of history of leaking or water damage in your home, you want to dive in a little bit further. That could, if it wasn't cleaned up properly and dried quickly, you could have a pretty big potential for a mold issue. Also, if you use a humidifier, not only mold in the humidifier itself, we see a lot, but high humidity in the environment, especially in a cold climate, we get condensation that happens on the windows, on the window sills. What happens is that moist air hits that cold surface and it condenses. Just like if you had a cold glass of water in the middle of summer outside and you notice the condensation. Now, that's going to directly feed any kind of mold or mold spores that we have and potentially have a problem. Well, it can also feed mold inside the walls, which we can't see. And so we've run into that a lot. If we have some air gaps or some thermal bridging and we got cold surfaces in the wall, if it's below the dew point. We're going to get some condensation. One trick that I always like to tell my clients is to take a look in your toilet tanks. Look around the wet areas of your home, in the drains. If you see any kind of mold growing, this could be indication that you have a bigger problem. A lot of times we have mold floating around in the air just in a normal environment, but it needs water to grow. And so when we have an area that has water, if we see mold start to build up in that area, it's almost like a little natural petri dish. So take a look in your toilet tanks. If you see mold in there, it could be an indication of a bigger problem. Another obvious one is if you smell mold or a damp smell, if it just doesn't smell right, maybe in the basement or the crawl space or in your house, that could be an indication that you have something going on behind the walls that you can't see. Also, if you don't feel well, if you. If you go in your house or people come over and they have respiratory issues, sneezing, coughing, rash, just unexplained illnesses that seem to go away when you leave the house, this is also an indication that you have a mold problem.

Two things I want to. I want to say. Say to you, Ryan, real quick. You know, first off, the toilet. I love that you mentioned the toilet tank. Looking at that as an indication there could be a. A more significant problem. I actually had a viral TikTok video showing people molding a toilet tank and how that could be an indicator, because, you know, just like I'm sure you've seen, I've seen so many houses where they had mold issues, and they also had a lot of mold in their toilet tanks. It was a really good indicator. The other thing that you said, which you know, for me about all this mold is, what I've noticed is mold is a great common denominator to help locate issues in our homes. It's. It's easy to test for, but it also comes with things like bacteria as well.

That's correct. Yep. And actinomycetes and. And bacteria and endotoxin. A whole range of other issues. Because a lot of these organisms need water. So water's that common denominator. Yep. So what do we do if we find mold? You know, one of the first things I always tell if you think you have a mold problem, air out your house, get some fresh air in your home. That's a lot of the problems with modern homes. They're built really airtight, and unless we have a fresh air ventilation system, the home's not breathing properly. So a lot of the toxins that are being. That are built up from these microorganisms are just being concentrated in the environment. So open up your windows, get it aired out, use some air filters, filter out those mold spores that are in the air. That's one of the first things you can do. Also, bleach is a big misconception, and we talk about this a lot, but don't go out and just use bleach. Use more of a, you know, soap and water, decon 30, hypochlorous acid, EC3. These are all things that are really good to clean the mold up with. Bleach a lot of times will just piss it off. It'll produce more mycotoxins, and the bleaching action will look like you got it at all, because it will bleach it. But there's still the roots that are in there, and that mold's gonna come back. Also, if you're messing around with any of the mold stuff, make sure you're wearing protective gear. Make sure you're wearing some gloves, a respirator, goggles. You know, you don't want to get this stuff in you on your system. And once you start messing with this, that's. It can be releasing more mycotoxins at the time, because that's their defense mechanism. It knows when it's under attack, and it releases more of the poisons as a defense. If you run into a larger amount of mold or a big leak or a big area of your home that's really wet, it's better just to call in a professional, like home cleanse to come in and take care of it properly. One thing that I see a lot of times people make a big mistake is, oh, there was a leak behind the wall. We opened it up, found a bunch of mold. We clean it up, we're fine. Well, what you just did is you just contaminated the rest of your house. When it was inside that wall, it was somewhat contained. We were getting some of the spores and mycotoxins coming out through the cracks. But once you. It's like messing with a bee, a beehive. You know, you start going in, and now you're going to release that throughout your whole house. And so it's really important to keep everything contained when you're. When you're cleaning this stuff up. And that's something that's left to a professional. You know, again, if you find that leak in the wall, you know, don't mess around with it. That's, you know, that's really the main thing with mold. If you think you got a problem and you start seeing stuff, really call in a professional. Don't try to mess with it yourself. How do we prevent mold? You know, it's always easier to prevent these problems than it is to fix it. In the long run, they can get really expensive. When we have to deal with mold, anybody that's dealt with mold knows is not fun. So what can we do to prevent mold? You know, keeping a clean house and when it comes to a healthy environment, that's one of the biggest things, honestly, that we can do is keep your house clean. If your house is dirty, if it's dusty, the mold needs water and it needs a food source. And that food source can be dust, it can be dead skin cells, it can be any organic matter. And if we have that all over the home, all it takes is a little water and a mold sport of land, and it's going to grow right away on that surface. So keeping a clean house is really a big deal. Not just the stuff. The surface you can see, pull the fridge out, pull your appliance out, clean behind those, get on tops of the shelves, in the cabinets, places where you normally wouldn't see. If you have any kind of liquid spills, any, any water that spills, clean that up right away. Especially on carpet, you know, if you spill something on the carpet, make sure that's cleaned right away because that's going to linger in there and feed the mold regularly. Check your attic and your crawl spaces for leaks. You could have, you know, I've seen some nasty stuff in crawl spaces where they didn't know they had a leak and it had gone, gone on for years. And we go down there and it just looks like a tropical jungle down there. It looks like velvet on all the walls. Just because they didn't know they had a leak and it was down their feet in the mold the whole time. So regular checks, looking for those leaks, gonna go a long ways. Also underneath the sinks, around the toilets, behind the fridge, your air conditioning units, washing machine. So all the areas in your home where you normally would use water, you want to check those regularly to make sure that we don't have a problem. Remember home I did opened up the sink, they didn't think they had any problems, but underneath their sink they had all their cleaning supplies, rags. You couldn't even see to the back. We started tearing stuff out, taking stuff out to look. And on the back, the whole back wall was completely moldy, but they didn't know about it because, you know, how often do you check all the way in the back. So make sure you're looking in these areas. Use the bathroom and the kitchen exhaust fans when you're showering and cooking. Again, we're just trying to get the moisture out. So when we take a nice hot shower and we notice condensation on the walls, on the mirrors, that can potentially feed mold. So we want to make sure we're exhausting that moist air outside. Same thing with cooking. Uh, your landscaping outside of your home, make sure that the water is running away from your home. So the next time it rains, want you to go outside of your house. I want you to make sure that all the water is running away from the house. Make sure that your downspouts are not plugged and they're working correctly and that they're putting pushing water at least four feet away from the home. Um, make sure you're using a dehumidifier. If you are in a humid climate and you can have, if you can buy one of those monitors, you can get like 20, 30 bucks online. A humidity meter. And if your humidity starts getting above 50, 60%, you might want to think about running a humidifier, a dehumidifier. Another trick you can do is run your H Vac fan on the on position. So instead of auto switch it to on and run that fan all the time during the hot seasons, that's going to prevent mold from growing on the coils. What happens when the AC kicks off? Those coils are cold and they can condensate water. And it's a really common place that we see mold growing on those H Vac systems. So those are some, some just some maintenance things you can do to help prevent mold in the first place.

Awesome.

Air quality, what we breathe, that's really important. We don't think about this a lot of times, but, you know, we wouldn't drink dirty water. You know, why would we breathe in dirty air? We want to talk about some of the things we can do for this. Actually, I'm going to go back. One slide, two slides. The dust test here. So if you think you have an issue, you can get this, the dust test on the home cleanse website. It's also part of a comprehensive test that we can send out to you that's part of a kit that you can swipe the dust on the surfaces of your house. We send that into the laboratory and they analyze it to see if we actually do have a mold problem in your home. So this is a really good test, scientific way to figure out if you actually do have a mold problem in your house.

And you know, I've, I've obviously covered this subject before, but I want to get your perspective, you know, why. Why is using dust testing technology so valuable? Just and as a screening tool as opposed to like taking an air sample in the center of the house?

Yeah, air samples I found from my experience going to give a lot of false negatives unless you actually have a pretty good source in that room or you have an active growth somewhere that's producing mold spores. It's kind of like if we went out into the forest in the middle of winter and held up a net and tried to catch some leaves. There's not going to be any leaves falling. The leaves are only falling in the fall time. So then we're going to see leaves in the air. That's like taking an air sample. Taking a dust sample is like collecting on the forest floor. It's going to give us a picture, a history of what's gone on in that house and in the past, in the history since the last time you cleaned a deep cleaned an area. So if you're going around and collecting dust that's been there for the last six months, it's given you a snapshot of everything that's been in the air in that time period versus air sample is just going to tell us what's in the air right now.

That's great.

So air quality again, keeping the house clean, dusting regularly, de dusting the home. You know, when we analyze dust, the majority of dust is dead skin cells, insect parts, insect feces, dust mites, mold spores, bacteria, pesticides, broken down foams and fibers, and some organic material. So none of those things we really want to breathe in or ingest. So keeping your home clean de dusting regularly goes a long ways. Don't wear your shoes inside. You know, this is real big over in eastern cultures, but here in the United States it's something that people need to adopt more often. We walk around outside. Think about, you go into a public bathroom, there's E. Coli on the floor. You go out to fill your car with gas and there's oils and gasolines and you go walk through the park with the pesticides and then what do you do? You bring those shoes and you walk right inside your house, kick your shoes up on the couch. Over time this builds up in your carpet on your flooring and you bring in a lot of nasty things inside your home. So it's a, you know, homes that I test that they have a strict shoe policy, always test quite a bit better for air quality. Make sure that you're ventilating your house. You know, commercial buildings are required to have fresh air ventilation, something like 20 to 30 CFM per person per hour air air exchange. Now the problem, residential homes don't have these kind of codes in place. It's kind of strange to me why they don't. I think, you know, we want to have our homes breathe, we want to have fresh air into our house. CO2 levels can build up, toxins can build up, volatile organic compounds or chemicals can build up. So we need to be flushing out the homes. Now it seems like only higher end homes have what's called an ERV system, which is an energy recovery ventilator, which brings filtered fresh air in, it pulls stale air out and it does this continually throughout the day. But if your home doesn't have one of these, you need to be diligent about making sure that you're ventilating your home on your own, which means opening windows. Even in my house, I keep a couple windows cracked all year long and I have an HRV also. Just, we want to have as much fresh air in the home as possible. When we get the CO2 buildup, it can cause brain fog, you can get headaches. It's not thinking right. The body just doesn't work as good when we don't have the proper oxygen levels.

I think this is a particular, really important point because over the last 50 years we've been building homes tighter and tighter in that energy efficiency goal that we've been having.

That is correct. Yep. Homes built in the last 20, 30 years are super airtight and not a lot of ventilation. So this is one of the biggest problems I bet I see with air quality with people is they just don't have fresh air in their homes. If you walk outside and breathe and then walk right inside and breathe and smell the air, if you can notice a difference or it feels heavy or musty, that's because your home is. You have stale air in your home and you're just recycling. You're all breathing the same air in and out. So real important to do that, make sure that you're using your exhaust fans in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the laundry room. They're put there for a reason and that's to exhaust out sources of pollution. I have a teenage daughter and she's getting ready in the Bathroom. That utility fan definitely needs to be on with the hairspray and all the stuff she's, she's using. You know, we try to use non toxic things but uh, you can only go so far with and you need to exhaust these things out. Same thing when you're cooking in the kitchen. And it's not just the smell, you're cooking fish or something, you want to get that smell out. It's if you're cooking with a gas range, you have to use that exhaust fan every time because you're burning off hydrocarbons. And the gas, when they pull it out of the ground, they're not filtering it, they're not purifying that gas, they're just making it, processing it enough so that it's natural gas, but it can have lead, it can have arsenic, it can have radon, whole number of things. And so when we cook and we burn, we're releasing that in the environment and then we can breathe that in. So always want to make sure we're using those exhaust fans. Make sure you're using a high quality air filter in your H vac system. Primarily those air filters were designed to protect the coils, protect the fans from big particles getting in there. But we can also use that to clean the air. So we can use a higher MERV rated filter. Typically a MERV 11 or a MERV 12 or 13 filter is going to pull out a lot of the contaminants. Just a caveat on that though, if you have an older unit, sometimes it can be too much strain on the unit. So if it does kick off on you, you might want to lower the particulate rating. But get a high quality H vac filter and turn the fan mode to on so that it's always filtering your air. And you know, if you. One test I like to do a lot of times is how much dust do you have on your surface? If you notice in your house that you're gathering a lot of dust, that means that your air is dirty because the dust is coming from the air. Just like with your dust test, we're testing the dust because it's what was in the air. So if we see a large amount of dust being built up, we know that we're not getting enough air filtration. So high quality H vac filter, switch the fan mode to on and if you still see dust, then get a standalone air filter, one that's going to filter out the air. And there's lots of different brands out there that work great. Don't overdo it with essential oils like incense, candles. You know, a lot of people, they feel like they need to have a certain smell in their home and that's fine. But you can overdo it with this stuff. Clean truly doesn't have a smell. If you walk into a home that's truly clean, it shouldn't smell at all. It should be very neutral. I have seen people with essential oils going to a client's house. They call me because they're all having asthma, breathing issues. I go in there. They had six different essential oil stations set up, all burning different oils. And they had different oils for morning, different oils for evening, different oils when they were sick. And we did an air particulate counter and it was in the millions, it was so high. And they were, she was literally poisoning the family with too much essential oil. So you can overdo it with this stuff. So just take it easy when, when you're thinking about smells in the home. If you do notice any unpleasant odors, and this is where it helps also is to keep it down with the, with the sense. Because we want to be able to smell the home. We want to see the, the smells going on in the house. And so if we notice something like a musty smell or a moldy smell or dead animal smell, something that isn't right, then we can find it and we can locate it. If we have a bunch of perfumes and fragrances going, then it kind of, it can mask that. And now we have a chemical problem with the biological problem. So if there's any unpleasant odors or smells, address those right away. Figure out what's causing that and make sure your vacuum cleaner has a good HEPA rated filter. You know, one worst thing you can do is a cheap vacuum cleaner. Go clean your carpets and you kick up a bunch of particulates in the air. You're just going to redistribute that, you're going to breathe that in. So make sure it has a HEPA filter. Now we. There are some meters you can use to measure some of these things you see on the slide here. The one is a gas meter on the left. Make sure that you're measuring if you have any kind of gas leaks. That's a common one we see from gas appliances. The seals can leak and they can let out small amounts of natural gas. You can breathe that in, it can make you sick. That air things monitor is going to continually monitor CO2VOC, which is chemical in the air, radon, humidity and then a carbon monoxide meter. You want to measure Carbon monoxide regularly through your house. Make sure that you don't have any leaks. That's also something that we include in the kit. That's your air quality.

Great tips, Ryan. Great tips. I really appreciate the, you know, the, the things that people can do right now to start making some simple changes.

Yeah, that's the point of this is, you know, easy takeaways you can do right now with this stuff. And there actually are a lot of easy things that people can do. A lot of basic stuff. So chemicals. So, you know, there's over 80,000 chemicals in production right now that you can buy, you can put in your house. And a lot of these actually haven't been tested on humans and majority of them haven't been tested in combination with each other. So bleach by itself is a strong oxidizer and can be harmful if you breathe it in. But bleach mixed with other chemicals, like ammonia for example, can be very deadly. So a lot of times these chemicals in combination with each other can make a lot of, wreak a lot of havoc on people and make people really sick. They say the Average female uses 17 different chemical products every day on our body. So you better make sure that those products that you're using are non toxic, they're chemical free. So fragrances and perfumes, and we talked about that a little bit with air quality, those chemical fragrances, the plugins, those things, those are bad for you. You don't want to have any of those in your home. You're releasing a chemical into the air, you're breathing that in. They have phthalates in them, they can last in the body a long time. Just be really cautious with the fragrance and perfumes. Toxic pest control, you know, you want some sort of an ecosystem in your house. You don't want a dead environment around your house. You don't want to kill everything off. The last thing you want to do is spread a bunch of toxic chemicals throughout the whole house that you can track in, you can breathe that in, you can get on your food. And some of these say, well, you know, it's not as harmful for humans. We've designed it just for the bugs. Well, we have little bugs inside of our body called the microbiome. That's very important to us. And when we get these chemicals into our body, it can really wreak havoc on the microbiome and mess up our gut. So people that have gut problems and gut situations, we look at the toxic load, the chemicals in their house, herbicides, glyphosates, you Know that's a big one reads recently with the, the cancers that are being linked to glyphosates and Roundup. So think about, do we really need to have perfect lawns? Is it okay to have a couple weeds here and there? Do we really need to spray chemicals? Especially if we have little ones that are playing out on the lawn or if you have pets that run out on your yard. I would highly advise against using these chemicals on your property. Cleaning supplies. It's amazing how much you can do with just vinegar and water and a little lemon essential oil or a little hypochlorous acid. These, these products will clean the home a lot better and they're a lot more non toxic and they're also a lot cheaper. You know, if we use a half mixture of distilled vinegar, water or distilled vinegar with half mixture of distilled water and then we put lemon peels in it and let it soak and we use that to clean the majority of our surfaces at our house. We don't need a lot of these other toxic chemicals. If you're wondering what is a healthy chemical or not, you can look on EWG Environmental Working Group. They have a cool app where you can scan barcodes. There's also another app called Think Dirty which you can download and it rates things on a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being highly dangerous. It's going to give you cancer ones. You could rub it on your baby and it'd be fine. So you can go through your house and scan all your products. It's kind of a fun thing to do is download the app and go through your home with all your products and see where you, where you rank. You know, maybe you say okay, everything that's four and higher we're just going to throw away, we're going to get rid of. We're not going to allow it in our house. And then you can go through and find out what's harmful, get rid of it and replace it with healthy stuff. And the same thing with personal care products and beauty products. You know, the things that we're actually putting physically on our body are so important. We need to look into those chemicals and if you don't know what they are, do you really need to rub that on your body? You know, you need to really pay attention to those things. Same thing with laundry detergents, paints and solvents. You know, if you're doing a remodel on your home, there's natural healthy paints, there's even some lime based paints that you can use. Just do a little research and just be very conscious about what you're bringing into your home. That's it for the chemicals.

That app sounds awesome. I think I'm gonna, you know, go ahead and scan everything through my. My house, my parents house, my friend's house.

Yeah, it was interesting. When we first did it on our house, we had two full garbage bags full of stuff. I couldn't believe how much toxic chemicals we had in our home. It was crazy.

It's confusing, right?

Yeah. Because you don't know there's a lot of greenwashing, you know.

Yeah.

So you really got to dig down and see what the actual chemicals are. Water quality, you know, we're the majority. Majority of our body is water. Water. We can't live too long without water. It's super important. We want to make sure that the water we're putting in our body is pure and, you know, it's becoming more of a mainstream thing. The quality of our water. We had that incident recently with the train and the derailment, all the chemicals. That's not an isolated incident, and that's not the first time that's happened. There's an. There's a documentary called Dark Waters, which I recommend everybody go see. It's fascinating. It's about the Forever Chemicals and how the majority of our water is now being polluted because of the PFOAs and how that gets into our system. And we can't. They call it Forever Chemicals because it doesn't break down and it persists in our environment for a long time. These unfortunately cause a lot of cancers and chronic illnesses. So if you have not tested your water, I highly recommend you do. You can order these off our website or again, it's included in our Kit Simple Labs, or just go to our website and order it and test your water, see what's in your water. I can guarantee you the majority of the water we test across the country does not look that good. If you're still drinking out of a tap water, you need to get with the times because the majority of the water is not good to be putting in your body. So what do we do about it then? Well, first of all, we want to install a whole home filter. And that's going to protect all the water that's coming into your house. Because just. Just like we get exposure from drinking and cooking with it, we also get exposure from bathing in it and showering in it. When we got it, when we're taking a nice, hot, steamy shower, that steam that's Coming up. We're breathing that in. We're getting exposure that way. It's also seeping through our pores and getting in through our skin. So we want to be conscious about that. The water that we're bathing and showering in, but of course, the water we're actually drinking and cooking with, we could take it one step further and use an RO system that you mount underneath the sink, and that filters it out. You know, 99.9% of the impurities are going to come out using an RO system. Now, some areas across the country have hard water, and this is more of a cosmetic thing. If you like hard water or you like soft water, you can use a water softener. It helps protect your faucets and your appliances and your pipes. You know, if your water tastes funny, it looks funny. It's discolored. Don't drink it. We were staying up at a cabin over the weekend, and we filled up the bathtub to take a bath, and we looked at it and the water looked yellow, like, okay, I better not be drinking this water. Something in the ground. They could have just been pipes that were, you know, rusty or whatever. But if it looks off, it looks. Doesn't look good. Don't drink it. Don't bathe in it.

Water is supposed to be colorless and odorless.

Colorless and odorless, Yep. Bottom line, get your water filtered, drink good water. That's really important. You get a lot of exposure of bad things through your water. All right, let's talk about EMF and lighting. This is always a good one these days. Some reason this is a controversial topic. I don't know why. There's a ton of studies out there showing the harms and dangers on this. You know, you have one side of the spectrum where we have the FCC and the government standards that have set these levels really high based off of the thermal rise they can measure in the body. So they've said, okay, at, you know, 5 to 10 million microwatts, we can start to measure a thermal rise in the body, which means you're starting to cook from the inside out. That's where we're going to set our safety limits. And we know that past that point, it's very harmful. If not, you could die from too much exposure. You go up a little bit higher than that. That's where we get into microwaves than microwaves. We know. I don't think anyone argue if we put our head in a microwave and turn it on, that that's going to be harmful for us. Here we're talking about the same kind of frequencies and the same kind of dangers at lower levels for longer term use. And then we got the doctors and scientists building biology institutes that say, you know, at these low levels, at one when we're asleep and last is bad, better for you and 10 microwatts when you're awake. We know that below these levels you're going to be completely safe. But that leaves a whole broad range in the middle of those two numbers. That leaves it up for debate. And then it comes down to, okay, well how much exposure can I get? How long can I be exposed to this? Is it more harmful for my little baby versus me? That's healthy, you know, middle aged person. And that's where these arguments come in. And what I really tell people is you choose what skill and how much protection you want to choose for you and your family. You know, that's the great thing about choice is you can choose low levels of exposure, you can choose high levels of exposure. So we got the full magnetic spectrum on one end. We got the these big radio waves, the AM FM transmission. That's how we get the data through the airwaves. And we get the radar, infrared, and then we get the light spectrum. So the visible light spectrum is what we can actually see. And the reason that we can see this is because all the years, 100,000 years or whatever that humans have evolved on this planet, we've evolved with the sun. And so the sun has kind of been our guiding light, so to speak. That's when we know when it's time to go to bed, when it's time to wake up. It's no coincidence that our sleep schedule is in tune directly with the sun. And so we developed eyes that we can be able to sense this. Now all the other spectrums we don't have any kind of sensory for, so we can't feel or sense these. Now some people are sensitive to EMF and they can feel some of these radio waves and these frequency waves. Now on the high end of things we have the X ray, the gamma ray, more of the ionizing radiation as they call it. And this has been proven to cause cancer already. So we want to keep these levels as low as possible. So like I mentioned, our circadian rhythm is based on the cycle of the sun. And so when in doubt, we want to make sure that we're mimicking what the sun is doing. So during the day we want to have full spectrum lighting that's shining down from above just like the sun would be doing as the sun starts to go down, we want to transition more into the light lighting, lighter colors, the warm red, the amber, the yellow. And we want to start to dim, dim the lights down. So ancestrally, you know, 100 years ago, when the lights went down, when the sun went down, all we had was firelight and we had candlelight and lanterns. And so we want to try to mimic that because that's what gives our body the cue to start producing melatonin and start getting us ready for bed. Okay, now, once we're about an hour into bed, closer to bedtime, and all throughout the night, we want to make sure the lighting that we use is red and very dim. Because what can happen, let's say you get up in the middle of night, you have to go to the bathroom, and you click on a really bright blue light. That's going to totally start over your circadian rhythm. It's going to block your melatonin. And the rest of your night, you're not going to get into that deep sleep. So super important to follow and mimic what the sun is doing. You know, we want to make sure we're staying away from the CFL bulbs. And the fluorescent bulbs, they contain vapor mercury. So if you were to crack those or if there's any kind of failure point, if they were to break, that could release vapor, mercury, heavy metal, into the environment. You could breathe that in. They also have a high flicker rate. Our eyes are used to the sun, which is a consistent light. The CFL bulbs, the fluorescent bulbs, and some of the LED bulbs have a flicker to them. So we can't perceive it with our eyes, but our brain can perceive it. And a lot of times that can cause headaches for people. It can cause heart palpitations, it can cause anxiety. It's surprising how many times I go into homes when people don't feel good and it actually ends up being the lighting. So if you want to test this out yourself, turn off all the power in your house, all the lights, just go out and flip the main breaker, and hang out in your house for maybe 30, 45 minutes, just kind of see how you feel. And then I want you to go out and turn the lights, turn the breaker back on, and turn every single one of your lights on in the whole house. And then go hang out in your house for another 30, 45 minutes and see if you notice the difference. It's. It's crazy how often you're going to notice that difference. And a lot of it is just because of the unnatural lighting and the high emf. Levels that you have in your house. So we want to make sure we're not using dimmers as much as possible. They create dirty electricity, which is line interference that throws interference into the airwaves. And our bodies can sense that using the blue blocking glasses. At night, if you do have any kind of blue light you can install on your phone and your laptop, you can install the blue blocking apps. Uh, Apple has it built in, so does Samsung. Actually, my phone has nightshade and night appearance you can set so it takes the blue light out automatically. I recommend you do that with the majority of your devices. Also, just try to limit your technology in your screens at least an hour before bedtime. This is just a really good habit, you know, with your kids. You want to read a book, pull out an old fashioned book and just read a book like they used to do back in the good old days and just try to limit your screen time as much as possible. Well, that's the lighting EMFs. So, you know, we are electrical beings. Our bodies run off of chemical impulses and electrical signals. Our nervous system is like the wiring in our house or in our body is the same. And so our nervous system, our heart, our brain, all use little electrical signals and little electrical impulses. We also have a magnetic field. Our body has a magnetic field. The earth has a magnetic field. Actually, all, all things in our universe have a magnetic field. And when they're in line, when they're aligned and they're in balance, everything works a lot better. Okay, so when we have heavy metals and iron that are in our body, so we have iron in our blood and the hemoglobin, it can make us more reactive to the electronics around us. So people that have heavy metals in their body also tend to be more reactive and more sensitive to EMFs because they're more like an antenna. They're conducting energy and electricity more so because of those heavy metals in the body. So the nervous system is also conducting electricity. Now, if we put ourselves in a magnetic field, an alternating magnetic field, like from a motor or underneath a high voltage power line, this 60 Hz vibration can interact with that iron in our blood. It can also cause microcurrents in our nervous system, which is again, it's the wiring of our body. So these are some of the ways that the EMF directly interacts with our body. And there's a direct correlation there that a lot of people, you know, don't understand that they don't take seriously. But it really has a big effect on the body. And there's a lot of studies coming out showing that too much of this exposure is highly increased in your risk of cancers and tumors. You know, some of the biggest things we see is brain fog. We see anxiety, we see ADHD type symptoms, we see neurological issues, headaches, things in the body where the brain's just not working like it should. And that's because our brain is like a little mini computer or a big computer. And when we put these artificial signals from 5G and cell towers through the body, it causes a lot of interference, cause a lot of health issues. So this is one of the big ones. I think this is also another highly underestimated issue of our time right now is the emf. So where does EMF come from? So there's three different types of EMF and three different types of sources. So we, you know, when we talk about, when we say emf, we're talking about electromagnetic fields. So electrical fields comes from electrical wiring in the house, comes from electrical from the power lines. Anything that's plugged in that's using power is going to have an electric field associated with it. Okay. That can get onto the body, that can cause a lot of interference. The M of the EMF is the magnetic energy. So magnetic energy comes from motors, it comes from big appliances, it comes from living underneath the high voltage power line. It come from wiring errors in the house, transformers, and then the frequencies. The emf, the, the, the RF frequencies come from all of the toys that we like. That's our cell phone, that's our Bluetooth, our WI fi, the security cameras, the baby monitors. These are things that are sending data over the airwaves. So the three different sources, outside sources, are the first things that we look at. So in a home, these are typically things that you don't have a lot of control over because there are sources that are coming from outside of your home. This is going to be cell towers, this is going to be 5G towers, radio, TV stations, satellite, high voltage power lines. These are things that if you have some of these sources nearby your home, it might be a good idea to either move or we can talk about some of the shielding. But a lot of times it's really hard to shield from some of these things. Remember, these are things we don't have a lot of control over. Now the second group are sources that are going to be from inside the building. So inside your home we have the WI fi. That's usually the biggest source. We have wireless cameras, we have baby monitors, Bluetooth speakers, we have smart TVs, appliances, security system, wiring errors. If things aren't wired correctly in the home, it causes a lot of interference and large motors and appliances. So these are things that we do have control over so we can hardwire the home. There's a lot of changes we can make. But also we want to look at our high use areas. When I say, how you say, I mean somewhere where you spend 30 minutes or more a day. So your bed, your office, the living room, couch, the kitchen. Draw an eight foot bubble around that area where you spend a lot of time and analyze what's in that area. Do you, do we have any appliances? Do we have the WI fi router? We want to make sure that these areas, we have these, we build these little bubbles around where we're sleeping around in the office and the couch so that we're not setting, we're not next to these high power devices. Okay. So if we can't hardwire and we can't eliminate, you have to have some of this stuff, at least distance yourself from them. Okay, now the last group, and this is usually the most dangerous, the most highest exposure is these are things that are actually on your body. So cell phones, number one, by far the highest exposure that we're getting from EMF is coming from our cell phone. How often is your cell phone ever more than three feet from your body? It's always on you, it's always there and it has to transmit all the way out to the tower, which could be 10 miles away in some cases. So that energy coming off the cell phone is, is high and it's always there. Especially if you have a lot of apps running in the background and they're constantly updating and sending data. Your cell phone's always working, always transmitting data. Okay, AirPods right in your ear, right next to the brain. Honestly, I would rather my kids smoke cigarettes than use airpods. That's how strongly I feel about these. And that's how some of the dangers I see with kids with the neurological issues, the ADD type symptoms, the brain fog, they're putting these high powered devices right next to their brain, right in their ears. Smartwatches, baby body monitors, electric blankets, wireless keyboard and mouse. So these are all things that are right next to the body that we're using. A lot of times these are causing the highest exposure. So really, really important to, to think about what we have in our proximity because our overall exposure depends on three things. It depends on the strength of the source, how strong the source is. It depends on the proximity. Like how close are we to these Sources. And then the third is how long are we in these fields? Okay, so we might have a cell tower that's a mile away. It's 5G, it's on the local, you know, school down the road, but we're a mile away from it. So by the time that energy comes to our house, comes through the walls, it's lowered significantly versus a baby monitor that might be sitting on the edge of your baby's crib, is two feet away from your baby's head, and very powerful. And it's on there all night long. So we have proximity, we have strength, we have duration. So you're getting a lot of exposure from the device that are on the body. So really important to put your attention in those areas.

I wanted to touch on wiring errors real quick too, because, you know, so I just bought a house in October. We're doing remediation on it. We're improving the air quality, doing, making it more aesthetically pleasing while we're at it. And we opened up a lot of the ceilings in the kitchen, some in the front hallway. And we found a ton of wiring errors. I mean, junction boxes everywhere, you know, that. I guess the previous owner, they just, they wanted to make a change, add an outlet here, put a TV there. They just kept retroactively adding stuff. We found a lot of 12 gauge wire connected with 14 gauge wire, not wired properly, not connected properly, not protected properly. That was certainly probably giving off a ton of EMF issues. Certainly wouldn't have been, you know, for, for me was scary just as a safety concern, not only for EMFs, but fires and things of that nature. So we ended up having to redo all the wiring on the first house. An unexpected expense. However. I'm so glad we did it.

Yeah, and those can be a little bit more tricky to track down those wiring errors because it's behind the walls. In your case, you were able to see, you know, the issues, but a lot of times it's hidden behind the drywall and we can't see it. So in our remote testing program, it comes with that monitor, the tri field that you see right there. And it comes with a step by step instruction on how to identify these wiring errors and how to identify these three levels of sources because it's really important. A lot of people live with these high levels of energy and they don't realize and it's easy steps that they can take. You know, we don't need to live like the caveman do. We don't need to live, you know, in like without Any of this technology, it just. There's smarter ways to do it. Distancing yourselves and hardwiring really solves a lot of these issues.

You know, another thing I don't know that. That people realize, but as you go to each slide, you kind of show a picture of a device and which you use to monitor some of these things to help diagnose some of these things inside the home, right?

Yep. All of these that we're showing is we. They're relevant to this page, and we include it in the kit so that when you buy this kit, you get all of the meters to measure all of these things.

Awesome.

Yep. So how do we lower EMF exposure? You know, don't use the wireless AirPods. Switch over to wired headphones instead. That's a big one. You can reduce exposure. Put your phone on airplane mode at night and when you need to take a break. So, you know, I'm on a call right now doing this. I don't need to have my phone on me. I don't need to have it in my pocket. It's on airplane mode, sitting across the room. Same thing. If there's quality time, dinner time, family time, you don't need to have your phone on you all the time. And there's a lot of other benefits, too, besides EMF exposure. That is the modern addiction that a lot of us deal with is our phone. You know, and so if we can just take breaks from our phone, put it on airplane mode, just set it aside for a little bit. We don't need to be connected 24 hours a day, all the time. Don't carry the phone in your bra or your pocket. You know, keep a distance off of your body. If you're in the car, put it up on the dash. If you're at your desk, put it on. You know, put it on the desk somewhere. You don't need to have it in your pocket. Again, it's the proximity. When we get distance away from these devices, Jeff, just having the phone 3ft away from you drops your exposure 90%. Talk on speakerphone or use wired headphones. You never want to put the phone up to your head. That's one of the worst things you can do. Again, proximity right there next to the brain. It's high power. Keep that distance as much as possible, turning off your circuits. You're sleeping there at night. This might sound crazy. We do this at ours. We've been doing this for quite a long time. We have an actual switch for our master that when we're done for the night we hit a button, it's a little key fob and it powers down the whole circuit area, the circuits to the area of the sleeping area and the bathroom. Any of the circuits that affect the sleeping area get shut off at night and then in the morning we can hit the button and it turns it back on. Now our kids sleeping area, we have it set up on a Timer. So at 9 o' clock at night, it's literal lights out, the bathroom, the hallway, the bedrooms, all the circuits turn off. And then at six in the morning it turns back on. That's kind of their alarm clock. That way at night we're sleeping in a zero electric field. The EMF exposure goes down tremendously because we don't necessarily need this stuff at night. So why have it on? You know, our fridge is still on, our H Vac is still on, the security system's on, but the power doesn't need to be on. So there's no reason to expose yourself at night. So that's a really a high impact one. A lot of my clients that have trouble sleeping, they. That's one of the first things we'll do that always makes a big difference. Unplug your electronics when you're not using them. So let's say you have a TV with an Apple TV in your bedroom and you only use it a couple nights a week. The rest of the time you're exposing yourself for no reason. So you might as well hook that up to a power strip, turn the power strip on, it powers all those devices on. Watch a movie, do your thing, and then when you're done, turn the power strip off. Because just because the tv, the power is off, it's still transmitted. It maintains a connection with the WI fi router so that when you turn it on, you have instant connection. It doesn't take that extra 15, 30 seconds to make the connection. And so unplug and don't use those electronics when you're not using them. Turn your WI fi off at night. This is another big one. You know, we're not using these things at night. A lot of the stuff we're talking about is practical avoidance. If you, we don't need to use it, why have it on? Why have it exposing ourselves? It takes a little bit more effort, but it's well worth it because a lot of this EMF exposure in this technology comes at a price. And so if we can reduce overall exposure, that's kind of the goal for what we're doing here. And you can use a Christmas light Timer to plug your WI fi into. So it does it automatically. So you can say okay, midnight it goes off. 7 o' clock in the morning it kicks back on. Those are the times when you're not using it. At least you're reducing exposure during those times. Take regular breaks from technology and we talked about this a little bit, but set some healthy boundaries for yourself and your, and your kids. Kids, that's, it's a bad one these days with, with the teenagers and the kids there seems like they're always on their technology. So you know, my kids, they think we're pretty strict. I don't even let my kids have cell phones. I have a 5 and 9 and a 13 year old and they don't have cell phones. We do movie night one night a week on Friday night. And the rest of the time we don't really have any screen time for the kids. I have them doing other stuff, you know, playing games, going outside, riding the bike, go play basketball, board games. You know, so many other things you can do besides technology. You don't have to use that as your pacifier. Make sure there's no electron appliances or electronics. You know, we Talked about the 8 foot radius from the bed and the high use areas. That's really a big one. Especially the beds. You know, think about what's on the other side of the wall from your, from your bed. I can't tell you how many, how many people we've had with major appliances on the other side of the wall. We had a post go viral about a gal that was sleeping on her bed in the fridge was right on the other side of the wall. Every time the fridge motor would kick on, it wake her up. She was having night terrors. You have neurological issues. They were getting brain scans. They're trying to figure out what was going on. It was simply the fridge was kicking on and it was close enough. It was about a foot from her head, right on the other side of the wall. We simply moved her bed. All of her symptoms went away. Wow. Hardwire your computers and your electronics. So in the office, like where I'm, where I'm sitting now, I got all of my computers and everything in here hardwired. We don't have WI fi in our house. It's just going back in time 20 years ago, 25 years ago when everything was hardwired. Anyways, that's how we did the did things. It doesn't, everything doesn't have to be wireless. In fact, it's more robust, it's a little bit More secure to hardwire all your stuff anyways. And you know, last, make sure you go outside, ground yourself regularly. Grounding, and I should say earthing because people get grounding and earthing confused. Grounding is when you're grounding to the electrical system. It's something for the electrical to provide fault protection. Earthing is something you do therapeutic where you go outside and you put your feet on the grass or you walk on the beach with your bare feet and you're just connecting yourself with, with earth, which can be really good for you. But just making sure you're getting outside, you know, taking a walk every once in a while goes a long ways. And that's it. I mean, each, each one of these, we could dive in much deeper, but hopefully this is some good takeaway for, for you.

Ryan, this was amazing. Thank you so much for covering, you know, these broad topics because as, as you know, there's a lot more, you know, to cover here than just mold. We covered a lot. We covered, you know, air quality, water, the different things that affect air quality. We covered EMFs, all things that people can easily do right now, today to start to make an impact on their, their overall well being. So I think this was awesome. And as far as questions go, where can people find you and learn more? I mean, for me, I think you showed a lot of great devices here. People will probably want to know where they can get those devices because I think the key is to get the data and you want to be able to measure that data. So go ahead and tell people where they could find you and get some of your tips on some of these devices and start to measure stuff in their home.

Yeah, yeah. You know, and it's, it's a lot easier than you think. Some of these, the meters and equipment, we have a step by step course you can take. It's super easy. And you can go get more information on that@testmyhome.info that takes you directly to the page where you can learn more about the kit and the equipment and the videos. You can follow us on Instagram. We're @TestMyHome. We're always putting out good content just like you. You know, we're trying to teach people and use that as a positive resource. Our website, testmyhome.com you can get a hold of us. You can schedule consultation with me or one of my coaches. You can do the kit where we ship you out the equipment, you do the testing yourself. You can also have us come out personally if you're in the western part of the United States, or we offer more of a white glove service where we come out and do the full testing and analysis for you. Basically, the home doctor consultation for your house, making sure you have full, healthy environment. Like I said, it's we make a lot of big impact for people. It's something that people unfortunately look at last when it comes to their health. And they really should be looking at these things first.

Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Ryan, for donating your time here today to educate us on all the things about the home and the indoor environment. And I really appreciate you and all the things you do it.

Yeah, you too, man. Thank you.