Mold Remediation Part 7: Cleaning Inside Containment with David Myrick

The mistake that most people make is the visible mold. And so, so many homeowners, they go, well, I don't see the mold anymore and I'm done. And things must have been done well. And no, no, that's half of the battle, right? The other half is cleaning up all the microscopic stuff because you're not having health reactions from the visible mold colonies. You are having health reactions from the spores and the fungal fragments that come off of that.

Thank you to our sponsor, Airmada Drying Solutions. Their generosity helps keep our resources free and available to the public. For more information on our sponsor, please head on over to our corporate partners page@changetheairfoundation.org As a reminder, this mini class series is designed to provide a consumer friendly overview of the mold remediation process. It is not a Do it Yourself series, nor does it cover every detail or scenario that needs to be considered during mold remediation. Before beginning mold remediation, be sure to work with a knowledgeable indoor environmental professional and remediation company. Hello everyone and welcome Back to part seven of our Change the Air Foundation Remediation 101 series. My name is Kendra Seymour and today we're going to jump into the most important or one of the most important but overlooked parts of the remediation process and that's cleaning of everything inside the containment, and I do mean absolutely everything. Now this is one of the most time consuming and labor intensive steps. Thus it's costly to implement correctly and as a result, it's the step that companies tend to skip or take shortcuts on and you don't want that to happen. So David Myrick is back to tackle this critical part of the process. Hopefully you've seen him speak on our previous episodes, but if not, he is a mold remediator in Northern Virginia, D.C. area for over 17 years and he is the owner of Valor Mold Remediation and so he's going to take us through this part. David, thank you so much for joining us again today.

Absolutely. And this episode, I mean, this thing is so. This thing is so critical. It's. I can't stress that enough. It's so critical. So let me jump in. So this is part seven, cleaning. And it's such a little word, but it means so much to me. It's like saying a doctorate or a bachelor's degree. It's a little word, but that means a lot dedication and time and effort and energy. So I'm trying to think, how should I phrase this? In the previous episode was demolition. Right. And so Demolition is we're tearing out moldy materials, but while we're tearing that stuff out, it's like kicking the hornet's nest. And so mold spores and fungal fragments and mycotoxins and stuff are just going everywhere, right? And so on a. I was. I was documenting a project we were doing many, many moons ago, and I just happened to catch this. And I don't know if you can hear us in the background, but we're like, grab our mask and we're like, oh, you know, so this is. We're tearing out some moldy tax strips and that right there. And I revisit this. Look, right there. You actually can see the mold. There's so many mold spores coming off of that surface that you can actually see it with the naked eye, which is something you never can do, right? It's almost hardly ever can you actually see the most poor release with the naked eye. But in that case, there's trillions of them. There must have been trillions to actually see a little cloud come off as we're hitting that with the. The crowbar. Absolutely amazing, right? It's cool from a nerd science standpoint, right? But it's abhorrent to see that that's in your house, right? So. So anyway, so part six was demolition. That is removing the actual visible mold colonies. This is part seven. This is cleaning up all the microscopic mold spores and the fungal fragments and everything. So I use this picture here of a dust storm, right, Coming across the landscape. And. And that's almost how you have to think of this from a cleanliness standpoint, because the mistake that so many people make. Let me see if I can bring up my little laser pointer again. Yeah, there it is. The mistake that most people make is the visible mold. And so, so many homeowners, they go, well, I don't see the mold anymore, and I'm done. And things must have been done well. And no, no, that's half of the battle, right? The other half is cleaning up all the microscopic stuff because you're not having health reactions from the visible mold colonies. You are having health reactions from the spores and the fungal fragments that come off of that colony that you're breathing in and being exposed to, right? The mycotoxins and everything. And cleaning is absolutely the most poorly performed part of most remediations, but it is so critical to get done, right? So again, if you're doing this remediation from a. From a health stance, right, you have Sears, you have lime, you have pans, Pandas, what have you cleaning is, is critical, just absolutely critical to doing this right. You know, why is this not done well? And, and the problem is you have to be almost OCD to do it right. It's, it's very meticulous, it's very, very tedious. This is a big one. Homeowners insurance doesn't pay well, or they don't. They pay very little to have it done well. And homeowners insurance, you have to realize most restoration companies, most remediators are water damage, fire damage companies first and mold remediation they do on the side. And so homeowners insurance and how they pay these, how these insurance companies pay has a tremendous impact on what these companies focus on, what their standard procedures are. And so homeowners insurance, they have a program called Xactimate. And this is what nearly every company in the country uses both insurance and restoration companies to price out their projects. And we used to use it many, many years ago. I didn't like it, so we got away from it, switched to flat rate pricing. But point is, I know how to use it and what's in it. And basically it has one line item for, I think it's HEPA vacuuming hyphen detailed. You can charge that once, the adjuster will pay for it once. But the problem is when it comes to cleaning, you have to do multiple rounds of that in a remediation. Well, good luck having an adjuster pay for that, right? They're going to look at their company like they're nuts, like they're trying to, you know, screw them over kind of thing. Excuse my French. And so anyway, you know, again, follow the money, right? Follow the money. This, this a lot of times has an impact on how things are done. The other thing is it's not sexy. And I say that from a marketing standpoint, right? If we did kitchen remodeling, I could show you beautiful pictures of new countertops and cabinets and whatever, right? But how, how do I as a business owner sell cleaning to you? Right? I'm clean, I'm selling you the absence of stuff. And, and we're, and furthermore, these are, these are job sites that just got demolitioned, right? So these are missing walls and wall framing. You're looking at this thing going, oh my gosh, look at all this. We have to put back together, right? And so it's very hard to convince people of the merit of having really, really good cleaning done. And then the other thing is during PRV sampling, it gets overlooked, right. When you're dealing with low quality remediators and they're running air scrubbers in the containment. Right. There's that saying a broken clock is right twice a day. Eventually you're gonna pass. Right? You might fail two or three or four times, but eventually that air scrubber is going to take enough of the mold out of the air that it's going to pass airborne sampling. Most remediators, most. Most testers do not do surface sampling. Right. They might do tape sampling of like a spot here or a spot there. They might do it for areas that look discolored, right. Where they suspect there might be residual mold growth on, like, wood framing. But that's it. Right. They're not doing random tape sampling of different surfaces that look clean. Because also, too, they're going to be accused of, by the client, possibly of ripping them off and raising up the charges and all that kind of thing. Right. And I love this cartoon. You know, again, this is. It's. It. You know, people talk about cleaning and. And people think we're all on the same page. They think this. Matter of fact, Kendra, you have the analogy of the McDonald's, I think, with buying a hamburger across the U.S. yeah. Not everything's the same. And so, you know, again, this is a small word. I say cleaning, and when I'm talking to a client in their face, you know, we're going to do a cleaning. And. And I know what that means, but the client doesn't. So the client goes on, they talk to other companies and they go, oh, yeah, we do cleaning too. Well, it's not the same. We're not talking about the same thing.

Yeah. You have to ask, what does that look like?

Yeah, exactly. What does that exactly look like? Like, list that out to me. Now, I had this diagram created. This thing is. This is. I'm going. I'm going to go into this with the assumption that you've already watched Part six, right. You've already watched Part five, Part four. You've already watched this whole series, right? If you haven't, please go back and watch it. I'm not going to explain the basics to you again. You need to go watch that video. So after the demolition is done, even though we've had negative air pressure running inside our containment this entire time, that negative air does not actually clean the chamber itself. Right. It's meant to keep the molds and the spores in the chamber, but it doesn't actually clean the chamber. And so as a result, there's billions of spores that have settled onto all the surfaces in that containment. So it's all over the ceiling, all over the walls, all over the floor, especially the floor. And it's just basically like a, just a pig pen, right, of spores. And so the cleaning process to address that is we, we basically have to clean every square inch of that containment. And so step one is a HEPA vacuuming, Step two is damp wiping. Step three is HEPA vacuuming again. Now this is called the HEPA sandwich. I'll get into this later because there's also two people that like the HEPA pizza and things like that. And that's totally fine. But point is, this is what we do. It's been effective. And these little dots here, they mean something. So the red dots are represent mold spores, the blue dots represent mycotoxins. And so as we do the first round of cleaning the HEPA vacuuming, that's meant to get up all the mold spores because what's left over are mycotoxins. And I have another slide later to explain mycotoxins. But essentially mycotoxins are sticky and so HEPA vacuuming alone is not going to remove them. So if you imagine the spore is a bowling ball and then the mycotoxins are like a tar coating on the outside of that bowling ball. Wherever that little bowling ball goes, it leaves a little, it leaves a little trail of sticky mycotoxins behind. And so the first step is you want to clean up the mold spores. The second step is damp wiping. And again, I'll get into that later about what exactly we damp wipe with. But that is meant to what's called denature the proteins in the mycotoxins, which basically in layman's terms means we're making them unsticky. And then the third round of cleaning is to remove those mycotoxins. Now again, we like to have a vacuum, but also too, I have some techs who, they like to do a third the instead of HEPA vacuum. Damp wipe. HEPA vacuum. They'll do HEPA vacuum damp wipe. Damp wipe. And that's fine. Point is it's a multi round cleaning process. You don't just do one initial vacuuming just to clean up the debris, the loose drywall or carpet fragments or what have you and think you're done, you're not right? This goes very detailed. These next couple slides are boring. But the, the, the, the. Because I don't have pictures, but the. I really want to get this data down right about how exactly this is done because I've done past presentations where I'm like, okay, I, I detail that step, but I don't actually get into meticulously exactly how that's done. So. So the first round of HEPA vacuuming, you're vacuuming the ceiling, then the walls, then the floor in the whole containment, right? You're not doing room by room. You know, you don't do one room and then stop and then, you know, start damp wiping. You're HEPA vacuuming the whole thing, and then you're damp wiping, same thing. Ceiling, then walls, then floor. And then the third round is again HEPA vacuuming or Swiffering or another round of damp wiping, but the whole thing, right? Ceiling, walls, floor, whole thing. Now, if you're doing this yourself, I will say this. If you can only pick one surface to clean, then clean the floor. That's going to be the most bang for your buck. You, we do the ceiling of the walls because again, you're paying us, we're professionals, right? We're going to clean all the surfaces, right? That's what you pay us for. But if you're doing something where you're, you're, you know, you're doing it yourself or your neighbors helping you out or something like that, and they don't have the patience for it, then okay, at least clean the floor, right? Do the three rounds of cleaning on the floor. That's going to be the most bang for your buck. Now, I talk about this because this has come up in recent topics, right? The recently HEPA sandwich versus HEPA pizza. And people are getting into this, this raging debate over which one, you know, the pizza is the way to go. The sandwich is the old way. And to explain this for people who aren't aware, the HEPA sandwich is vacuum damp, white vacuum, the HEPA pizza is vacuum, damp, wipe, Swiffer. Both are effective. We've done both, right? But one of my mentors who passed away a few years ago, he, he would have us do Swiffering, right? Vacuum, damp, wipe, Swiffer, he would change it depending on the project, but we've done both and both are effective. So to me, it's like this debate, right? People get in this raging debate, oh, this is, you know, pizza is the way to go. It doesn't matter, right? What matters is, is how meticulous the person is that's doing the cleaning. That's what matters. That's what matters. This whole debate about with the method, it's barking up the wrong tree. If you're doing the, the HEPA pizza, but you're doing some. But the person who's doing it is somebody who's very sloppy and they're missing strokes and stuff, then it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The point is, you need to be a little OCD when you do this. Now, the guidelines as far as HEPA vacuuming go, you want to use a true HEPA vacuum. These are some examples. These are some examples of commercial brands. Now, I'm not saying go buy a Mastercraft. Any model you buy is going to be good. I'm not saying that, right? Some are regular vacuums, some are true HEPA vacuums, but this is very important. Residential brands I'm not too familiar with. There's going to be others watching this. They're going to know way more about this than I do. But I do know this German manufacturer immediately. They make one. I think it's the C series is their version of, of a true HEPA vacuum. And, and this is very. By the way, this is very misleading because right now, in the US economy, when you got to buy a vacuum, all the vacuums say they're HEPA vacuums, all of them, and they're not lying. There is a HEPA filter in the vacuum, but it is not a true HEPA vacuum, because it matters where the filter sits in relation to the motor doing the pulling, right? The impeller. And so in, in this case, I believe the filter has to sit in front of the impeller. So, you know, you just don't know that unless you're breaking the vacuum apart or something. Now, as far as actually doing the vacuuming, you. When you're doing the walls, you start at the top and you work your way down to the bottom and you're doing overlapping strokes, right? So if I'm vacuuming here, my next stroke is going to be here. It's going to overlap damp wiping to get into the actual procedures. I don't want to say it doesn't matter too much what you actually use. For damp wiping. We've used rags, we've used paper towels, right? Now we use microfiber cloths. Again, this gets into the person actually doing the cleaning. Now, if you're going to use microfiber cloths, like, it's not unusual for us to go through 50, 200, 500 microfiber cloths in a project. It adds up, right? And microfiber cloths, by the way, you can't wash them. If you stick them in a washing machine and, and use soap, what happens is the soap clogs up the little pores, right? And that make the microfiber Cloth effective at picking up debris so you can't wash them. So, yeah, you want to go ahead and let me go back. You want to go ahead and pick something that is within your budget if you're going to do this yourself. Right.

Again, as a disclaimer, this is not a do it yourself series, and we do not recommend do it yourself remediation. You should always consult with the appropriate professional.

Right. You're right. Thank you. Thank you for keeping me out of the courtroom, Kendra. And same thing when you do vacuuming, right? You're going to go top to bottom and you're going to go with the overlapping strokes. Now, the difference is with each wipe, you're going to use a new surface on the cloth. Right? So again, this is how meticulous this gets of. You know, every wipe you're using a new surface. And so it's a giant pain in the butt to do it the right way. And I get it. Right. But again, this is how it has to be done to. To be effective. And you have to clean all the ducts, the pipes and the wires in that containment area. This is why unfinished rooms are the bane of our existence. You're talking about utility rooms or a crawl space or a room that we just tore the ceiling out. Right. Even walls, right. There's electrical lines and pipes and wires that run through that. All that stuff has to be cleaned by hand. And so there is something called a white glove test where, you know, some of the testers will do that. They'll just walk through the white glove and go wipe things. Now, some surfaces you're just never going to get clean. They're always going to have like a discoloration to it. But point is, if you're wiping it, you're picking up dust. Well, if you didn't clean, if you didn't clean the dust off, if you didn't clean all the dust out of the containment, then how in the world could you have cleaned all the mold spores out? Think about that, right? You know, mold spores are microscopic dust. Dust isn't. The dust particles are bigger. And so anyway, going back to this, I go off on tangents all the time. But what you don't want to do when you're doing the damp wiping is you don't want to do the whole scrubby Mr. Miyagi thing. This is not Karate Kid. Right. I'm dating myself. I know this movie came out in the 80s, but he has the whole wax on, wax off. Right? You're not doing that. Right. This is not bali Maids, this is not your local cleaning service where we're, we're trying to clean things for appearances. We're not, we're trying to clean it for health. We're getting up mold spores and mycotoxins. And so again, if you do the whole scrubby thing, if you do the circular motion, you're. All you're doing is smearing it everywhere.

And this is where the advantage, those microfiber cloths, they really are more effective than say, your paper towel. So from a health perspective, that's not an area where I would recommend people cut corners. But to your point, you know the process is important, right?

Well, and just to play that as advocate, I would be more like, if I had to, if you put a gun to my head and you said, what about somebody who was super meticulous but they have paper towels for versus somebody who is sloppy, but they have microfiber cloths, I would say meticulous person with paper towels. Right?

Right, Absolutely. The process is important. Who's doing the work and how they're doing it.

Exactly. Now, names are important for communication, right. Between us as people. The problem that is confusing in, in this industry and probably in construction in general, is there's a million different names of what this is called. So again, this cleaning can be called a hepa sandwich or a hepa pizza. It could be called a fine particle cleaning. I've, in the recent years, I've taken to calling it a mold spore and mycotoxin cleaning only because I like to identify exactly what it is we're doing. Help, help it make more sense to people. But there's also two other names, right? Immaculate cleaning. You'll notice in the previous slide, I made that in 2016. And so back then we called it immaculate cleaning. So again, this is a very confusing thing of, of to me, all these mean the same thing. But who knows? The remediator you're talking to, to them, they might think it's different, right? Their, their standard procedure might just be doing one round of vacuuming and leaving. But if you say, okay, do a fine particle cleaning, maybe the light bulb goes off and they go, yeah, okay, I know what you're talking about. Maybe, maybe. Now to get into the mycotoxin debate, first of all, I'm going to say some things that are going to ruffle some feathers in this video and I'm sorry for upsetting you. I'm talking to the viewer, right? Who's, who's going to disagree with me on this? But I'm just Just being, being honest, right? This is my platform in terms of, it's my video, right? I get to get to speak freely. So for the people who don't know, you know, mycotoxins themselves, they're a chemical which again, remember my example with the spore and the tar coating, right? It's a chemical that's very sticky. And so they stick to surfaces mainly, of course, they coat the outside of spores, but also too, they can stick to dust and things like that. And so this bullet point right here is very, there's a lot of people that would, there's a lot of companies trying to sell you stuff that would just bristle at this. But I'm going to go out all in and say, you know, our gold standard in this industry, by the way, because most of our industry is total hogwash, right? Marketing fluff. And 95% of our industry, just total marketing fluff. It's ridiculous the stuff that companies try to sell to the American public. But anyway, our gold standard in our industry is independent university research, right? Where they're independently funded. They're, they're not funded by companies, right? And so they're just out there for the sake of science and research. You know, does this work? What does this do? Right? And so, no, to my knowledge at least, no independent university research has shown that mycotoxins go airborne on their own. Now I will agree with the people who say, well, they're attached to spore dust and that goes airborne. Yeah, I agree, right. But I'm trying to remove that particle. I'm not trying to remove mycotoxins that are floating in the air. And so again, I'm very, very skeptical when people are buying fogging and what's the other one? Candles, right? And they're like, it's going to remove mycotoxins. And I'm in my head, I'm thinking, I have ocean front property in Arizona to sell you, right? And I'm sorry, I'm just, I'm just, this is, you know, they got sold a bag of goods, right? Now, I put in parentheses yet because we are still a very young industry. This industry has only been around for 20, 30 years, right? This is not like buying a car that, you know, cars have been out since 1880. You know, there's a lot of research that goes into this in, in the future. And so in another five or 10 or 20 years, I might watch this and go, man, I was totally wrong, right? And so I reserved the right to be completely wrong in the future, right? But for today, this is, this is what we know. And so again, this is another one I talked about the industry. You know, again, I'm trying to be very diplomatic in that curse, but the, the bag of goods that are sold people, to my knowledge, mycotoxins cannot be fog sprayed or treated out of existence, right? I'm sure you went to high school, right? And, and you've heard this before in science class, right? Matter can't be created or destroyed. Hey man, there's no magic foo foo juice, right, that you spray and then all sudden things just disappear. But I like this far side cartoon, right? Hey, look what Zog do. So this is me going, there might be advances in the future, we don't know, but for today there isn't. But again, you always hope that things progress and things improve.

So for today it's about removal, right? Not killing or covering up. We're removing mycotoxins and fragments and spores, etc. From your environment.

Oh, matter of fact, if you, if again, if you skipped around, I'm talking to you, viewer. If you skipped around, I get, I go into that in the previous segment, right, in the demolition. So I actually quote verbatim what comes out of the S by 20, what the S520 says. We're not trying to kill stuff. That's never the goal. That's actually a red flag that the person you're talking to has no idea what they're talking about from a health perspective when it comes to mold. So. But yes, thank you Kendra for bringing me back back to the point. So damp wiping and I can't see the top of my slide. So I think this is. So the goal of damp wiping is again to, to make them unsticky and make the mycotoxins unsticky. There's only certain things that are, that are effective when it comes to removing mycotoxins. Now I'm going to show a chart here on the right. So just know that whatever your solution you're going to use for damp wiping, you're going to add 2% dish soap to that. Now we like to use a seventh generation unscented dish soap, right? Because again, dealing with mold sensitized, having multiple chemicals, multiple chemical sensitivities, you don't want to use scented products. So but you know, if you want to use dawn or whatever's on your, your, you know, whatever's available is fine.

Can I jump in for a second, David? For those interested, we just released a series with John Vanta and he goes into great detail it's the Deep Cleaning blueprint series. And he talks about surfactants and how they work and why they work and why they're important. So the chemistry gets unpacked in that episode. For those who are interested.

Yeah, no, it's true. You don't want to use just water. You know, you have to. You have to add their surfactants in there because they change the angle of penetration. I think it is of the water. So four main things that we know have been proven to remove mycotoxins. Now, this is not the end all, be all list. Right. Don't crucify me if you go, well, this and that. Hey, maybe. Right.

But for today, saying in this list that you're recommending what, you're just sharing options that are out there for people. So he's not endorsing any of these specifically.

Right. So there's 70% rubbing alcohol. And before you ask, what's the other 30? The other 30 is water. Right. So if you're buying 70 rubbing alcohol, that means the other 30 is water. So you're not adding water to this. It's already pre mixed. Right. If you're going to use hydrogen peroxide, we like to use 6%. I'm not. I'm fuzzy on this. It's been a long time since I looked into this. But I. I think you can use 3%. But don't quote me on that. But yeah, we stick with 6%. This is an old school method, but it does work. Everclear, right? AKA the mind Eraser. That stuff is brood level. He fully had it a couple times. And I mean, it is. Oh. Anyway, we won't get into those stories.

So you can drink it and clean your wall.

Not at the same time. You're not gonna do it. Well, that's true. Sorry. I would say use it at full strength because you can dilute it. Right. I would treat Everclear the same as the isopropyl. Right. So if you're using it at 70 strength, but you have to realize Everclear, I want to say, is 191 proof or 200 proof or something. So it's it. So at 191, what's half of that? What, 95 or something like that? Yeah. So, yeah, there's a way to mix it and dilute it, but I would just go, unless you're a wizard Volume. Right. When I don't know if you remember those math problems that you had to deal with in high school, but, you know, unless you're a wizard That I was just keeping it full strength.

Well, and, and it's your mediation company doing this, so let, they'll do the math. The point, you know, you don't even have to worry about it. So you're, you're asking, you know, what solution are you damp wiping? And they may come back to you with, with some of these options.

Right. And then the fourth one is quaternary ammonia cleaners, AKA Quats. This is a broad group of cat. This is a broad group of products that are out there. There are many, many, many products that are quaternary ammonia cleaners. It's so vast I didn't want to list them all. Right. But it, it would easily be 50, 100, 150 different products that are quite, quite cleaners. Now as far as we go, we use one of these two because I like to keep it simple. And again, for our clients that we have that have the multiple chemical, multiple chemical sensitivities, they haven't reacted. We haven't had a client yet who reacted either one. So to us these are safe. These have again, proprietary blends from companies and things. I don't know what's in them. They have odors. I just don't trust them. Right. Because the last thing I would do is do a remediation for a client and then we're introducing a chemical that then they react to because that we're trying to make the house better for them, not not introduce new things that they could react to.

And for those listening, I. David's just touching on this briefly because we actually have an upcoming episode with Michael Pinto and it's just on chemical use and remediation and he's going to unpack the different options there. So Dave, I appreciate you though, just giving kind of a high level overview here of what you're damp wiping with.

Absolutely. Yeah. Not to step on Pinto's toes. I love, I love Pinto. Now this is, this goes back to the debate of HEPA sandwich versus HEPA pizza and what's effective and all this. There is DNA testing for surfaces and it is not caught on in the industry at all. Right. Everybody bristles at this, right? Testers, remediators, everybody just absolutely says they won't do it and they have reasons for it and they're good reasons. The big one is this is how bad our industry is. It's hard enough to get a remediator to pass PRV testing with traditional sampling, with traditional sport trap, airborne sampling, with traditional tape sampling. Right. They came and passed that. Right. I think the average Passing rate, I want to say is 50 in our industry on the first try. I mean it's really bad. If anybody's curious, ours is 96. It's. Anyway, we had a client, she was out in Maryland and we'd actually done quite a few remediations for it. So she, and she had, you know, it was a progression, right? She, she taught herself and she learned a lot and she really got up on things. And so she was to the point where she knew the differences between the different mold tests that were out there and the pros and cons of each, right? And so she said, hey, I would like to do my own DNA sampling, right? Not ermi, but just raw DNA sampling. I think it was called Cap 15. From. From, I won't say Assured Biolabs. Can I mention companies or is that.

You can. We don't.

Okay, gotcha. But it's just a resource, right? This is just the company that she used. And so she would take her own samples and she kept a very clean house because again, most sensitized client, she knew how things should be done and so she took her own dust samples. Now she still had a third party tester because in our contract we only guarantee passing with traditional sampling. So she still had a third party tester come in to verify and do the whole PRV bit, but she took her own samples. And the thing was, I didn't warn my crew. I didn't want to give them any heads up that she was going to be doing this. I wanted to see for myself how effective we are at just our normal everyday routine day in, day out. This is just a random Tuesday job, right? So I didn't want to give them any heads up. And I really think that this is where things should, should go for the mold sensitized crowd. Because again, I said this in a previous slide. You can fool airborne sampling, but you cannot fool DNA raw counts, right? You're going around doing. And they're little samples. I mean you're only testing like I think a square centimeter at a time and you're doing a composite. So if you're testing one room, you're doing I think four samples in that room. But you know, it's a good cross representation. But anyway, you can't fool that, right? If you suck at cleaning, at surface cleaning, you can't fool the DNA rock hound. Now at the risk of putting ourselves out on a limb here, these are the levels. So the first project we did, she tested us after we remediated the master bathroom and, and the catomium globosum came back as not detected. Now after we were done, she brought in her remodeler who promptly tore out some subflooring. And what they uncovered was a mold colony that nobody knew was there. There was a slow leak and old leak. And so anyway what happened was they tore out some subfloor and they revealed a mold colony on the backside of the ceiling drywall of the room below. And so the remodeler, thinking that they were doing good by this client, sucked it up with the shop vac. And so she took DNA sampling in that room and found that the catomium shot up to 47,000. And so needless to say, she was like, yep, you guys are going to come back. And we were able to roll it into another project we had to do down the road. But point is, when we did the recleaning, that catalium came back as not detectable. So again, this was the HEPA sandwich. And I'm not touting the HEPA sandwich saying the HEPA sandwich is better than the HEPA pizza. I'm not saying that, I'm just saying the multi round cleaning is very effective. And then this was the subsequent project down the road. So we actually did multiple rooms on multiple levels. And so her, the, the, the level before for Penicillin aspergillus was 62,000 in her in one area that she was testing. And then after cleaning it came back at 27. So again, these are DNA fragments. Right. And the reason to, to, to go into why the industry doesn't really want to get into this is because I'm told these are unusual, that if you had 62,000 before and then you had remediation done even after the cleaning, that it wouldn't be unusual for this number to be 300,000 or 3 million. Right. And so it's like kicking the hornet's nest. And so, but again, this comes back to multi round cleaning. It's so critical. So. Now this gets into the hall of shame. So some easy ways to tell remediators, good remediators, from bad. Obviously you don't want to have any visible mold remaining after the remediation is done. That is a bad sign. Another one is baseboards or door trim not torn out. Right? Because if you have drywall behind the baseboard, well, baseboards are like ground zero for growing mold, especially if you're talking about flooding and water leaks and things like that. But you'll see a lot of companies will leave it behind. I don't know why? These are examples of poor cleaning, right? So right here you have visible mold growth, right? That's still there. And then also to all this crap, man, look at all this dust and debris. And I mean, this is terrible. This is atrocious cleaning, right? But you'll find this more often than not, right? All this debris very easily accessible, right? Very easy to be cleaned up. Again, just the people doing the cleaning, either they don't care or they don't know any better. Here's another one, right? This is after. This is in our work, right? This is after a remediation was done. But here you have visible dust and debris in the corner. Now, granted, these corners are hard to clean, but look, man, that's the remediator that needs to do that, right? You have it here, you have it there, you have it there. It's all over the place. It's just poorly done. Another red flag is when companies want to do encapsulation before prv. This is what it looks like, right? Everything's white, everything's been painted, everything's been encapsulated. The mold standard addresses this. They say clear as day. If you're going to put on encapsulation, which, by the way, fungicidal coatings, mold resistant coatings, right? This is. Encapsulation is kind of a generic name for them. But if you're going to do that, you do it after testing, after the PRV's been done. You don't do it before, but yeah, you'll see a lot of companies do this because I'll be honest, it's more profitable because if I go in and encapsulate a project before testing, I know I'm going to pass surface sampling of that wood framing. I know it. Because what's the mold tester testing? They're going to be taking tape samples of the paint I just put on. They have no idea how good the mold was stripped out of that wood underneath. Right? So I'm sorry, I get very passionate. So, yeah, the translation is, once the job passes testing, you can encapsulate anything you want. Because the encapsulations and the mold inhibiting coatings, they. They are effective. They will give you. They will give you a little bit of buffer time where if you don't fix the water issue that grew the mold in the first place, it can be a little bit of time that it will prevent the mold growth on those surfaces. Not forever, not forever, but for a little bit of time. But at this point, I go, well, if we pass mold Testing. I tell this to people all the time. If we pass mold testing, why are you paying us mold remediation prices to, to do something that a painter can apply? You don't need us. So. And furthermore, we don't like to do them because again, we're adding chemicals to the client's house. And, and, and going back to the fundamental thing, matter of fact, I totally forgot to mention this. If you fix the water issue that grew the mold in the first place, mold will never reappear in a million years, right? Mold only grows because of water. So again, why add this man made thing? There's nothing man made that's going to hold back mother nature. So if you address the water issue, you'll never see mold again. So again, why are we encapsulating it makes no sense.

And that's a good. You must correct the moisture source. And I probably flag on the bottom of all these, but yeah, you must correct the moisture source.

Yeah. The other one is fogging, right. You'll see this a lot. This was actually on a downward trend in our industry. And then what brought it raging back was Covid because it made sense. If you're dealing about, you're talking about a operating room theater or something, you're trying to kill a virus. Fogging is effective, but with mold it's not effective at all. And again, I talked about this in the part six in the demolition, right? About what the actual mold standard says. But this is what it looks like, right? This is fogging. This is what you'll see most times, right? These wet foggers. And we used to do it, right? Don't say, don't think we walk on water. I did this for the first two years we were in business. We'd come in in fog and it was horrible. You had to wear a respirator because you would hack your lungs out. That's why it's called fogging. It's so thick it actually makes a fog in the air. That's how much chemical is in the air. What does the most standard say says don't do it. I can't get any clearer than this should not fog in lieu of source removal. But I was talking to a client two weeks ago, right? They had a company come by. Oh, you don't have to do all this demolition and cleaning and stuff. We're just going to spray this stuff in the air and we'll charge you $5,000 and we'll do your entire house. And so again, if you don't know any different, right. You Think this is the way it's done. It sounds very attractive, but yeah, this is not, this is, this is total, total snake oil salesman. So that's my presentation. David.

I have a couple follow up questions. Of course. So just to help people understand how time consuming the cleaning process is, if you had like a three day job, and I know this is a bit of a loaded question question, what, what percentage of the time spent on a job is dedicated just to that last step?

Typically, if you have a three day project, I mean, it just, it depends. It is a loaded question because obviously a crawl space utility room is going to take more time. Right. But let's say, let's say we're talking about a basement where we just did blasting. The blasting may take two days and the cleaning would take two weeks.

Yeah.

And so if we're doing the cleaning, because we'll see, we'll get this too, right? Clients go, okay, do a fine particle cleaning in my entire house. And if you're talking about a regular, let's say 2000. Well, I say regular. Let's just say 15002000 square foot house. It's not usual for that process to take two, three, four weeks to do. Right? Weeks. Right. If not, if not months, it's very time consuming. So again, if a company says that they're going to do a fine particle cleaning, you'll hear this all the time. We'll do a fine particle cleaning in the house and we'll get it done in two days. And we're gonna do your entire house. Unless you're coming in with an army of mold. Top notch Navy SEAL version of mold remediation technicians. It's not happening. It's not happening. So yeah, it's very time consuming.

Yeah, this has been really helpful. I want to flag a few things for listeners because we brought it up that post remediation verification. We have an upcoming mini episode on as well with Michael Pinto talking about that, testing what it should look like, what it should include, who should do it. So you'll want to check that out. And then we actually have Michael Rubino, he's going to be doing an episode talking about cleaning the rest of the home and what that looks like. And he's going to be going into a deeper dive, so you'll want to check that one out for sure. So if you've listened to these before, you've heard this spiel before, if you want to make sure that you don't miss an episode like this, head on over to changethearafoundation Org. Sign up for our newsletter because it really is the best way to get great information like this directly to your inbox. We'll see you next time. Thanks so much.