Live in a Toxin-Free Home: The Construction Secrets Behind a Truly Healthy House, with Paul Kealey

We had a customer recently come on board and found out they had 3 different types of mold in the home, and it's the reason why they really were experiencing some significant health problems.

If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great, and feel freaking amazing, you're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendie Trubow, MD, and I'm Dr.

Ed Lovattan, MD.

Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast, where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social, and spiritual lives.

Hold on to your hats.

Hello and welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, MBA, MBA, and Levitan's with us today. And our guest today is something that's near and dear to my heart. He's going to talk about something. So Paul Keeley has built his career around proving that healthy homes are the most powerful medicine we take every day, lowering your energy bills, reducing your stress, preventing mold and other illnesses, and protecting the planet. So from families seeking nurturing environments to developers building sustainable communities, Paul brings science-backed insight, practical strategies, and an unwavering belief that the home is humanity's most overlooked medicine. So, Paul, thanks for being here today.

Well, you're welcome, and thank you very much for having me. I hope I can, can contribute to the, the health movement conversation because there's lots to know about the house that, that I think most people don't realize.

So, When people think about their home, most people— you know, I can't tell you how many patients I have who they tell me, oh, I'm doing a construction project. And I said, well, did you use no VOC paint? Did you get healthier or sicker when you moved into your new build home? And they're like, oh, sicker. So most people don't have in their brain that their home plays a role. So what are some of the biggest risks that people take when they go into a typical modern home that they can't see or smell or easily measure?

Well, there's a number of items, including high carbon dioxide levels, humidity, low humidity, high humidity. Humidity has big health impacts and really needs to stay between the 35 or 40 to 60% range. Mold is becoming really prevalent, especially amongst a lot of newer homes. Noise, is part of the conversation as well. And constant drafts, cold surfaces, ultimately homes that are very leaky. And what we try to communicate from a House is Medicine perspective all goes back to the— this is the one missing link we feel in general health. And important to know that there's no neutral when it comes to a home. A home is either accelerating aging or it's slowing it down. And most homes unintentionally operate like low-grade biological stress machines, believe it or not. So when I think of the longevity conversation, I think of— we like to optimize our food, the water we drink. Very simple to eat healthy and and drink healthy for anyone that wants to do that. But supplements are part of the, are part of daily health regimen, optimizing our workouts as well so that our bodies can feel most healthy. But again, we spend 90% of our time indoors, and it's important to recognize that our bodies have two primary operating modes, the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system. Parasympathetic is there for rest, repair, recovery, digestion, healing, ultimately, whereas the sympathetic nervous system, as we all know, is our survival mode. It's our fight or flight system. It's designed to be there temporarily. And if we're in a house that is creating constant stress with all of these factors coming into play, our body is never going to be in a situation where we can rest and recover. Some of the common symptoms people experience would be waking up with morning brain fog, waking up tired, anxiety, having afternoon crashes, chronic congestion, irritability, waking up, you know, really just feeling tired even after presuming we had a full night of sleep. So anyone that is experiencing these symptoms should be aware it might not be a personal problem and it might be a house problem.

So you said two different things that I'm always curious about. There's the CO2, but then there's leaky house. So right now, new houses are built— if built properly, are very tight. But they have very poor circulation, so they have high CO2 concentration. The older houses are very much leakier and have better CO2. So how do we optimize?

What's a girl to do, dude?

So yeah, it's overwhelming when you think about it, right? Because all houses are different. And when it comes to the home in terms of protecting your health, it is really having a house that's intentional from being able to control its own environment. So if we could simply control the air quality, for example, when it comes to carbon dioxide in our homes, then we're naturally going to be in an optimal healthy environment. And the two biggest problems that houses have are in terms of being a leaky home and also being a vapor-tight Homes need to be able to dissipate any moisture that's accumulating in the building envelope. But airtightness is a big part. And it is true that most new homes are built a lot tighter now than they used to be. But the big problem when it comes to a building code perspective with most standard homes is they're built to a reasonable degree of airtightness. But they're not vapor open. Houses are still, for some reason, it's very frustrating for me that we haven't evolved with all this building science that we've become aware of in the past 15 to 20 years. Homes are built in a way to hold moisture. So vapor barriers on the inside or the outside of the home and ultimately structural sheathing products that are not vapor open and ultimately hold the moisture. So this gets into a mold problem, essentially. But building airtightness, it's true. And we think of airtight buildings, we might naturally think that, oh, we're going to suffocate in the home and we're going to make the home less healthy. So an airtight house does need a fresh air system, but it's really important for any house to have a fresh air system. Houses that are not airtight or airtight to a certain degree are constantly going to be bringing in a lot of exterior toxins, whether those toxins are either from outside air or toxins within the building envelope itself. The answer to a house that is able to easily control its environment is ultimately one that is airtight. So it doesn't let in any exterior toxins either from outside air quality, which is known to be only optimal approximately 25% of the time. And a house that is airtight is easily able to control its own indoor air environment with a fresh air machine. And the airtightness, you know, the second part to it benefit, what I mentioned a little bit earlier is airtight homes do protect against toxins that might be in the building envelope itself from coming into the home. So every house today, regardless of the home, whether it's built with concrete or Styrofoam or if it's a wood frame home, there's engineered construction materials in any house. There's a certain amount of formaldehyde that might be in the building system itself. And that's only going to really have an impact if it's able to come in the home, mitigate itself into the house through a leaky building envelope. So it's true, houses are built tighter, but they're not built tight enough where we can be intentional from controlling our inside environment. Houses are still built with a reasonable degree of air leakage that allows moisture in. Allows toxins in and doesn't protect the house as a result.

Okay, so we got to drill into this. And my request is that you use smaller words and dummy this down for people like me. So make this simpler. Simplify this, please, Paul.

I want to know what a fresh air machine is.

Well, we're going to get to that, definitely. Because so what I'm hearing is there's airtight and there's vapor tight. Am I correct right there? Yes, no.

Homes should be airtight and vapor tight. Exactly. And the other part to that equation is vapor open. So we have to be, we have to be realistic about the house even. So a type of home that is really the optimal type of house to build is a home that's referred to as a passive house. A passive house, meaning it's a construction model that results in the tightest home possible. But even a passive home has a certain amount of air leakage, and there's always going to be some residual vapor leakage as well. We have to understand that there will always be moisture to some degree in the building, in the home, and that moisture does have to be able to escape the house as well. But it's not supposed to escape through a leaky building envelope. Because toxins are always going to come into the inside. If this is the case, it needs to be able to dissipate through, through proper vapor-open membranes. So the vapor-open membrane can either be put on the inside of the home or the outside of the home. It depends on the climate zone and how people really protect themselves against this is building to a construction model that has vapor-open membranes as part of the construction system.

Can you talk about the fresh air thing that Ed wanted to share?

I'm waiting for my fresh air machine.

He's waiting for fresh air.

Is it my time to get to—

It's your time, honey.

Okay. Thank God.

So for sure. And I refer to it as a fresh air machine because that's how to simply communicate it. But the machines are either called an HRV, meaning a heat recovery ventilator, or an ERV, which is referred to as an energy recovery ventilator. ERVs are recommended or should be installed in most areas of North America because they're able to also control moisture. So ultimately what the fresh air machines do is they have a high degree of heat recovery. So the good machines will even during cold, the extreme cold, periods during the wintertime, be able to extract 90% of stale energy being forced to the outside through the machine and transfer all that energy to the incoming cold air. So that's essentially what the machine does from an energy conservation perspective, but also regulating humidity. So if there's high humidity outside, keeping the humidity outside but most importantly, in the wintertime, when outside air is drier in most areas, it's able to keep the humidity inside the home so that you're always in between this 40% to 60% range.

Do they change? Do those fresh air things change based on the size of the home?

Yeah, it's different. It has to be sized for the home, of course. A proper house from a from an air quality perspective should be exchanging the complete volume of the air at least once every 3 hours. And most houses that are leaky, so this is very interesting, most houses that are, let's say, even built to the building code standard, building code stipulates pretty much every code in North America says that a house should perform at a maximum 3 air changes per hour. But that's all when we think about it, 3 air changes. So the entire volume of air in a house naturally leaking through the building envelope up to 3 times every hour. So a house that has a certain amount of air leakage like this, even if that home has a fresh air machine, it's very difficult to have balanced air and guarantee a healthy indoor air quality. But, you know, I do understand that not everyone's in a position to build a new home, and a lot of people are living in existing homes where they really love the community and moving is not, you know, really an option. We've had a number of customers that explore— were at the point where they had to do a major renovation inside, outside, and really found that it was more economical to rebuild than go through a very expensive renovation. Because if the renovation is really complicated, it can actually cost more on a per square foot basis than, than building a simple home new. And, you know, but, but that said, what, you know, what I think is important for people to know in their existing homes, if you are at the point where you're going to be renovating, there is a way to to make your house airtight. And there is a way to evaluate. So just like being aware of what your air quality is, being aware of how your house is performing from an airtightness or an air leakage perspective. So hire an energy evaluator to come in and do a blower door test, and they'll be able to tell you within a couple hours how many air changes your house is experiencing. And there's a really good system out there too called the AeroBarrier system. Which is ultimately a franchise. There's, there's AeroBarrier offices right across North America, pretty much in every municipality where they come in as part of a blower door test as well. They essentially pressurize the home and they release an airborne, a proprietary airborne formula that essentially will get driven to all the minor gaps and cracks that the house has. It can't seal anything large, but if, let's say, someone was replacing their siding on the outside of the home, it would be very simple to bring in AeroBarrier and apply a proper airtight vapor-open membrane on the outside of the home before the new siding is installed. And if the house is going through an interior renovation, that can also be done at the drywall level.

Okay. So most people are not building a new home imminently. Most people live in their home and have and are going to. So what are we telling people to do who live in a home that was suboptimally built? What are the remedies possible for them?

Well, the first— great question because it really leads to understanding your environment. Right. I think the biggest thing is we have to understand How our house is performing. Maybe it's fine. And so what I recommend people do is buy some type of air quality monitor. There's a system, for example, called the Swidget system that will replace one of your light switches. So it will go in where you have an existing light switch and it comes with an application that's able to also give you some results on your air quality. So it will, for example, be able to let you know what the humidity level is in the home. It'll be able to let you know what the carbon dioxide levels are. So carbon dioxide levels, if they are high, it's also likely there's a high level of toxins as well. And to put, you know, just to put it into a bit of perspective from a carbon dioxide level, outside air is the equivalent of 400 parts per million.. And we want our houses to be somewhere between 500 to 1,000. As long as we're under 1,000, we're gonna be in general healthy air from a carbon dioxide and a toxin level. But having a device that's able to let you know what your house is at. There's also some silent killers besides the carbon dioxide and humidity levels, meaning radon gas and carbon monoxide. Any house that, that has gas appliances will have a, a certain level of residual carbon monoxide. And a lot of houses have radon problems. So radon is essentially a soil gas coming out of the ground that houses were never designed to protect against. And houses can install a radon mitigation system if there are high radon levels. So getting a monitor to really tell you what those levels are at is the is the next thing that can be done. And from a mold perspective, there's a test called the HertzMe2 test, which is ultimately a dust swab where you mail in to the company and you're able to see if there's any airborne contaminants. We had a customer recently come on board that did this test and found out they had 3 different types of mold in the home. And it's the reason why they they really were experiencing some significant health problems.

So if you're going to do a renovation piecemeal, as a lot of people like, oh, I'm going to do this bathroom this year and I'm going to do my kitchen in 5 years. Do you recommend that people as they go do it? Does it— is it impactful that way?

It would be difficult to do it on a, on a sectional level. Not to say it can't be done, but it would be it would be best to do that major renovation at once. And when you do do parts of a house over a number of years, usually the end cost always results in being a little bit greater. But, you know, it all comes down to how the house is performing. And if it's not practical, it wouldn't be practical to bring in AeroBarrier unless that whole house renovation was being done. So better to really, you know, there are obviously devices that can be brought in from a humidity perspective, dehumidifiers, humidifiers to keep the, and also to keep the air quality good from a moisture perspective. And also very simple for every house that doesn't have a fresh air machine to connect an ERV or HRV system to existing ductwork. People have furnace systems, any type of forced air system, essentially. If a house doesn't have a furnace, doesn't have any existing ductwork, there's also decentralized systems, meaning fresh air systems that are designed to go right into the wall cavity and do all high heat recovery ventilation. Through a wall-installed device. Now, at this level, every room in the house has to receive one, but they're not very expensive units and, you know, really solutions for everyone right around the board. But anyone that is looking at building new, whether it's now or into the future, of course, you know, the best way to do that to guarantee your health and have a house without all of these extra devices that you have to manage is by building a new home. And that new home, we always recommend is a Passive House.

So when you say Passive House, I think of passive solar. I don't think that's what you mean.

I knew you were thinking about that.

So I just want to clarify because there's active solar that are solar up on the roof, solar panels, and then I think of Passive Solar House where everything is— use the sun as to heat and cool the home. That's not what you're thinking. That's not what you're saying in terms of when you say Passive House, is that correct?

Yes, you're very correct in the sense that Passive House is a construction model based around airtightness, proper insulation, thermal bridge-free design, heat recovery ventilation, and high-performance windows and doors that are really there to keep the heat in in the winter, keep the heat out in the summer. But that said, the best Passive House is always one that is optimized for passive solar reasons as well. So homes that have the ability to face the living room where the majority of windows are gonna be placed on that living room wall, if that can be faced south in an unshaded environment, then the Passive House has a great ability to reduce the heat demand down to a point where the home really doesn't need much heating or cooling, regardless of where the house is located. When I stumbled across the Passive House construction model, really on the path to creating the most sustainable home, I instantly fell in love with the concept, meaning that it had all the health protections and energy conservation protections within a very simple construction model that any builder can really follow. And build. You know, Passive Houses are really fundamentally designed on a minimalistic approach to design. So really simple details, difficult to make a house airtight without simple details, of course. But, you know, Passive House is the— from a health perspective, it's the only construction model in the world that takes hygrothermic performance as part of the construction model. So to, to just to be simple, there is a house that is as a prerequisite required to manage moisture so that there's an optimal moisture level both inside the home itself and within the building envelope. And a building envelope, a building system that can control moisture is effectively going to be a building that is going to last an infinite amount of time because the biggest single biggest factor for deterioration of the building is moisture. It'll degrade materials. And as we've been talking about a lot here, it also will degrade our health because mold will instantly form above 60%.

So when you compare new construction with a standard construction versus Passive Home construction, are we talking about a 10% increase in cost? Are we talking about 30? Are we equal? I just have no clue. Does not.

Yeah, great. Yeah, I love that question too, because it's like affordability. If a lot of people, you know, can't build Passive House affordably, it's not going to be much of a solution, right? So with respect to our company, we've tried to limit the incremental cost to building Passive at 10%. And through our Our examples, research and development, if we can limit the incremental cost to 10%, because it is a house that costs more, the windows and doors cost a bit more, and the building envelope is thicker and requires some more expensive materials. But the only incremental costs to the building are within the building envelope itself. All other components are the same. There's also reduced cost for HVAC systems because the The systems are very, very small. So less capital costs from an HVAC perspective. But we—

what we have—

we have demonstrated is if we can limit the incremental cost to 10%, that incremental cost is going to be offset instantly most of the time with savings in utilities. So most of our customers, for example, that are moving from a home that's operated on gas into a Passive House that's only electrically operated, the— it's like getting rid of the gas bill. Electric bill stays the same because it's mostly there for the appliances. Very little electrical costs for heating and cooling in a Passive House. When someone's moving from this gas-operated home into the Passive Home, usually cost of living is offset. And the alternative to that, customers that would be on propane Propane is very expensive, 3 to 4 times the cost of gas. And most people moving from a house operated by propane into their Passive House are now in a home where the house could be considered making money for the family because it comes with an even reduced impact on that cost of living.

I'm assuming solar panels and a battery backup would be a potential piece of the puzzle.

If additional benefit, a big additional benefit, if, if, if people are in an area where they're building that has a net metering program. So a program through, through a hydro, through an electric utility that allows you to connect solar panels to the grid and offset your hydro bill with, with those solar inputs. The house will automatically make money for any family living in the home because most net metering programs are very simple to offset the electrical operation of a Passive House with a very small 5 to 7 kilowatt solar array. So most homes will essentially use no more than 7,000 to 8,000 kilowatt hours of energy per year. And so very small solar array connected to the grid. There is always a cost to, to, to be connected to the grid, connected to the net metering program. But that cost is as little as $40 to $50 a month in most, in most cases. So the cost of essentially the cost of a net metering system for a passive home, because it's very small, is, is, is less to borrow on a monthly basis than a standard hydro bill.

Cool. And I like the idea of having batteries so you can have a generator if anything goes down.

All right. So let's recap. If you can, it's ideal to build from scratch and incorporate this. And if you can't, then the things you can do to mitigate would be humidity moderators, air quality fresh air, air quality moderators. You didn't say anything about air filtration, but I think a high-quality air filter and a high-quality water filter would be retrofits that you could do if you're not gonna rebuild. Yes?

Yes, a water conditioning system, very important. I'll mention one product, NLP Aqua. They're a company based out of Florida, and essentially a water conditioning system that uses no salts, no ultraviolet light through simple restructuring of water, guaranteed healthy water. Also very good for your plant and your garden. But you're right, Wendie Trubow, in terms of filtration, very important that the air is filtered. But monitoring, figuring out what the air quality level is like from a carbon dioxide level. If the CO2 is high, then guaranteed the toxins are high as well. When we think about VOCs, volatile organic compounds, even someone that renovates their house to a level of very minimal VOCs or zero VOC, even the furniture— furniture is a lot of time a big problem. There's still VOCs that come off of cooking. You cook with oil, VOCs are— the kitchen is full of VOCs. So ventilation, very important. And the minimum filter that should be used on any furnace or fresh air system is what's referred to as a MERV 13 filter. Now most filters that go onto furnaces or conventional fresh air systems are below that level, most of the time a MERV 7 or a MERV 8. But ultimately anything below a MERV 13, I feel is there to protect the machine, but not to protect your health.

Okay. I feel like this is a Pandora's box kind of situation that everything I ask opens up like 3 more possible questions. So we'll— I think what we want to do is we want to make sure people can find you. We'll put this all in the show notes. Where can people find you so that they can ask you more questions and pursue this if it's appropriate for them?

Our website is the best spot. We do have a podcast page, ecobuilt.com/podcast, and Ecobuilt is E-K-O-B-U-I-L-T.com/podcast. We do have a lot of resources on that page. Anyone can book a free consultation with us at no charge, and we're happy to discuss your situation. And on our podcast page, you know, we also have a list of builder questions that you can download. So if anyone's thinking about building now or into the future and you're interviewing builders, there's a lot of questions here to ask so you can guarantee you're in a healthy house. We also have access to almost 100 different Passive House designs, anywhere from 400 square feet tiny homes up to 4,000 square feet multifamily. Houses you have access to. And we also have an incentive, a cash incentive for anyone that is excited to start designing their home. And we also have what it's going to cost you to build the house. Our company in particular, really where we help solve the new house, Passive House problem from an affordability perspective is deliver a certified Passive House kit anywhere across North America is ultimately our core business. But we're here for education awareness. We want people to be aware of what you can do to really optimize your health. And you can't optimize your health unless you are in a healthy home. So feel free to reach out, anyone's listening, and book a consultation.

That's great. We'll make sure that's all in the show notes.

It's been amazing, Paul.

This is really cool. And horrifying but really cool. And now I, I, you know, as we were talking, I wrote things down to look up for ourselves. So for the listeners, I hope that this was valuable for you. And for Paul, thank you so much for being on the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. We're really happy you joined us today.

Great. Well, thanks very much for having me.

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