Mold itself can be made simple. The decisions around it are where it gets hard.

Hey, how's it going? Get a lot of questions about fogging the home. So what is fogging? Do you use it?

Is it useful at all? Is it going to make things worse? Okay, so maybe you've heard something about this, maybe you have no clue what I'm talking about. So fogging is like this fogger, it literally looks like a gun and you spray very, very small, it could be like a dry fog, thermal fog, like very, very small particulates of water droplets into the air.

So some people kind of use it as, it's a very polarizing topic by the way, some people use it as a standalone treatment, okay? So, okay, there's mold in the house, let's fog the whole house. Not recommended. I'll explain why.

First of all, I just want to say, what is your goal when it comes to fogging? If your house has already got a very clean bill of health, you're in great shape, you're already maintaining air purifiers and, you know, humidity levels are low, there's no mold source in the house and you're kind of just in maintenance mode. Maybe fogging the house is one way to kind of apply a safe solution like an EC3 citrus, you know, base spray or just something that you want to kind of clean and then do a damp wipe down, which we'll talk about. If you have a mold source in your house, fogging by itself is not a standalone treatment.

Why? Because what is our goal? Our goal should be removal, right? So if you have mold present in your house, fogging mold is not gonna solve it because it doesn't remove it, right?

It might change it, you know, chemically or structurally or kill it or whatever these words are, but that's not the goal, at least based on my philosophy and many others, that the goal is to remove this. If mold is like a microscopic plant or tree, which I often refer to, if you had a plant or tree in your house, you would not just spray and walk away, right? You would remove it. So if our goal is to remove the mold, then that's the number one step.

So when I say fogging, does it work? For that, no, not at all. What is the function of fogging? Why is it even around?

Well, it's actually very functional in certain situations. What situations would be? When is the best time to fog? Well, if you've seen my mold remediation video, it's going to be talking about removing the building material that needs to be uprooted and actually physically removed.

And you're disturbing a ton of stuff in that contained environment. You have negative air pressure going, you have this contained environment where particles are kind of all over the air or all throughout the air. And I want to use a picture that might be helpful for you. So here's our example.

If these are mold or airborne particles in the air, okay, this is the function of fogging according to the IICRC mold remediation protocols, okay? The function of fogging is to actually knock particles out of the air so that they land on the surface and then we can clean them. So you know when the sunlight comes through the window and you see like little particles just floating in the air? Well, those are represented here, okay?

They're just floating, they're kind of drifting in the air. When you're in a mold remediation, especially a crawl space or attic, when insulation and dirt and dust and debris are all getting kicked up, the air scrubbers should be cleaning them, but it's still this stuff has like been kicked up for a while and that stuff's just floating in the air. So we need to clean the surfaces, which we've talked about in other videos, but how do you actually clean the air? You can wait for that air scrubber to do as much as it can and filter the air as much as it can and do cross-ventilation and all this stuff, but fogging can literally go into those hard-to-reach places and start to knock stuff out of the air.

So how does it do that? This is the fogger here, okay, and it's going to spray the water droplets into the air. And so back to the picture, if you see the sunlight coming in the window and you see the little particles, if you were to take a spray bottle and just spray a little right there towards those particles, that spray bottle most likely would microscopically, those water droplets would grab onto those light particles and airborne whatevers and knock them down. They will cause them to be heavier and knock them down.

Think of a rainstorm, right? It's going to knock all that stuff out of the air, all the pollen, right? That's why people get a lot of pollen buildup on the ground. That's the same thing.

Water is coming and knocking that stuff out of the air and knocking it onto the surface. So then what's our goal here? Well, it is HEPA vacuuming and doing a microfiber damp wipe down because the goal is removal, right? So when we're trying to remove, the best way to remove out of the air is going to be air scrubbing, cross ventilation, you're cleaning the air as best you can.

But fogging can be extremely helpful, especially in, I said when's the best time to fog? In crawl spaces, in attics, in hard to reach zones. There's a lot of different curveballs that happen in a remediation process where fogging within the contained environment especially, and you can do the rest of the house as long as there's not other sources, you'd be fogging a safe solution, AC3, Benefac Decon 30, you know, maybe a smaller peroxide-based solution, not one of the more concentrated stuff, but you want to get a safe solution. There are other good ones out there.

Forgetting the names right now, forgive me. BioBalance, I believe, is one. Citrusafe, I believe, is one. So yes, you can fog.

That is not the end-all be-all. I always recommend that it's done kind of towards the last 20% or so of remediation because we need to really remember our operation and what our goal is here. Remove, remove, remove, and then one way to remove out of the air is to knock the stuff down to the ground and then go ahead and clean it up off the surface. HEPA vacuum, wipe down, and maybe you fog again to do that and knock it down.

So does fogging work as a remediation solution all by itself? You tell me. If you had a tree in your home, would you spray it with something and think that that's going to take it out of your living room? No.

So fogging by itself, not effective. Fogging in conjunction with a remediation plan where you're knocking stuff out of the air, getting into these cracks and crevices and hard to reach places so you can go and clean it might be a great, great way of completing your remediation properly. Again, it should be approved based on what you're okay with being used in the home. And I don't recommend changing the chemistry and the ecology of the home so much by just kind of constantly spraying different solutions throughout the house, right?

There's a great video by Corbett with Home Performance, which I will link somewhere and I just will keep promoting his page. He is a wealth of knowledge, but he talks about ozone generators and especially on this little clip and video, but how much we want to do this like special silver bullet to kill everything in a house or what it's doing is changing the chemistry in the home and it's really, he explains it much better and that's not for this video, but when we start introducing new things into the home, it can cause a whole host of things. So we want to keep it really simple. We want to physically, manually remove stuff as best we can.

That's cutting stuff out, that's HEPA vacuum, that's wipe down. That involves no chemicals right there. So if we're going to introduce any form of solution, we want to obviously make sure we're good with that solution being safe and non-toxic, and then we want to use it where it's most needed. And this is one way that it can be used.

So goal is removal. What is the function of fogging? To knock stuff out of the air is the most basic function that it has. And the best time to fog is towards the end of remediation, and especially in crawl spaces, attics, and other hard-to-reach zones where the cleaning can be potentially difficult.

And so does it work? You tell me. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

What's up everybody? Back in front of the whiteboard. I'm going to be short and sweet with this one. It's a very, very basic overview on a few key principles that I want everybody to understand.

And it's going to be a bit about testing and a bit about airflow throughout the home. Again, there's so much to this. There are multiple sciences around air pressure and temperature differentials and even where exhaust and ventilation and circulation can happen in the home, where to place certain fans, how the HVAC system is, and just how air flows throughout a home. I'm going to do this from a mold inspection angle to stay within that niche and hopefully give you an understanding that this big breathing organism that is also a recycled air box that I call our homes are very important to, you know, see in this very basic picture.

So I'll just get right to it. With different testing, the three main tests, go watch the video if you haven't seen yet about the three main different type of mold tests in a home is going to be ERMI or dust collection samples, air samples, and swab samples. They all have their pros and cons, their upsides and their downsides, what they show and what they don't show. If we didn't do any testing and we just assessed the home, we would want that assessment to be top to bottom, all the way around every nook and cranny of the home to really see how the current moisture levels are, how maybe previous water damage have impacted the home, and how the airflow and different ways the building is structured, the building envelope, you know, around the house, things like that.

We want to actually make sure that the grading, I did this maybe a bit wrong, the grading of the home is a bit more up and down like this to drain moisture away from the home. That's why gutters are going to be important so the water that comes off comes off and out. That is one of the many, many things to check on the external envelope of the home. So the goal is to control moisture.

That's one thing we can control in homes is moisture content. So moisture can come in, humidity can come in in a lot of different ways. You want to make sure that you have, these are windows here and here. There are windows all throughout the home.

You want to make sure that the windows and doors get opened and we introduce fresh air. If we have a very tight home, it causes that recycled air in the home to stay tighter and tighter, which causes more condensation, more carbon dioxide buildup, other contaminants. It's going to be a heavier concentration within the home. They say the best solution to pollution is dilution, and one way of really diluting effectively is letting fresh air cross-ventilate into the home.

Doors, like I said, windows, a lot of natural light in as well. Mold thrives in the dark, so let the sunlight in. These are some basic principles. Before I get to testing, I'm going to just incorporate a little bit of other understanding about different areas of the home.

If you have a crawl space or basement, that is part of the building envelope. There is something called the stacking effect, which will cause air pressure and temperature differentials to move air from the bottom up. We're maybe never going to get a crawl space perfect, but we want it definitely as good as we can get it because the air down there does influence the air up here, especially if you have gaps at all, if you have an HVAC system, which we'll talk about in a minute as well, that air will move upwards and it's very important to make sure that the drainage is good down there, that there's a proper vapor barrier that covers the soil and, you know, dirt down here. A bunch of different factors on keeping a crawl space good we've talked about in the past as well.

First floor, you can do a lot of these inspections yourself, checking around, you know, sinks and toilets and showers and any other places where water damage could happen. Here we want to mitigate humidity and dust. Yep. So those are two things we can control in our first and second floor living spaces much, much easier.

So you want your humidity levels to be 40 to 50-ish percent. If it gets over 50 into 55 or so, that's fine, but it shouldn't stay up, you know, in the upper 50s consistently. That's where the buildup of humidity in the home can cause the dust around the home to kind of convert microscopically into mold. Dust becomes its own little place to harbor mold throughout the home.

And you're not going to keep your home completely dust-free 24/7 all the time. We shouldn't be scared of it, but dust buildup areas and places where circulation doesn't happen as well or dust buildup does happen, you add dust and humidity, you have again another place where mold can build up. And guys, if you know about the ERMI test, you know that that's a dust collection sample. So the more dust you have in the home, that's what you're collecting.

You're collecting innocent looking household dust and then the lab tells you what's in that dust. So when you lower the dust content, you're in a sense lowering the potential for these species to be found in the ERMI, as long as you don't have, you know, other sources in the home. The toughest thing about the ERMI test is it does not point to a location. I wish that when we took dust from the first and second floor or just the first floor, that there was some arrow from the ERMI saying, "Hey, it's coming from this room or that room." It's not.

It talks about different species. Some, you know, need more water to grow. So some of the more toxigenic mold types need longer-term water damage. That's why they're more commonly found where there's dark, damp, long-term water damage happening in certain places.

And that's where, you know, I can help you with the assessment of the ERMI and looking at that. But just for an example here, if I take an ERMI, which is going to be represented by these little dots here, if I take an ERMI here and I collect dust over here and I collect it over here and over here, all different places throughout my home, okay? I have an ERMI test. Well, it's a cumulative test of dust in multiple different surfaces, and that's what makes it one of the weak points, or that's what makes one of the weak points of the ERMI, is now we have to decide where or determine where is the higher ERMI counts coming from.

Are they coming from the water leak you had that came in, you know, through a window here? Was that adding to it? Because air is constantly moving, like I said. So is it the HVAC system that is heavily contaminated and every time that's kicking on, it's distributing all that around and that's what we're finding on the ERMI.

The ERMI is this accumulative picture of where you might have one really big bad source in the home that's distributing throughout the house or you might have 10 different problem areas in the home and the ERMI is picking that up as well. So an ERMI by itself does not really show us that. I've seen low ERMIs but I still tell people, hey let's still cover the bases, let's still check the house because the assessment of the home is most important. When I tell people to check the home and then their ERMI is low, but they find visible areas of water damage or like visible mold behind wallpaper and stuff like that, the ERMI didn't show it.

So this is where we can't just make our big determinations or have all of our peace of mind put on what our ERMI says. That's just one aspect. So if I'm assessing a home, I'm going to keep this very basic because there's a lot of nuance and intricacy to this. If I'm going to assess this home and I take an ERMI, there's one, okay?

This is just a overall collection of what happens to be sitting on these surfaces in the dust. That's going to be my ERMI, okay? For an air sample, maybe underneath, maybe in this bathroom, underneath this sink, there was an issue or a funky smell. We'll take an air sample underneath that sink, okay?

It's a more localized spot. Maybe we see in the second floor, you know, on a baseboard here, there is some visible water damage. We'll put an X for the swab, okay? So you start to put this whole strategy together.

Any places you find visually, man, this is a, you know, black area that has definitely had water damage. You could put a direct swab on it, or you could just assign that, hey, that needs to be replaced anyway and remediated properly. Air samples can be determinations of these localized spots. You can take an air sample in a handful of different places, but you got to know what those limitations are.

What is the likelihood that mold is just floating into that air sample at the time that you're taking it? It could maybe be a lower likelihood, which is why there's a lot of false negatives at times, but that's why we just do the best we can with the options we have and we put the pieces together. And like my last video, if you haven't seen that yet, you know, determines is that the assessment of the entire home, knowing what to look for, knowing how a home works and breathes and the history of the home is the most important part. I'm just including if you're getting testing done so that you guys know, oh wow, if I only did one air sample in the bathroom, look what it's not showing, a lot.

If I just do one ERMI in the home, look what it's not going to tell me, a lot. The most important part is knowing how your home is working. Does it have proper, see this is representing ventilation. Does it have ventilation in the attic properly?

Does the bathroom have exhaust fans dumping the humidity out of the home entirely? Is the HVAC system in good shape because whatever's in that system is getting distributed throughout the entire house? Are we lowering humidity and dust content? A lot of different factors, right?

Those are all things that tests can show us, but they can also miss. I wish there was a better test. Maybe the technology will get better and better as time goes on. I am hoping we have AI that tells us everything now.

Let's have some sort of improved mold testing option that can really tell us a lot more about the home. But at the end of the day, the assessment from the trained eye, knowing how a building works, knowing a bit of the history of the home, knowing how we're feeling inside and out of the home, the smells, the senses are really, really big parts to get a lot accomplished. I always encourage people to get as much out of this as you can accomplished without spending a ton of money and energy and putting only tunnel vision on what the test results say, which are one, you know, important aspect, but not the end-all be-all by themselves. So a testing strategy is a nice combination of all, but there are many times where maybe an assessor is good enough that he doesn't need to be taking any tests at all.

There are times where that is actually recommended and obviously this all works within people's budget and what their goals are and the different areas of the home that really need to be checked and vice versa. So the HVAC system is the final thing I'll talk about here. This is a motherboard, I like to call it, of what may be influencing the health of the home and the overall air quality a lot. Whatever is in this system, if it's dirty, 15, 20 years old of old dust and contaminants, and every time that kicks on, it's going and it's landing on all the surfaces, your ERMI might be high because of a contaminated HVAC system.

Maybe not every time, but that could be part of that buildup. Maybe it's old dust. You know, the ERMI tells a historical picture because dust is the picture of what has been in the air and then what settles on the surfaces. So that's a historical picture of old air quality that's landed on it.

An air sample that you take is a current sample only. It does not tell history. It's only those 5 to 10 minutes that you're collecting air. And finally, swab samples or presence/absence tells the type and amount, you know, on that direct swab.

But again, a good assessor should know what they're doing around the house, be very thorough in checking, not just set up a couple air samples and leave, not just take an ERMI and whatever that says goes, but really knowing how a home is working and giving very customized pictures of what is needing to be prioritized. Final thing I'll say about that word priority is we need to assess the priorities of the red flag versus the yellow flag spots. So maybe the red flag zones are the HVAC system, the crawl space, and the bathroom. Maybe these three spots are influencing the most amount of air quality and the most amount of surface area throughout the house, which may be why the ERMI is high, why the symptoms are being experienced, why we, you know, what we really need to do to improve the health of the home.

These are probably our red flag zones that need to be handled first to get us to our goal, which is I really like the 80/20 rule personally. They say the best solution to pollution is dilution. If we can dilute your home to about 80%, that's within reason. That should take the burden off the body and then we focus on healing the body.

But it's about taking care of prioritizing what's actually impacting the health of the home the most. You might have, you know, some grout that has a little bit of, you know, speckled, you know, areas. Maybe you have one baseboard that looks questionable and maybe, you know, some dust buildup throughout the house. These are not going to give us the biggest return on our investment for the effort, the money, the energy, and attention that we're going to give to improving the health of the home the most.

This is where I like to help people in consulting, saying, based on everything we know and all the, you know, inspection steps and testing steps we've done, let's put the three to five, some people have more, red flag zones down first and let's get those done and really improve it without going totally overkill. And then maybe these are something that we can revisit in the future. Maybe we can improve and not assign some massive remediation protocol that's going to cost a lot and really turn the home upside down, but these are things that we can just improve. And then finally, after you get those handled, it's all about the goal of maintaining and moving on.

So how do we maintain humidity levels, dust levels, you know, maybe air purifiers and just keeping our routine checkups around the home to make sure things are good? And yeah, this covers a lot of different topics. I don't really know what to title this one because there are so much here about and a lot of different intricacies I could go into about different areas of the home, different ways in testing. But I do hope this is a good overview to give you an idea of this big breathing organism that you're living in called a home with a lot of different aspects of it and different ways of assessing it.

So if I can help any more, book a consultation with me one-on-one, check, you know, binge my Instagram page with the videos and the story archives I've done. There's a lot of information there. And let me know any other additional questions. And if you have any specific questions on this video or this picture by itself, and I would love to answer those.

Thanks.

What's up everybody? Gonna answer some very common questions around inspection tools. So first off, as a homeowner or renter or someone who wants to have some of this stuff on hand, I really would recommend these first two. These are a little higher cost and not always going to be needed.

So we'll talk through each one and clear up any potential misconceptions and let you know the strengths of these different things. So first off, a bright flashlight. To me, I've found the most amount of issues on inspections with a flashlight. So good lighting is very, very important.

You can see in an old Instagram post that I have the difference between a well-lit area and a not well-lit area. It was two pieces of wood and the one with good lighting or with the flashlight and flash photo showed us some white, gray, green dusting that turned out to be an Aspergillus, you know, left behind Aspergillus colony. So bright flashlights can be very, very important. Low cost, shows us that dust and different discolorations and hard to reach places.

And when you use it at different angles, you can see different areas of the building material that might be warped or water damaged, and then getting into dark places where mold likes to thrive in the dark. So using a bright flashlight is very, very important. Get one, high lumen, and that's a very, very good start for everybody. A moisture meter.

So a lot of you guys maybe already have one. You can get a decent one for 50 to 100 bucks, but I know there are kind of like the best ones are going to be much more expensive. I would start just as a homeowner with the low-cost one just to have an idea if you're wanting to check on building material under sinks or whatever it may be. You probably have a pin or pinless one.

The pin one will literally poke holes into the wood or drywall that you're checking, and it will have a little reading. The pinless one will just go on the surface, and it will read a little bit underneath the surface. The more expensive ones, you know, and one I have that is really good, is it goes deeper into the building material to show the moisture content. So that's what it does.

It just simply tells us moisture levels within most building materials, not all, but there's different settings, you know, for maybe a concrete setting or a drywall setting and wood setting. So what you want to do first is find a dry standard. So this can be a bit confusing, but for a quick description of it, basically if you're looking in a bathroom and you're wanting to get a dry standard for the wall of drywall, mostly it's going to be between 0% moisture and maybe like 3 to 5% moisture. But the goal is to go to an area that you know for sure is dry and you find that dry standard of what your moisture reader is looking at and find that baseline.

And then as you go and scan the places and it spikes up, you see the differential in the percentage. You don't have to do that as much with drywall because really anything over 10, 12% you want to start looking more. If it's at, you know, 18, 20%, it's definitely wet, maybe even saturated, needs to be cut out. With wood, it's a little bit different if it's soft wood or hardwood and different areas that way.

With tile can be very tough, and so you want to find a dry standard. Different moisture readers will have different settings and numbers, whether they're reading moisture content percentage or have a different way of reading it. So without getting too technical, you do want to find a dry standard because I've had some areas where you're like, man, everything's at 50. Well, it's not really 50% moisture.

That was our dry standard. That was our zero. So when it jumps up to 85, it's the difference, right? 85 and 50, maybe it's 35% or points higher than our dry standard. I hope that makes sense.

That is a definite key when using a moisture meter so that you don't think your entire house is soaking wet if your dry standard happens to be a certain percentage. And this can be based on like even metal areas. That's why I wrote it here, is to be aware of metal areas and the setting that you're using. So when you go around a window and it spikes up right at the corner, it's likely because there's metal right there, a metal piece of framing there.

Around a shower, maybe there's a metal frame as well, and it's going to spike, you know, that moisture content. Really it's finding the metal and you want to just be, again, aware of what you're doing there so you don't freak out just if it jumps up, but really to get a good 360 assessment of it. So yeah, that would be something else to look into and to have. And really, you can get a lot done with these two, a lot.

If you know what you're looking for, you can really tell a lot. Now, moisture readers will not check if there was previous moisture, obviously. That's pretty obvious. It's only going to check active moisture, but it's important to know that.

Thermal imaging. So this can be a little bit overrated by some people, in my opinion. It's not necessary for every homeowner to have. It can be a very high cost investment and really all it's going to tell you is temperature differentials, temperature contrast.

So when you go on something that's warm, it's going to be yellowish or, you know, orange, whatever, and you go into something that's cooler, it's going to be that dark blue, maybe even getting to black. It's very, very cold. So all it's showing is temperature differences. When you see in the corner and you scan, you know, in the corner of buildings where the ceiling and wall meet, there's always going to be a little different color there, you know, from the airflow.

And if you go over a vent and you see it's cooler because the AC is on, right? So you can really tell a lot of just simply temperature differentials. It may show you, like I found a lot of areas where people were missing insulation. There's a hot spot in the middle of the summer.

I was like, wow, there's a big hot spot here. Well, I go up there in the attic, no insulation. So the infrared camera can really show temperature differentials only. It will maybe show active moisture.

If it's a good thermal imaging camera, it will show, oh wow, that's like a weird funky looking spot of blue. That may be a cooler zone that could be moisture. That's why you want to use this and then go confirm it with the moisture meter to really confirm if it is moisture or not. These things have fooled me a few times, but it's a very good thing that I would scan most homes with anyway.

And then also with the thermal imaging, you just want to have a good idea of where you want to use it and not putting kind of everything based on just that. Hot and cool zones happen all the time in houses, nothing to really overly freak out about. Maybe not every mold inspector will have one, but it is just something else that might be commonly used. Borescope.

So the borescope camera, this is also what a lot of inspectors will use as well, and maybe it's putting a hole in a wall to put the camera into. Maybe it's already finding an area that we really can't reach. What a borescope camera is basically has an extended tube wire with a little camera at the end of it and a little light, so you can literally put it behind into a wall and then it will show on a little screen here what that camera is finding. So it's an extended camera that goes into behind those different materials there, and it's a way to see those hard-to-reach areas, and someone who knows what they're doing can really discover a lot behind a wall that we might not be able to see.

Now, it will take drilling holes at times or taking certain things apart in order to get there, but that can be a really good tool. Again, probably not necessary for every homeowner to have, but it's just something else to be aware of as an investigation tool. And if you're curious about stuff behind a wall, maybe you would request that oven inspector or industrial hygienist to use a borescope and get behind there. I know a lot of mold issues have been found that way for sure.

And yeah, I've liked using it as well. So hope this helps. Really, these are the two key ones for you guys to be using is the moisture meter and the bright flashlight, in my opinion. That's going to be the best bang for your buck.

And check out my other videos that talks about the inspection process and the importance of that, because alongside of this, after a full inspection, then we get a really good idea of what tests should be taken and why. So hope this helps. See you soon.

Just did an ERMI test and your results are high. What are you going to do? Move out? Freak out?

What are the next steps? Your results are low. Are you going to ignore it and think that you have no mold sources in the home or automatically push mold aside and say that it's not impacting the health of the home at all? One ERMI test is like doing one small test on someone's body and thinking that you know systemically what is happening with them mentally, emotionally, physically, and in every aspect of their body.

The ERMI is one small, small piece of the puzzle and too many people think that that is the tool that's going to help them make every single decision needed to get to a mold-safe environment.