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Hello this is Marko Vovk from www.houseinvestigations.com. If you go outside on a humid day, you may
inhale 100,000 mold spores. If you place five bags of mulch around bushes, you inhale another
1,000,000 mold spores and you never once complain about mold. However, when the mold inspector
tells you have 1,000 mold spores of Penicillium in your basement you start to have short-term
memory loss, headaches, and your fingernails turn green. Homes today are tight and built
with materials that no longer hold water. So when they get wet, they stay wet. In the
old non-air-conditioning days, homes could dry from the inside out and the outside in.
Today we install exterior siding systems such as EIFS synthetic stucco, Cultured Stone,
Hardy Board without proper drainage spaces (which could be simply a 3/8 drainage gap
behind the siding material) or without proper drainage planes (which could be simply properly
installed house wrap), and some builders even install brick without weep holes which are
needed to drain brick when it becomes wet. Additionally, we now have aluminum-clad windows,
which are now rotting all over the country and we fill the interior of our walls with
foam, fiberglass, or cellulose. Some of us even install non-breathable plastic Visqueen
or vinyl wallpaper on the inside of our walls. Then, we turn on our unbalanced HVAC system
along with man's dumbest invention the furnace humidifier and then we wonder why we have
mold. Mold need spores, nutrients and water. Spores and nutrient are everywhere. Mold can
grow on a dusty mirror, it eats drywall for dessert, and yes, it grows on your green board
drywall in your bathroom. You cannot fool the mold. We cannot control mold spores or
nutrients, but we can control water. No water, no mold, end of story.
Water comes from water events, house dampness, moisture intrusion, moist air entering the
home due to negative pressures from your poorly balanced HVAC system, high indoor humidity
from moisture generators such as a basement sump pump that does not have a 100% sealed
lid, humidifiers, vented crawl spaces, ventless appliances, all of which promote mold growth.
Along with the mold, are bacteria, dust mites, cockroaches, other insects, and chemical out-gassing
of building materiols Therefore, we have multiple agents present in damp homes that simultaneously
can cause health effects. Furthermore, damp homes permit Pre-1978 painted surfaces to
fail and become lead dust, pipe insulation to become heavy, fall to the ground, and become
friable possibly containing asbestos or fiberglass. We have OSB, particleboard, and pressed wood
all of which can outgas formaldehydes when they become moist. Finally, let us not forget,
about air-fresheners, aerosols, paint, thinners cleaning agents, glues, resins, fecal pellets
from dust mites, house dust, insect fragments, pollen, and mouse droppings and much more
all of this can make us sink. What about the 40% of Americans that may have side effects
from their prescription drugs. I had one elderly client pay me thousands of dollars to test
her home for many things, only to find out her itching and skin rashes were a side effect
from her prescription drug. You cannot just blame mold for your sicknesses. If you have
high humidity, a pet, and carpet, you probably getting sick from fecal pellets caused by
dust mites! This mold craze started in Cleveland with
a few dead babies that lived in damp, and possibly lead paint, asbestos, dust filled,
dirty carpeted homes, along with their possibly cigarette smoking, alcohol drinking, or prescription
taking moms. And it is even possible that some of these moms may have not owned vacuum
cleaners. This small Cleveland mold ripple effect went
all the way across the country to California where it was re-packaged and sent back to
us in a tidal wave. This tidal wave stopped at a few Hollywood movie stars' homes to gain
some extra turbulence such as Ed McMahon is who blamed mold for his illness, and also
blamed mold for the death of his poor little doggy Muffin.
Then all the snake oil salesmen morphed into mold experts and started teaching, testing,
selling the wonderful world of mold. Now you have a muti billion dollar industry that survives
on mold alone. If you perform an easy tape-lift mold test
and send the same sample to five different labs, you will get five different test results.
If you test the air for mold spores in the morning, they will be different in the afternoon.
Many times, the same mold spores on the outside of your home are the same mold spores on the
inside of your home except for the quantities that change simply by turning on your furnace.
When your mold test reaches the lab, cronies dressed in white lab coats that are certified
because they took a four-day class on microscopy identify and count the number of mold colonies
or spores. Nobody ever checks these white coat cronies for dyslexia or if they flunked
high school math. Then a week later, the mold result comes back and your mold expert tells
you that your are going to be sick because you have toxic mold and everything in your
home is contaminated. I just read the December 2010 140 page New
York State Toxic Mold Task Force Report. After reading this document, I still
did not learn anything I did not already know. This is what I know. If you smell mold and
see mold, you have mold. Additionally, all molds are bad unless it is non-moldy cheese
in your refrigerator. You need to correct the water, moisture, and humidity problems
in your home. It is that simple. You do not a governmental task force of 14 individuals
who probably know absolutely nothing about a homes construction, building science, or
moisture intrusion, studying MOLD 101 and telling us, what we need to do.
This mold thing is very simple. If your basement, crawl space, attic, roof, plumbing, have leaks
fix them. If you have high indoor humidity, lower it.
Run a basement de-humidifier. If your home has condensation on anything,
something is screwed up, go and find out what's screwed up.
Sometime you may need to call a good ASHI home inspector or building scientists such
as myself to help diagnose the more complex moisture problem.
After you correct the moisture problem, take precautions so the moisture problems do not
happen again. You do not need expensive laboratory tests
to tell you that you have mold. Who cares what kind of mold it is anyway! All mold is
bad. As far as toxic and non-toxic mold, theses are scam words used by mold litigators, mitigators
and scamolators, and even NEW CITY they do not use the word toxic mold anymore.
Then there are those special top-secret formula chemicals that kill mold. Mold does not care
what you use. Your house dust is loaded with millions of spores just waiting to be watered.
And even if you clean all your dust, when you open the front door to buy Girl Scout
cookies the mold spores come back in. If you are healthy, go ahead and clean up
the mold. After all, just layed down five bags of mold infested mulch. Go ahead and
put on your respirator and some gloves and have some fun. When I was five, I used to
make mud pies and eat them and I am still here 45 years later. MOLD IS OVERRATED
We must build our homes properly for the geographical area we live in and use materials that are
compatible with the rest of the products in our home. We need to drain the rain, and let
our homes dry when they get wet. In cold climate zones, builders must stop venting crawls spaces,
stop installing interior vapors, and stop installing house products wrong. Furthermore,
it is truly amazing that the public relies on mold tests, and mold mitigation contractors
for all their answers. It seems that we are getting dumber and dumber. Thank you for watching.
This is Marko Vovk from www.houseinvestigaitons.com. Please subscribe to my channel and watch my
other videos