331// Mold Remediation: Is My Home Clean Enough?

And it's a question that comes up mainly because there is a camp, at least one camp of mold providers or providers who help clients heal from mold, who say that to heal from mold, you must have a ERMI test, which is a test that's done by collecting dust in your home.

If you want to learn more about it, I have an episode, a couple episodes back, I think it's 329, where I talk about actually how to analyze the, it's 328, how to interpret an ERMI in five minutes or less.

I also go through what it is, why it I think is a great test to start with, a great test to use along your mold journey.

But one of the things that people say is you, there's some camps of people saying that you, to really heal, be healed from mold, you need to be in a negative, have an ERMI score that's negative usually.

So it'd be zero or less.

And While that's a great score to have and if someone has it, awesome, sweet potatoes, like it's great.

It's not something that many of my clients get to even after remediation, even after fine particle cleaning, even after HVAC cleaning, even after, you know, taking out their couches and their mattresses and their porous items and getting rid of everything and buying new things.

They still haven't gotten to a negative number and it can be very self-defeating to then feel that, you know, trying to strive for something random.

And so I wanted to address what I almost consider a myth of clean and start talking a little bit more about what I'm practically seeing with my clients as they're trying to heal in very real person scenarios.

As a reminder, every person is different.

So some people might need a stricter, clean environment to get results.

But that has not been what we've been seeing in our program.

And with the clients I've been working with for, what, three or four years now, specifically mold clients, and I've been working with non-mold clients for eight years, I mean, just all sorts of everything under the sun clients, that we've not seen people need to be in this negative ERMI score to get results.

So how clean is clean enough? I, the main phrase I use when I talk to clients is progress over perfection.

And it's really interesting because even someone who I've heard be more of a proponent, I don't know if he's still in that place, but a friend of mine who's more of a proponent of like you need to have a negative ERMI to have a clean house, Matt Kelly, when he tells his story and he's told his story on our podcast of how he got his family out of toxic mold exposure in their home, he shared that he was equally new to the whole concept of healing his house from mold.

And he ended up only healing issues in his house one at a time because he didn't know he had multiple issues.

So one issue he found just through his own like infrared gun and different types of testing was that a lot of the windows seals had broken and so window frames were getting moldy and he replaced his window frames and his windows in his house and his son one of his sons which is his main indicator is the son who child who was getting sick the most and the worst in the family got better but then he realized that there was some issue with the roof during a storm and he had to fix the roof and remediate that and so Thank you.

his son was actually getting better as he took steps.

And I have found even in our family, even though we've taken more drastic, like moving, getting rid of things, buying new pieces of furniture, buying new clothes, doing deep clothes cleanses with vinegar or hydrogen peroxide detergent of our clothes, doing fine particle cleaning, which is using herbal cleaning solutions to wipe down all the non-porous surfaces in your house, walls, you know, coffee tables, metal, glass, anything, right? that every time we take it, tried something different and tried something new.

When we added in – that at least was relevant, right? When we added in PCO technology, photocatalytic oxidation with high-tech air reactors, even a bigger improvement there than what we had been.

It just stabilized because, you know, think about even if your home isn't moldy, you can go somewhere like a grocery store or your church or – an Airbnb that maybe you're bringing home mold spores on you, your workplace, a gym, and maybe it's not really bad there, but if you just want to generally have just that much better air quality, having photocatalytic oxidation units, reactors in your home is good.