Category: Mold Remediation

HEPA, HEPA, Damp Wipe

Post author By Jamesb
Post date October 6, 2023

Everyone has a secret family recipe. Surely. Jessica (the head of Yeti operations) grew up with a Dad who was a successful for-real chef. He knows
more about the perfect meal than most of us have ever learned about anything.

In the mold remediation world, because we’re such fun-loving types, we’ve got a recipe for mold remediation called the “HEPA Sandwich”. You’d love it. As mold experts, we establish containment wherever necessary; before a fully suited remediation professional HEPA vacs the affected surface, damp wipes said surface, and then HEPA vacs again.

Somewhere along the way the secret recipe has been getting a sly adjustment.

In fact, the sandwich has fallen apart altogether – more like an open face, now. This new recipe is now “HEPA, HEPA, Damp Wipe”.

A small change, and possibly insignificant. But the goal is the same – we’re trying to remove (not kill) the mold. The HEPA vac is a negative pressure chamber and it removes loose spores from hard surfaces.

The damp wipe step removes what else you can get off simply from that hard surface before repeating the steps.

In real life, there’s an abrasion step between the two HEPA steps. As long as the moldy hard surface (mold on lumber, for example) is dry, the IICRC S520 recommends that the surface is sanded or otherwise abraded, before the second HEPA vac, and the final damp wipe to collect residual mold spores.

If you’re ever lucky enough to watch mold under a microscope when a person walks past, you’ll see what appears to be all the mold fly away. Actually, that air movement that was imperceptible to you, was a storm in the mold cup, because these spores are light enough to be carried in the air. Easily moved, and fragile. The roots of mold do not go deep on hard surfaces, so they fly away easily. The HEPA vac step sucks them in before you get too close to be moving them around too much.

While we recommend this as the first step in every mold remediation, the practical knowledge is that this recipe is most effective on hard surfaces. Sadly, mold will embed roots in porous surfaces like drywall and cloth.

When drywall is affected by mold, we remove it 100% of the time. The stud wall behind that drywall may also be affected but would not need to be removed. That hard surface like lumber can have the HEPA, HEPA, Damp Wipe treatment, and may even be sanded or otherwise abraded to physically remove the spores from this substrate.

Those spores then get the HEPA, HEPA, Damp Wipe treatment again, and get sucked or blown into a HEPA filter forever.

All this to get you back to a mold-neutral indoor environment.

Adapted from the book: Yeti’s Eat Mold for Breakfast, first published 2022

Mold Remediation

PPE For Your House

Post author By Jamesb
Post date September 29, 2023

You know when somebody is cooking bacon because you open the door, and the smell carries the warm air to your nose. As you create negative pressure pulling air into your nasal cavity (stick with me) you draw those molecules towards you and further away from its source.

Mold spores are much smaller than bacon smells.

And because you intuitively know how bacon smells travel, you now know how mold spores travel through your affected building. It’s that easy.

Our goal is to limit the further spread of mold spores in the air (already happening) by forcing that air (producing negative pressure) to carry the spores where we want them into a HEPA filter (a trap).

Typically, we’ll build temporary plastic containment walls inside doorways or openings just outside the mold affected area, with large HEPA filtration devices set-up, sucking air from one side of the plastic walls to the other; forced through the filter.

As the spores are carried to the HEPA filter, they get stuck.

The air passes through the filter, but the mold spores don’t.

Just in the same way that you wear a mask around a sick person (stopping the sickness getting into your mouth), we establish a containment like a mask for your building (stopping the spores traveling further away from the source). This containment will usually be built with double-sided tape on the walls and ceiling, or magnets in an office building, holding plastic sheets in place with extendable poles, and with equipment passing through the temporary wall to push and pull the air as necessary.

If we can effectively identify the source of the mold, we then physically agitate, sand, scrub, and remove it from the surface. We will attempt to make any loose spores airborne to specifically get them trapped in the air filters – so we can take them out of the area and get you back into your now mold-neutral space.

In fact, a final step in the mold removal process will often be an “air-wash”, where we’ll use a leaf blower over all the walls and ceilings, to lift any spores that may have tried to rest since we cleaned those areas. Knowing the negative pressure is sufficient, all the spores we kick-up will be pulled through the HEPA filters and trapped at the end of the project.

Adapted from the book: Yeti’s Eat Mold For Breakfast, first published 2022

Mold Remediation

To Test, or Not to Test? Who Knows?

Post author By Jamesb
Post date September 22, 2023

One family asked us to give them a quote to remove all the walls and flooring in their large and beautiful basement.
They’d been told by a mold inspector that it was necessary. This happens a lot.

In conversation, it turned out that their first inspector also owned a remediation company, and this
was his recommended scope of work. And this happens a lot, too.

The Problem with Dual Services: Testing and Remediation

We duly suggested a local vendor we’ve worked with who tests, but does no remediation, and therefore has no dog in the fight. After testing, inspector #2 essentially recommended a deep clean.

Because there is no state licensing for mold remediation technicians or testing in most states, some remediation companies offer in-house testing before and after their work, and some home inspectors offer testing… and even mold remediation services as well.

This means that anybody can sell their mold removal services to you in our part of the country.

Our Stance at Yeti’s: Integrity Over Profit

Perhaps, by contrast, we Yeti’s don’t own a single mold testing contraption of any kind.

Not because we don’t care to know, but we don’t care to cheat 🙂

We want to avoid a conflict of interest when it comes to mold remediation.

It’s waaaaay too easy to find mold, and it’s pretty easy NOT to find it once we think we’re done. But a disinterested third-party… wow – they might find mold spores when we’re done. And that keeps everybody honest.

When to Consider Testing

Sometimes air quality testing is the right move.

We suggest indoor environmental testing whenever you’re experiencing sickness, and believe it may be related to the mold in your indoor space. We suggest mold testing when there is a LOT of mold, or when we can’t find an obvious source. We also recommend mold testing by a third party when the complexities are such that it would be difficult to guarantee we’d landed the plane without hard data. Lastly, we recommend mold testing when a customer is a higher risk occupant (mold in a nursing home, mold identified in a school facility, hospital, etc).

And in many other mold remediation scenarios, it may be appropriate to press on.

If we can see the source, and the affected space, and no one has a health concern, and the scope of remediation hasn’t gotten away from us, there’s a lot of work we can do for the price of testing. And so we try to apply the common sense principle… what would we tell our Mom to do in this situation? Generally, that steers us well – we like Mom 🙂

Adapted from the book: Yeti’s Eat Mold For Breakfast, first published 2022

Mold Remediation

PPE For Your Face

Post author By Jamesb
Post date September 1, 2023

Only clean the teeth you want to keep. That’s the best dental advice for kids at bedtime 🙂

Only protect the lungs you want to keep. Surely, this is the best advice for mold professionals.

In reality, most people don’t have a deadly reaction to mold exposure. Clearly some do. But most of us have a “tell”.

James knows when he’s walked into something “big” when he gets a weird pulse feeling behind his eye (oh, that’s very scientific), and a tightness in his chest. Some of the team gets a sense in their throat.

That’s when the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) comes out.

And sometimes, that’s the time to bring in a third-party air quality professional (see our “professionals” post).

And while this PPE is to protect the person during mold remediation – get them wearing the right gear, before they do the right stuff – it also stops the spread of mold to unaffected spaces too. E.g. if you walk around in the affected space, then back it into an unaffected space with those tiny spores all over you – that’s not super helpful. So the “space suit” comes off at the containment exit point (known as a critical barrier), when you leave the affected area.

So PPE is for use inside the affected area (inside the containment) but not for use outside the affected area (outside the containment).

As always, with science-y things, there’s an exception – PPE is less important to remove when leaving containment when you have an option to leave directly to the exterior of a building. No one cares if you walk the mold outside!

When we worked in the ballroom-basement of a community center, we identified the best exit path to the outside of the building. This meant clearing a path where the best (least visible to the public) egress hadn’t been used very much. But it was worth it for everybody – we could stay in PPE while removing debris, and the guests to the center wouldn’t see the weird Yetis in “space suits” wandering around looking like they’ve stepped into a nuclear site.

Good PPE will typically include some or all of the following:

Full-face respirator (did you know your eyes let in a LOT of mold spores, sickness, and the like?), Tyvek full body suit, gloves, booties. And these may all need to be taped together!

One residential Yeti mold job had four of our team working for three days. Each person changed their mold remediation suit four times a day (after every morning break, lunch, and afternoon break) – that’s a total of twelve remediation suits per person! They wore the same respirator, but changed the cartridge filters regularly on the face plate, and washed their mask daily, inside and out.

The key is to limit transmission of mold spores from inside the affected area, to outside of that area; including to your car, your lungs, other buildings, and other parts of the same building.

Done well, the mold technician may even HEPA vac themselves and dispose their full suit before leaving the final containment.

And all under negative pressure, inside containment – which is like PPE for a mold-affected building!

Other Related & Helpful 'Mold Remediation' Articles:

HEPA, HEPA, Damp Wipe

We’re trying to remove (not kill) the mold. The HEPA vac is a negative pressure chamber and it removes loose spores from hard surfaces.

PPE For Your House

To Test, or Not to Test? Who Knows?

We want to avoid a conflict of interest when it comes to mold remediation.

It’s waaaaay too easy to find mold, and it’s pretty easy NOT to find it once we think we’re done.

All Mold is a Signpost

Mold is a sign that there’s a problem.

You know it shouldn’t be there. Maybe the black mold wasn’t there when you moved into the office, or your family bought the house. So what’s causing it?

Mold Remediation

Mold | Don’t Kill It – Remove It

Post author By Jamesb
Post date August 9, 2023

James is horribly allergic to horses. He had the chance in northern Canada to stand among a field of wild mustangs… which he did. But it took him two days to recover. It seemed worth it at the time.

Today, if James walked into a room with a horse in it, it wouldn’t matter if the horse was alive or dead – he’d still be allergic to it. Our immune response to mold is the same. It doesn’t matter if that mold has been starved of moisture or food, or if it’s alive and well – mold maintains all of its toxins and allergenic properties when it’s present in any form. So the key is removal. That’s why the book of Leviticus tells us to remove the people from the moldy space, remove the mold, take it out of the city, and then rebuild the space. This is the exact formula we still use today at Yeti Restoration.

In fact, the IICRC S520 (industry standards for mold remediation) states that “remediators should not mist or fog… in an attempt to kill mold in lieu of source removal”.

So you don’t use chemicals? Right. Chemicals are universally water-based; and mold spores are oil-based. It was explained once like pounding a bag of flour with your fist – the mold spores are tiny like the flour in the analogy, and the chemical mist, fog, or spray is like the fist. Not only is a water molecule larger than a mold spore, but it’s a repellent (water to oil), rather than a counteractant.

When the goal is removal, the strategy can’t be to cover-up with Kilz, or generally bleach the area.

In fact, bleach won’t work for what you want to achieve with mold. The efficacy of the bleach is used up too quickly on the very top surface of a substrate, killing whatever it touches on contact, and using up that chemical potency. While this is interesting and helpful on a metal laboratory table, it’s not very helpful for removing mold colonies eating each other on porous materials. That 99.9% efficiency is tested and proven on pre-cleaned metal, not moldy porous surfaces in basements.

The removal of the mold itself is the starting point – and that often requires the removal of the porous materials the mold is growing through (not just on it). But more on that later…!

Adapted from the book: Yeti’s Eat Mold for Breakfast, first published 2022

Mold Remediation

All Mold is a Signpost

Post author By Jamesb
Post date July 26, 2023

Mold-remediation-mitigation-yeti-restoration

Our amazing office manager, Vicki, kept coming to the Yeti Restoration office early in the morning because she knew (she has special senses) that there was a dog on the loose, and she wanted to help it. Yetis make great pet people.

There were some obvious (to Vicki) signs that the dog was there – and finally she saw it on the security camera,; came in at 3am, caught him, took lots of photos for Amy and the rest of the team, and got him safely to a shelter. True story 🙂

There were signs letting Vicki know there was a problem.

Mold is a sign that there’s a problem.

You know it shouldn’t be there. Maybe the black mold wasn’t there when you moved into the office, or your family bought the house. So what’s causing it?

Think of mold like a mushroom in the forest. It’s a simple organism; needing something to eat, something to drink, and somewhere safe to thrive.

Enter…moisture.

A national retailer we worked for had mold on the ceiling joists of a new store. Everywhere. Could it be that there was water coming in… everywhere? Seems unlikely.

Believe it or not, we see this quite often – high humidity is enough for some molds to drink and thrive. When you consider that our sales leader, Jim, needs more to drink than my youngest son does, who in turn needs less than his friend’s pet rabbit, you can start to imagine that some molds are so small that they can actually drink the humidity in the air.

After a drink, mold just needs something to eat (dirt/ dust is fine), and somewhere safe to thrive. Ceiling joists don’t get touched often, have very little airflow, and tend to be located just above the bright lights in a warm place. So we ended up cleaning every inch of this retailer’s ceiling with dry ice blasting technology; full mold removal, and cleaning of the remains.

If it’s not universal, like the ceiling mentioned above, mold on drywall may be pointing to a water leak or intrusion. So we’ll often remove the drywall in safe containment with negative pressure to expose the problem and get it fixed.

This means that the crack in the foundation can now be seen and fixed.

The high moisture can now be addressed.

Or the plumbing leak, or other concern can be remedied.

With the signpost (affected porous materials) removed, and the space cleaned, the mold can’t grow back like it wants to, giving you a chance to repair the source of the problem.

Note: Drywall with mold is a non-starter. Because the drywall is porous (and covered in paper), affected drywall has to be removed. If you cut through moldy drywall, you’ll see the roots may go all the way through – there’s no cleaning the surface and getting it done. Indeed, when you understand how mold grows, you’ll know it’s happier and stronger on the back of the drywall than the front. Without appropriate remediation, you’re only cleaning the front…

Adapted from the book: Yeti’s Eat Mold For Breakfast, first published 2022

Mold Remediation

Green Mold, Red Mold, and Black Mold – Who Cares?

Post author By Jamesb
Post date July 12, 2023

We’re asked almost daily what kind of mold a client has, and if they need mold removal. Many people are kind enough to tell us what kind of mold they have because they found out online. Sometimes, what a homeowner has diagnosed will turn out to be spider poo (spiders poo too!), or a tiny insect nest, or a rusty nail, or a water stain.

In truth, they don’t know.

And even Yetis can’t tell specific mold types by looking with their eyes.

Without a great deal of knowledge, training (usually a degree), and an actual microscope, you simply can’t tell what kind of mold you have growing in your grandma’s wet basement.

And in most (possibly all, but let’s play it safe) cases, it simply doesn’t matter what type of mold you have at the office. The process for mold removal is the same for any type of mold. The critical barriers, the negative pressure strategy, and the agitation/ mold removal process remain broadly unchanged.

Please hear us right – it matters if you have it. But probably it doesn’t matter what you call it. The volume of mold and occupancy type are the key metrics to determine strategy. Let us explain!

Mold Remediation in Challenging Environments

There’s mold everywhere, and on everything. It’s on you now, and it’s on your tree , car and children.

Because we can’t achieve a mold-free state, the goal of a successful mold remediation project is to achieve the same mold spore count inside as can be found outside. And that’s a moving target, in just the same way as you have more or less pollen or smog in the air on any given day.

The outside environment is known as “Condition One”. We want your indoor air quality to be as close to the outside air makeup as possible – or better. It’s good to remember that any of the “bad molds” are either a) safe in their Condition One levels, or b) non-existent in the Condition One environment, and therefore can be removed during your mold remediation project.

Like anything science-y, there’s a few times these conditions don’t translate into reality.

One quick example – when we were wrapping up a four-story mold job at a federal facility in Ohio, the outside air temperature was so low that no mold (impossible) was captured in the outside (Condition One) control sample. This meant we could only fail our clearance test, because the indoors was a heated space, and spores (while not high in normal testing conditions) were higher than the outside comparable conditions on the day.

So the volume of mold is important, and occupancy type. A nursing home we worked in had so much mold in two client’s rooms that when we touched the wallpaper, it fell off!! The mold had grown so thick behind the wallpaper that the glue was either eaten away or otherwise rendered useless, and the wallpaper was hanging on the wall by some invisible pressure miracle. Naturally, the concern level rises in a nursing home with indoor air quality concerns, or a school, versus a moldy attic or your shed. But the protocol may not change.

In this nursing home environment, we applied the same general strategy that we do in a basement or kitchen mold removal; safely remove the occupants, contain the affected area, remove the mold/ affected porous materials, and limit future growth.

There’s several consistent right steps to perform a successful mold remediation, and it’s usually a blend of science and art – or wisdom 🙂

Adapted from the book: Yeti’s Eat Mold for Breakfast, first published 2022

The Problem with Dual Services: Testing and Remediation

Our Stance at Yeti’s: Integrity Over Profit

When to Consider Testing

Other Related & Helpful 'Mold Remediation' Articles:

HEPA, HEPA, Damp Wipe

PPE For Your House

To Test, or Not to Test? Who Knows?

All Mold is a Signpost

Mold Remediation in Challenging Environments

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