Category: Mold Remediation

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.