In this episode, we tackle the more questions about mold and its impact on your home and health, even your vehicle. Whether you’re a homeowner, renter, or just mold-curious, this episode will give you the essential knowledge to stay informed and mold-free.
TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to The Mold Money Podcast, where I give you ideas on how to save money and get rid of it when you're doing mold remediation, how to save money and make sure the mold is gone.
So today's topic is special situations, special questions.
Can mold damage my belongings?
Anything that gets wet can grow mold on it, and you can't always see the mold growing on your stuff.
But here's the thing, before you panic about your stuff being contaminated, and I have a whole book on this called Dust Money.
Dust Money, how to clean your house.
The house is dusty.
Your stuff is dusty.
How to clean your house and pick out what has mold and what doesn't, what you should throw away and what you can clean.
Here's the important thing to remember.
If your stuff didn't get wet, mold needs water to grow.
If your clothes didn't get wet, mold can't grow on them.
So the first thing to do in answering the question, can mold damage my belongings?
Yes, mold can grow on your belongings.
Does it mean mold grows on your belongings automatically because there's mold in your house?
Absolutely no.
Most of the time, no.
Most of the time, your clothes, they're in your closet, they're in your drawers, in your dresser, clothes, for example, and other stuff that's in your kitchen cabinets.
It didn't get wet.
It can't grow mold.
In some extreme cases where you tear out the drywall in your house and do remediation without any kind of containment and the dust is going everywhere, and you can see the drywall dust when you tear out the walls getting into your bedroom and you're living them, well, some old spores went through that.
What we have is called cross-contamination.
There's mold in that dust, and now that dust is everywhere on your stuff.
But before you panic, it's not like we need to treat it.
You can't treat it.
You need to clean it.
It's just dust.
So there's a whole book on that dust money, but the answer is mold can grow on your stuff.
What should I do if I find mold in my HVAC system?
So this is assuming you can see it, which actually challenged that question.
What should I do if I find mold in my HVAC?
This is based on me.
Personally, I've inspected and tested so many different air conditioning systems, from the kind that are just wall-mounted or in the window, to for big commercial buildings, where you literally walk inside the air conditioning system.
The filter is so big, it's like a door.
Pretty much all the time, oh, that looks like mold, it's dust.
Or that looks like mold, it is mold.
First, when you say I find mold, I don't care what kind of pictures or what you read on the Internet, you need to test it.
And you can test it.
I have a course on that, on how to do surface sampling.
Don't use a swab.
You're going to do a tape lift sample.
The reason I have a whole course on something so simple is, then it's, what do you ask the lab to do with it?
Count the spores?
No.
How do you interpret the results?
It's incredible how many different ways that something so common sense can be goofed up.
So you should test it.
If you find mold, it's the same as to clean an HVAC, I'm sorry, to remediate an HVAC, to remove the mold, is anything else.
Remove the porous materials.
If it's a hard surface, it can be wiped down.
Don't get caught up in sanitation.
You can't remove mold by killing it.
Killing is not removing.
You need to remove it, not kill it or treat it or encapsulate it, unless you're really desperate, you can encapsulate it.
But that's really hard to do, and treatments do nothing to remove it or neutralize the allergens.
And it doesn't matter what kind of sanitizer it is.
You're fooling yourself that way and it's not going to help.
If you really have a lot of mold, my advice sometimes is just replace the whole thing.
Don't do that until you talk to me, have a consultation so we can make sure there is mold.
And more importantly, don't do that before you clean up the mold in your house.
You can put a brand new system in and it's going to get contaminated.
So there's some step by step.
And what I do in a consultation is break everything down.
We create a plan so we don't waste money and do things that are unnecessary or do things out of order.
Next question, how does mold affect property value or home sales?
Well, the common answer you'll get on the internet is mold can lower the property value and make it harder to sell.
That's not true.
Some people don't care.
I know some contractors that buy mold properties and they flip them.
I've been in bank owned properties that's not disclosed tons of mold and they sell to somebody else without telling them after my client doesn't buy it.
Does it affect the property values?
Okay, so if you're honest, let's talk about if you're honest.
If you're honest, my advice is disclose, disclose, disclose, and don't answer questions about the mold report.
Give them the report and go, this is the professional report.
If you have a question, ask the professional, call them and ask them.
I'm not the professional.
I'm just going to give you the report.
The reason for that is you can make mistakes, assumptions, you're not the expert, good or bad.
You don't want to say something that's not true just to get your home, you know, to sell your home.
Ironically, you're going to run into two groups of people selling your house under that way.
One, who doesn't care.
We're not worried you got it remediated, show me the report.
The other is actually a group of really smart people who know why I wrote my book.
If you say it's been remediated, I guarantee 95% of the time, it has not.
I will bet you if you give me 100 houses that say it's remediated and they're up for sale, I'll find mold, and actually probably half of them, because most remediators do not remove the mold effectively.
They spray, they treat it, they do not work as hard as it should be.
The mold inspector coming in afterwards is not as confident as he could be.
He just does air samples.
He doesn't look well enough.
He doesn't really do an inspection well enough.
He has some relationship with the remediator, and he doesn't want to come down too hard on them, whatever the excuse is.
So these are smart people.
They don't want it, because they know there's still mold there.
They may try to negotiate and take some money off, and fair enough, because they know they're going to have to fix something.
They could run into it.
My advice with that in terms of selling stuff is a fair thing to do.
Get an estimate for worst case remediation.
Put it in escrow, and it stays there until the remediation is done.
And that money should be double what the estimate is, and double what the estimate for testing is, in case they have to do two rounds of testing to get rid of it all.
And then the seller can get the money back.
That never happens, of course, because the realtors want to close the deal, and the seller never wants to leave that money in escrow.
But that's the fair thing to do, rather than guess on, oh, it might cost this much to remediate, or I have this much, I have estimates to remediate for this much, take that much off the house.
What legal steps can I take if my landlord or contractor doesn't address a mold problem?
Let's cover the landlord first.
I have a whole book on that, that I wrote with intention, not just for people renting, but also for the landlord.
A fair straight up book to answer these kinds of questions if you're a landlord or tenant.
In a rental situation where you think you have mold, you think you smell mold, how to investigate it, and what to do step by step.
And I've been on both sides.
My clients have been landlords and as well as renters, and I tell it straight up.
So that book's Rent Money, a part of my Mold Money series.
So what legal steps can I take?
Let's assume you think there's mold and you're trying to take legal steps against your landlord.
Legal is different from just talking to them.
I suggest in my book, let's first talk because there's a lot of misinformation your landlord might not understand.
He's going to panic and maybe it's not mold.
I've been on the tenant side, the tenant side quite a few times where they were panicking, wanted to sue the landlord, and I come over and I told them, you don't have mold.
So you got to find a good tester first.
If it's common sense, you have mold.
My suggestion to most landlords and tenant, you're the tenant, leave.
You're the landlord, let them leave.
We've been talking about this on this podcast for a while, all the things to know about and do right or wrong.
Is it really just possible for a tenant to stay there?
Now I had a some of the tenant who in California, Beach Town, you know, and houses are older, they're in a chamber, there's mold.
They found a lot of mold.
I really had to tell them, you know, guys, you really should get rid of it.
Okay, my landlord is going to come in here and gut it and wants us out for a week or two.
I'm like, well, you got to cover your stuff, box your stuff.
They're going to come in and just demo, and they're going to get rid of probably 80% of the mold, not all of it, and they're going to make a huge mess.
It's not ideal for you guys, your health.
However, they were getting a really good deal on that rental.
They couldn't find any place else.
So there are these things to consider.
If you're working with the landlord and don't just try to say legal action, the question was legal steps, then you're going to get hostile.
That's not the best way to go.
There's other podcasts you can probably listen to, bad stories about trying to go take legal action.
There's good and bad.
I've seen good ones and bad ones.
But moreover, if you really want to stay there, the reason I wrote the book Rent Money was so you can work with your landlord in a fair way to really get rid of the mold and protect yourself.
Part two of this question, legal steps my contractor doesn't address mold problem.
I do expert witness testimony.
Contact me through healthylivingspaces.com.
Can mold grow in cars or other vehicles?
The answer you'll get on the internet is yes, mold can grow in vehicles, especially if they've been exposed to leaks or high humidity.
This is misinformation.
Maybe it's true in one out of a thousand cases.
I would almost say it's false.
Anything's possible.
I just haven't seen it.
Stalky Botrys would call it the black mold, even though I told you don't do that, but you know what I mean.
It does not grow on very many materials except grass, straw, and the drywall in your home on the wallboard.
What's in your car that can grow Stalky Botrys?
What's in your car that can grow Altenari or Aspergillus?
More things, maybe your carpet.
It can't grow on metal, glass, steel, rubber.
It can't grow on those things really for the most part.
Really, this is not a mold question.
If you think you have mold in your car, it got wet.
It's a bacteria.
You know, bacteria comes first with water damage.
That stuff stinks.
That stuff's not great for you either.
Then quote mold.
To answer this question, anything's possible, but you should not panic thinking you have mold in your car.
That doesn't mean you don't need to be concerned about having a vehicle that has water damage or you smell something because there are other things besides mold that can be responsible for that, and you shouldn't ignore it.
You need a consultation maybe or send me a question through the website, healthylivingspaces.com.