Can electromagnetic fields affect how fast mold grows and which types grow? In this episode, I take you behind the scenes of an experiment I designed to find out.
You'll learn:
- How I designed my experiment
- What I’m measuring, for how long, under what conditions
- The different types of EMFs I studied — WiFi, electric, magnetic fields
This is Part 1 of a two-part series. In the next episode, I’ll share what I found, and what it might mean for people trying to live in healthier homes. It was inspired by a blog post forwarded to me, "Why Your Cell Phone May Help Black Mold Grow." The studies referenced in that blog do not support that statment, to the contrary they are unscientific. My moto is question everything and see for yourself. I therfore designed and performed an experiment to see if EMFs can affect mold. Hear for yourself what I discovered.
The Mold Money Podcast
TRANSCRIPT
I'm going to give you a brief overview of an experiment I did to study do electromagnetic fields actually affect the rate at which mold grows?
And if it does, does it affect certain molds? Black mold, aspergillus, penicillin, you used to pick your mold, is there a difference?
So what I did was I did what I would do if I was testing the air in your house for mold, but not with spore traps, because those are just trapped particles, and you can't tell if they're dead or alive and watch them grow because they're not growing.
I got my MEA, that's Malt Extract Degar Plates from the laboratory, to do viable cultured air samples, five-minute air samples, and then we put the lid on, and normally we would send them to lab to be incubated for a week.
In this case, what I did was I went outside, I took 10 outside air samples, and then to minimize, this is what we do in experimental design.
Well, what if the first one's slightly different than the last one you take, you randomize them, meaning out of those 10, I've got five groups, I'm gonna have five groups of different conditions with either electric or magnetic or RF fields
I put two next to an electrical cord, high electric fields. I taped two to the fuse box, to the cover of the fuse box panel in my house.
I put two on top of the Wi-Fi rabbit ears, and then I put two on a shielding cloth, a grounding cloth, that's grounded, so there is no electric field. And then I discovered my own neighborhood has an issue with underground power lines.
So it doesn't matter where you go near this condominium complex within a block, because the underground power lines are unbalanced. There's actually a slight magnetic field in the whole neighborhood.
I drove half an hour outside of town to get to a place where there's no power lines. And I measured the magnetic field also with the meter. So zero magnetic field, probably no electric field, no Wi-Fi and limited cell coverage.
Left those outside there for a week in nature to compare what grows how fast. For the magnetic fields, I use the digital WF Bellometer. It's the best in the world.
For electric fields, I use the body voltage method. There's a video on my website on how to do that. The Wi-Fi signal when characterized, it's your typical modern-day Wi-Fi, both low and high band, high-speed, low-speed Internet.
It's relatively new.
And I didn't get to characterize that because if you read my book, Unplugged, How to Find and Get Rid of EMFs in Your House, you'll see case studies of, well, you really got to rent a $30,000 meter if you can do that intelligently.
As you will see, it's staggering how many fields we have everywhere and what does it mean. How would I get away from it, really? Meaning, I want to have electric fields in my house.
If I unplug the Wi-Fi, I'm on a six-unit condominium. I'm not really getting rid of it. So this is not the perfect, perfect experiment.
This has taken me about two or three days of my time, mind you. It wasn't easy to collect the samples and measure the fields in every location, and etc., etc., and drive outside of town, leave the plates.
Documented it on a video on my website so you can see exactly what I do. Pictures are great. Tape what you did, because a lot of experiments, you have to read between the lines and make assumptions.
And as you will see in my video, through the course of the experiment, like, oh, you know what, I should go back and actually do that. I shouldn't assume that. For example, when I taped the plates to the fuse box, I measured the magnetic field.
It's going to be high. I measured it, and I just assumed, well, the electric field is going to be off the chart, because, I mean, it's right by all its wires too.
I mean, if a simple cable in the living room can put a couple of volts on your body, a simple extension cord, and then I'm like, no, Daniel, just to be thorough, gotta do everything, and then I did.
And then it seemed to be rather low, lower than normal. What is going on? Is my equipment good?
I always check my equipment before I measure anything, and it was. It didn't make sense, and I thought about it. Y'all got this, probably.
Especially you electricians, you're probably going, seriously, Daniel? Okay, but I've got a lot going on in my head, because I'm calibrating meters, and I've got this experimental design in my head. So it took me a moment.
The metal panel for the fuse box is grounded. So it is literally like a Faraday cage for the electric field.
And what I was actually reading, because it didn't go down to zero, was from an electrical wire in the wall to a light switch just two feet away.
The other thing that's not ideal, and the reason I mentioned all this is because if you're going to go out there and you're going to read studies that say, oh, the mold, black mold grew when exposed to fields.
These are the kind of details you can ask, and you're probably not going to find them unless it's a real good study that documents everything. And almost why you should do it yourself? Why not do this yourself?
I say question everything for yourself. So for example, I also at first made the assumption oversight. I just assumed we're really just trying to study the Wi-Fi, put the mold plates on top of the rabbit ears, on top of the Wi-Fi unit.
That's all we need to know, right? It's being zapped. And then I hadn't considered, well, there's going to be some magnetic field from the transformer for the unit, the power supply in it.
I can't get the plate that far away from the unit without making the assumption this is the worst case. I'm putting my head next to the rabbit ears.
And the same thing with the electrical field, because there's cord plugged in to power the Wi-Fi, so I can't really get rid of the electric field either, even if I had to shield the cord.
So it's things like these that I documented on my website and the video. You'll just hear me talking about it out loud as I observe these things. So what does it all mean?
Stay tuned. I was, by the way, surprised that some molds actually started spotting up on the second day, which is only 48 hours. That's kind of fast.
Because there's this idea, like, how long does it take the mold to grow? Depending on what text you read, it might say 24 hours, 72 hours, 48 hours. The truth is, right away, if you dry it out right away, too, it stops growing right away, too.
It won't even be visible, and it'll be like microscopic and not significant. And then it depends on the type of mold.
See, the tricky thing here is, we really want the black mold, we want the aspergillus, and that stuff's going to take three or four days, because our stocky botchers could take a week to grow.
If our plate starts overgrowing with mold because it likes these EMFs, ironically, the black mold's not even get a chance to start growing, because by that time, the plate or your body, if you believe in this stuff, will already be affected by the
other molds, and it won't have a chance. You'll see in video the pictures of, it's only so big a plate, and the stuff that starts growing first is the stuff outside that like dandelions in the wind, that really fluffy stuff likes to grow fast.
Something we have to work with unless we were in a controlled experiment in a lab with a lot of money to where we could buy a liter of air that's spiked with so many aspergillus penicillin per liter of air, measured and quantified and pure.
We're gonna spend that kind of money, at least not as an initial experiment, do this. Let's do a matrix, to see what variables are the most significant, and then repeat it, and then squeeze it down and only study the variables we find significant.
In this case, actually, so far seems to be the electric fields. Who would have thought?
But that might just be an initial observation, kind of like a horse race, like you see a filly coming up, making a move, but we're only halfway through the race still.
Next time, I'll give you my findings, and who knows, maybe there'll be no difference at all. But I'm sure I will have something interesting to say.