In this episode, Reuben and Tessa discuss the importance of mold testing and the transition to offering mold inspections. They introduce the guests from All Dry Services, a company that specializes in mold remediation. The conversation highlights the need for mold inspections as a precautionary measure and to address health concerns. The guests explain the services they provide, including water restoration and sewage cleanups. The chapter also covers the evolution of mold inspections and the certifications required for mold testing. In this conversation, Eric Houseman, Tessa Murry, Reuben Saltzman, Sean Grenfell, and Jason Schlafer discuss various aspects of mold testing and remediation. They cover certifications required for mold testing and remediation, the process of mold remediation, cleaning mold on different surfaces, determining when DIY mold remediation is appropriate, cleaning mold in attics, and the need for mold testing standards. They also highlight the importance of proper mold remediation to ensure a healthy living environment.
Takeaways
Mold inspections are important as a precautionary measure and to address health concerns.
Offering mold inspections can reduce complaints and provide clients with peace of mind.
AllDry offers a range of services including mold remediation, water restoration, and sewage cleanups.
The evolution of mold inspections has led to a more comprehensive approach that focuses on identifying the root cause of moisture intrusion.
Certifications such as CMSI (Certified Mold Inspection) are available for professionals in the mold testing industry. Certifications such as CMSI (Certified Structural Mold Investigator) and IICRC (Institute of Inspection, Cleaning, and Restoration Certifications) are important for professionals in the mold testing and remediation industry.
Mold remediation involves containment, neutralization, and removal of mold, as well as cleaning and scrubbing the air to ensure a healthy living environment.
Different surfaces require different cleaning methods for mold removal, and it is important to assess the extent of mold damage before deciding on the appropriate approach.
Determining whether DIY mold remediation is suitable depends on the severity of the mold problem and the homeowner’s capabilities.
Cleaning mold in attics involves investigating the cause of moisture, treating the affected areas with antimicrobial solutions, and encapsulating surfaces to prevent further mold growth.
The absence of mold testing standards in the United States creates confusion and anxiety, and there is a need for standardized guidelines specific to the country.
All Dry Twin Cities is a professional mold remediation company with a small but dedicated team that provides high-quality services to ensure a safe and healthy living environment.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Guest Introductions
03:14 The Importance of Mold Testing
08:09 Transition to Offering Mold Testing
13:01 Frequency of Mold Inspections
14:25 Introduction to AllDry
16:14 The Evolution of Mold Inspections
19:47 Certifications for Mold Testing
21:04 Certifications for Mold Remediation
22:18 Process of Mold Remediation
26:10 Cleaning Mold on Different Surfaces
28:12 Cleaning Mold on Concrete Block Walls
29:24 Determining DIY vs Professional Mold Remediation
31:08 Cleaning Mold in Attics
33:50 Mold Testing Standards
36:24 Size of All Dry Twin Cities Team
TRANSCRIPTION
The following is a transcription from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be slightly incomplete or contain minor inaccuracies due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Reuben Saltzman: Welcome to my house. Welcome to the Structure Talk podcast, a production of Structure Tech Home inspections. My name is Reuben Saltzman. I’m your host alongside building science geek Tessa Murry. We help home inspectors up their game through education, and we help homeowners to be better stewards of their houses. We’ve been keeping it real on this podcast since 2019, and we are also the number one home inspection podcast in the world, according to my mom. Welcome back to the Structure Talk podcast. Tessa, great to see you on here. How are you doing today?
Tessa Murry: Hey, Ruben. Good to see you, too. Happy to be here. We’ve got quite a lineup today. Wonderful Guests.
RS: Oh man. Do we have a lineup?
TM: I’m excited for today’s episode.
RS: Yeah, we’re just talking on the show. We’ve got more people on this show than we have ever had. We’ve got five people talking. We’ve got five live mics right now. Let’s bring them on, Tess?
TM: First of all, I see the wonderful Eric Hausman. Eric, it’s great to have you back on. For anybody that doesn’t know Eric Hausman he runs the show at Structure Tech and does a lot of everything; inspecting, managing. We had you on for the podcast, Eric. What was it like a year ago to talk about kind of how you organized your truck tools, which was a big hit with listeners.
Eric Hausman: It was. I was a little disappointed that I didn’t make the Top Five of 2023 list. [laughter] But here’s another shot. And I would just say this is my fourth time back, so thanks for having me again. I think that makes me the most frequent podcast guest.
RS: Ooh, wow. Well, Eric, with a name like Hausman, how could you not be? I mean, you were born to do this. [laughter]
EH: This is true.
RS: Come on.
EH: True.
TM: It’s great to have you back. And actually, Eric, I probably did not introduce you accurately anymore. What are you actually doing at Structure Tech these days? What’s your role?
EH: So my tech technical title is Service Manager. However, I also do inspections, primarily on request basis, at this point. But I do jump back into the field when we get really busy, which this year has been a really good year for us so far. I’ve needed to jump back in to cover some inspections ’cause we obviously don’t want clients going elsewhere. And then I also general manage the white label ancillary service company inspection services. And we are currently in year three of that endeavor.
RS: Yes.
TM: And you’ve dabbled in a little bit of everything, right? Eric, you’ve done the home inspections, you’ve done the mold testing, you’ve done the sewer inspections. You kind of understand all of it. Correct?
EH: Yep. Rounded out. I’m a licensed radon measurement technician.
TM: There we go.
EH: I also have a Part 107 drone license. I do sub-slab ductwork inspections. Yeah.
RS: Yeah.
TM: Pretty impressive resume there, yeah. Very cool. Okay, so you came to Reuben. You had an idea of a guest to have on today. So would you like to introduce your guests?
EH: Sure, I would be happy to. Today we have with us Sean and Jason from All Dry, who is a company that we partner with and recommend for mold remediation.
RS: Yes. Yeah. And we haven’t talked about mold for a long time on the podcast. We were going through the past episodes. Eric, you tell me the last time we brought this up was in 2019. Oh my goodness.
EH: Yes.
RS: Yeah, we had…
EH: The last time that we discussed it at length. I’m sure the dirty M word has come up in passing in Podcast Past. But I could not believe it was 2019, it was the last time that we had an episode that was focused on it.
RS: Yeah, yeah. We had Vickie Swenson on, she’s awesome, wealth of Knowledge. And at the time, we weren’t really doing much with mold, but a lot has changed. We’ve gotten into it a lot more. Seriously. What has changed, Eric?
EH: Well, the big change was getting someone on the team who was CMSI certified, in order to really be able to talk in an educated manner about mold. And not to get too technical, but you only need to have one CMSI certified technician on your team. And then you can have other people that are trained to take samples and do reporting on it as long as you have that one person. But we’ve really built it out since then with really the inception of inspection services. It’s grown quite a bit and now we’re doing hundreds of mold tests a year at this point.
RS: Yep, yep. It’s changed quite a bit. So we’ve got Sean and Jason with All Dry on today. I’ll let you guys take it away. I’d like you guys to just introduce yourselves, talk about who All Dry is and what you guys do. What’s your full scope of services and what does your day-to-day activity typically look like?
Sean: Well, I’ll start. My name’s Sean. And honestly, I think Jason, as a boss, has been probably one of the best bosses I could work for and work with. Him and his team pretty much invested in the franchise of All Dry. All Dry is based out of Florida and there was no such thing as All Dry up here in the Twin Cities. And him and his team went ahead and invested in this company and it’s been quite the opportunity to grow a business in something that we can really help people within their homes. That Dirty M word has really, I would say in the past couple of years, exploded and people being aware about it, right? And people understanding that, “Hey, every house has mold in it.” But how bad is it? Where is it? Where can we find it? And we do other things besides just mold remediation. We do water restoration, mold, sewage cleanups. We help with demo work too, because when you do a lot of demo, you definitely expose a lot of things. There’s mold behind a lot of walls that you don’t know are in there. And so we’ve kind of just started really growing our business in a really healthy way. And I think Jason can second on that. So I’ll let Jason at least introduce himself, too.
Jason: Yeah, thanks Sean. And thanks everybody for having me on. So also I’ll pay you later for saying I’m a great boss, so thank you for that. [laughter]
Sean: You’re welcome. [laughter]
Jason: The idea was how do we offer a service in a fair way? How do we take the side of the client, form a non-biased opinion and really just get to the root of what the issue is and help them put themselves and their health in a better place. And so to back up, I’m one of the managing partners. My name’s Jason Schlafer and I’m the GM and the sales manager for Bruggeman Exteriors up here in White Bear Lake. And I’m fortunate enough to have an opportunity as a partner in the water-mold space and been able to watch Sean and his team grow and absolutely, I think, flip the standards of that space sort of on their head, right? And do it the right way and with the right intent. And so it’s been great to watch him in his journey and I’m just here to support, so.
RS: Excellent. And Eric, before we get into this a little bit, I wanna talk about the transition that we made to seriously getting into mold testing and offering it to a lot of our clients. I’m wondering, just talk us through why we’re doing this now.
EH: In my opinion, it was for two reasons. One, and you and I have discussed this on other topics, ancillary services that we do is, the main reason is because we used to get a lot of complaints, sorry, service inquiries about mold and bringing someone onto the team or bringing a team together in order to offer this service really puts clients at ease. It answers a lot of their questions. And as we found out in the past with other services, when we offer these services, the number of complaints seems to dwindle, doesn’t disappear, but it dwindles. So it’s been a huge asset for ourselves and obviously for our clients. And then, the second reason would be we get a ton of questions about mold on home inspections. And I remember when I started with Structure Tech back in 2019, and even when Tessa was training me, ’cause Tessa was one of the inspectors on the team, at the time, who trained me, I was told, “You don’t mention mold at a home inspection. You call it anything but mold, organic growth, whatever you want to call it, dark staining.” And I think for me, it’s more of a, “let’s talk about this for what it actually is.” And now that we have a better understanding of it and we’re better educated on it, we can talk more about it and have open and honest conversations about it. And I think it’s something that needs to not be taboo in the home inspection industry anymore.
TM: Yeah. [laughter]
RS: Yeah, well put, well put. And I mean, I just… I wanna repeat that part about what you said about complaints going away. I mean, we used to get a lot of complaints about sewers, about the main drain line going from the house to the street, and how maybe three months after the inspection it would clog and they’d be like, “Well, we didn’t find this clog.” Well, we can’t see it. We’re not inspecting it. But as soon as we started saying, “Hey, do you want your sewer line inspected? If you do, it’s not part of the home inspection, but we can inspect it for you.” As soon as we started offering it, it’s like the complaints… You say they dwindled, Eric? In my mind, and don’t correct me, Eric, [laughter] in my mind, they completely went away overnight and we didn’t get a single one after we started offering sewer inspections.
RS: And I feel the same way about mold. Eric, you’re right. It’s not like it made it zero, but way less stuff after the fact. If we offer a mold inspection, if you offer the specialized inspection. And it kind of makes it clear that we are not testing for mold during a home inspection. We’re looking for signs of moisture, we’re looking for all the evidence of that, but we’re not doing any type of testing. And if it’s hidden inside the wall, we’re not gonna find it during a home inspection. Tessa, what do you think?
TM: Well, Yeah, I was just gonna add I feel like mold, yes, it is this taboo thing and, I mean, it scares a lot of people in this industry. Not only home buyers, homeowners, sellers, agents, but even financial institutions, where you’re borrowing money from. There’s all sorts of ramifications that can happen if an inspection report says the word mold in it. So one thing I appreciate over the years Reuben at Structure Tech, what you’re doing is trying to not scare people into getting a mold inspection just because you’re kind of leveraging that fear in people, but you’re providing a service because there is such a need for it. And there are so many people that are really worried about it.
TM: And like you said, there’s no way to really verify it unless you do test for it. And there are some situations where people really do want to test… Need to test for it. So I think, just so our listeners know, as a home inspection company, we are always looking for signs of it and going back to inspecting the house and if you have a mold problem, it’s really a moisture problem. So where is it coming from? What’s causing it? And get to the root cause of trying to fix that issue, but also adding on this other additional service that can give people answers and connecting them with people like you guys here today to try and fix the problem, so.
EH: And to be clear, this is not a service that Structure Tech pushes, either. We have a very clear idea of like radon, sewer, chimney. If it’s necessary, you should have those things done. But this is just something that we’re offering in the background to say, “Hey, we do this and if you want it done, we can do it for you.” And I would say that of the mold inspections that I’ve done, over 90%… People are just doing it as a precautionary reason. It’s not because they saw something or there was something that was disclosed, they just wanna know for their peace of mind.
RS: Yep. Yep, exactly.
TM: What Percentage…
RS: That’s an an important distinction.
TM: Yeah, it is. What percentage of inspections would you say these days are opt to have a mold inspection done, too?
EH: It’s about 10%.
TM: Is it? Okay.
RS: Yep.
EH: Yeah.
RS: Yep. Eric is correct. We look at those numbers every week. Yeah.
TM: Well, Okay. Interesting.
RS: All right, So moving on to All Dry a little bit. The way I kinda put this together is that Jason, you started the franchise up here in the Twin Cities, the company’s based out of Florida and then you brought Sean on and it sounds like Sean, you’re kind of running the operation. Does that sound about fair?
Sean: I think…
Jason: That’s 100% correct.
Sean: Pretty fair. Yep.
RS: All right, so.
Sean: Yeah. You go ahead. He sits back, and when I have questions about things, he leads me in the right direction. But one of the best things about us on All Dry is when you call and you have a question or you’re looking for help, it’s immediately, to me, it’s not a call center. It’s not an automated, “I’m calling you.” I always try to say it’s 99% a mental game before it is any physical game, right? People are worried about mold in their house. And I actually did want to bounce off a little bit, with Eric, is people do it as a precautionary thing, especially with home services and they’re trying to sell the house or buy a house, right?
Sean: A couple of other ways that I’ve actually pushed people towards Structure Tech to get a mold test is because I’ve gotten a couple of calls that somebody in the family has an allergy or an autoimmune disorder, that it’s really affecting them and they have no idea where it is, and the way that Structure Tech does their, I would say, their CSI investigating with their mold tests and how they do things, just gives us a roadmap on where to follow, where to walk. I mean, X can mark the spot on a lot of things, but we need to know where it’s coming from and where it’s at. And a lot of times, we can get it to the rooms that it’s in and we can help take care of it. Any mold, you can contain it, you can neutralize it, you can get rid of it, and then we can clean it and you’re okay.
RS: And Sean, I think you bring up a really good point about the investigation, because that’s an important distinction. Back in the day when we offered mold testing, we didn’t really advertise it at all, and it was just kind of something we sort of did where we’d collect samples and send them to a lab and then we’d be like “All right, I don’t know what you do with this? I mean, here’s what the lab said.” But we have completely changed it to where the actual testing is just a small part of what we’re offering for a mold inspection. Eric, can you talk a little bit more about what we actually do for a mold inspection versus someone who comes out and just does mold testing? I’m doing Eric quotes here.
EH: Yeah. Yeah. The best way to put it, is it’s a miniature version of a home inspection that is done under the umbrella of moisture intrusion. So just to run through… And myself and Greg and Eric Larson, we really all kind of follow the same pattern when we’re out at the house. It’s a matter of taking the outdoor sample when it’s nice enough outside, we’ll go around the outside of the house. And I’m sure you’ve used this term on the podcast before, Reuben, is the fail first locations at the outside. Where do we not have gutters? Where do we have improper grading? Where are the areas where moisture is going to get into the home more than any others? And then once that exterior sample is done taken, we move to the interior and we start trying to put the puzzle together to find out if we have moisture intrusion at those fail first locations from the exterior of the home. We’re looking at the furnace, we’re looking at the air exchanger. If there’s an air exchanger. The indoor samples are taken with the HVAC system running so that we’re getting air samples from the HVAC system to determine if there is an isolated issue in one room of the house, or if this is something that’s potentially throughout the home because it’s infiltrated the HVAC.
RS: That’s good. That’s good. Thank you.
TM: Is that a standard process?
RS: I just wanted to clarify that…
TM: Is that a standard process, Eric? Or are there certifications for people that do this type of testing or inspecting?
EH: I’ll be 100% honest. I am not the person that holds the CSMI certification on the team. It’s Eric Larson that does, mostly, because I haven’t found time to do it and it’s a very extensive course. It’s like 40 to 50 hours.
TM: Hey Eric, just so kind of taking a step back and looking at the big picture what is this CSMI certification and is this something that you need in order to do mold testing? It feels like mold is kind of this wild, wild west. So I’m not sure if this is something that everybody does or if this is just local here in Minnesota or how that works.
EH: I will say it gives you a lot of street cred. Let’s put it that way. So we were told by Vickie that if you are going to be doing mold testing, you need to have someone on the team that is CSMI certified. And that stands for, here comes the technical stuff, Certified Structural Mold Investigator.
TM: Okay.
EH: And that is a certification that is given by the ACAC, the American Council for Accredited Certification.
TM: Okay. And that sounds like it’s a national organization, and that’s what most people that are doing mold testing have. Okay.
EH: Correct.
TM: That’s helpful.
RS: Okay, so if we’re getting into accreditation, what about all Dry? Sean, what type of certifications or accreditations do you guys need to have to clean up the mess that we might find?
Sean: The biggest one that we have is the IICRC certification. I think last time… I listen to all the podcasts so I made sure I listened to Vickie’s before I came on, but she did a great way of explaining of having the IICRC. That’s what we follow when we follow it to a T. A lot of it is, like I said on earlier, you’re neutralizing, you’re taking care of it and containing it, so going forward with that. So that’s our biggest certification that we have for that. And we are IICRC certified in water, too, because mold needs two things, moisture and humidity, right? So if we work on mold, it’s come from some kind of water somewhere, right? And so that’s kind of what we’re trying to follow. The water tells us the story. The mold tells us the story, right? So we just follow it the way we have to follow it.
TM: Is that another national accreditation?
Sean: That would be the national accreditation. It’s the Institute of Inspection Cleaning and Restoration Certifications.
TM: Okay.
RS: Okay so Sean, earlier on you talked about your process when somebody calls you and you said it’s really asking a lot of questions. Can you dive into that a little bit more? If someone calls you up and says, “Hey, I had a mold investigation and we got this report and there’s some concerning areas here, we need you guys to come out and clean it up.” For instance, when… No, I won’t give you “for instance”. What’s your process? [laughter]
Sean: If we get a call and I do want to at least drop Structure Tech in and how awesome it has been to work with you guys because we’ve gotten calls from people that are just, “Hey, I got a mold test from Structure Tech. I don’t even know what it means. And it says I have mold in the house.” My first inclination is, “Hey, here’s my email, please send over the mold report so I can look at it and I can read it.” You guys, extensively, walk me through it. All I have to do is really read it, see what the areas of concern are and then look at the spore counts and the graphs that you guys add to it and what rooms they’re in. And that gives me a better idea of what’s happening where? Next part of that process is I have to get out there and see it with my own two eyes because it’s also not fair for me to say something over the phone when I don’t truly know everything, right? I can’t just… Well, how much does that cost? Well, to be very honest with you, I have no idea. I need to see it and I need to help you understand, too, because I don’t fully understand. So a lot of the times when I get out there we’ll take pictures, we’ll look around, we’ll see where the intrusions are. Sometimes, you guys will pull back the corner of the carpet and show us on a tax strip that, “Hey, this might be where some water intrusion came in. Okay, well great.”
Sean: We’re going to pull back this carpet a little bit more. If we see some we’re gonna put it back and we’re gonna come up with a game plan because we have to contain off what we need to. We use antimicrobial to help kill off all of the microbial that’s either in the air or on walls or floors or whatever it is. And then we need to scrub the air. So what we do is we just build an estimate get a game plan together and let the customer know kind of what’s going to happen. And a lot of the times, the tough part is getting in to see it, right? So if it’s a buyer-seller type situation, the seller themselves have to allow us to come in, right, to see what’s going on because then they kind of get blindsided a little bit with the mold. But that’s where we come in and we just have to tell you “Hey, it’s okay if it’s in there, we’ll help you get rid of it.” It’s not something that’s going to never get out of the house and it’s not a deal killer. We’ll just help you get rid of it and move forward and we’ll get in there, do our thing. And we are the remediation part of it, we’re the takeout people, we’re the clean out and then we work with a contractor to help build everything back so we’re not quite the all round, “Hey, we’re going to take it out and put it back.” ‘Cause we’re not trying to build it to where we’re satisfying one need for the other. It’s, “Hey, we need to really just take out the problem.” And that’s what we’re there for. That’s what we’re certified for.
RS: All right, so you talk about you’re going to get in there and clean it up. Let’s just throw out a potential scenario. Totally hypothetical.
TM: Does it involve a little water heater that’s leaking? [laughter]
RS: No. Good question, Tessa. This one might be got a family member who’s got one of those whole house humidifiers, those gigantic things and they sit down in the basement and then they happen to move it for the first time in many years and there’s this big patch of mold on the wall behind it. What are you going to do? What does your process for something like that look like?
Sean: Two things. One, what kind of wall is behind it? Is it cement wall or is it Drywall? If mold has gotten into something that’s porous like a Drywall or a wood, it’ll have to be taken out. If it’s a frame like a frame of a wall, it doesn’t necessarily mean that has to come out. If it’s rotted, that’s a different story. If it’s just on the wood then we can treat it, stand it out, get it down and encapsulate it. So, I mean, you say hypothetical. I think I know where you’re going with that. [laughter] But a lot of the times, it might be easier to take out and replace it than it is to try and clean it off. I think one of the problems that a lot of people have is we like to go down the Google DIY and that is a pretty gnarly rabbit hole. A lot of people say the bleach or bleach it off and all that. That doesn’t always work. It doesn’t penetrate the Drywall. It doesn’t penetrate the surface if it’s all the way down in the surface. So you might be better off replacing what’s been moldy.
RS: All right, now you brought something else up. What about if it’s a concrete block wall? Could you just take water and bleach and scrub the heck out of it yourself?
Sean: You could. We have a different process where we use an antimicrobial because that kills off the microbial better than a bleach does. Within bleach, it actually does have a little bit of water in it so you’re kind of adding a little bit more of the problem back into it. With a concrete wall, we’re going to treat it, we’re going to spray it down to their antimicrobial, we’re going to scrub it all off if it needs to be encapsulated we encapsulate that cement wall as well.
RS: Okay. All right.
TM: And do you do anything to manage the mold spores in the air while you’re doing that?
EH: 100%. We will contain off the area that we pull out. So it doesn’t matter where that area is we will put up a containment barrier and put an air scrubber within that containment barrier to give the negative error and give out the pure error, right? It doesn’t matter what you take out if it’s microbial and all that it’s going to kick up. It’s going to get in there but we’re here to contain that and neutralize it.
TM: And I know your business is remediation. Obviously, you’re called in to remove the mold that’s present. But are there ever any situations where a homeowner calls you in or a seller and you actually think it’s something that they can do themselves or it’s so minor you wouldn’t take the job? And what are some examples of that?
Sean: That is where we like to be as honest as we can. I would rather go into somebody’s house and say there’s no work here for us. And it might be something that you can do rather than, “Hey, we have to take out a bunch of your basement. We have to take out a bunch of your Drywall.” I don’t want to do that. But if it’s going to help somebody, absolutely. But if I look at them and say, “Hey, I will be 100% honest, you are more than capable of doing this. Here’s how we would do it.” And it’s small enough to where they could do it. Absolutely. It is a risk for them to not have a professional do it. And that’s where I will lead them in the direction and be like, “You’re taking that risk but I want to make sure that if you do take that risk that you do it the proper way.”
RS: Okay. All right, that’s good. And then I got one more potential scenario I got to ask you about that we run into all the time. We go inside the attic and it’s a black mess up there. You’ve had condensation like crazy over many years. There’s black stuff all over the sheathing. How do you clean it up? You’ve got someone who’s freaked out. What’s your process for something like that?
RS: Oh, attics, as Jason know, are my absolute favorite. It depends on how tall they are, how big they are. If it’s something… First and foremost, I’ll ask when the last time the roof was replaced. A lot of the times you can see that the roof was replaced within the last couple of years and if this happens that would be something that, “Hey, that roof was open too long, and the water got in ’cause it rained or something like that, right? But if the roof hasn’t been replaced in a while, there’s obviously some condensation that’s gotten up there. So we’ll go up there and kind of CSI it and see, is there a bathroom fan exhaust that’s not quite hooked up or is the circulation… Can I feel it up here? How high is the humidity up here? So we’ll kind of investigate but when it comes to removing what’s on the back of the plywood, we do follow the same process. We’ll follow it with, we’ll spray down the whole roof with our antimicrobial, we’ll more than likely fog the attic with our antimicrobial and kill off everything that’s in the air. And then we end up doing the encapsulation process. We’ll sand it off best we can. If it’s super deep, we might use a different chemical, but we try not to do that at all. That’s why when you go up there and you see a white roof when you get up in the attic that was because it’s been encapsulated, something’s happened up there.
Sean: So that’s kind of a process. Now, if it’s something where that insulation is so damp and I think one of your podcasts, you call it the raining ceiling, right?
RS: Yeah.
Sean: That’s a whole different issue where we might have to talk about removing that insulation because it’s so contaminated and so bad and then really steer them in the right direction to somebody that can help them with what’s going on up in that attic. We can only do so much and we can point you in the right direction but we’re going to give you the best references that we can.
RS: Okay. All right, thank you. And then we’re running out of time here but I got one more question I wanted to ask you about and it’s just mold testing standards. I know that we talk about the certification that we have and we didn’t have it before but we were still doing mold testing at a much lower level of professionalism I would say. But as far as I know, there is no standard that anybody has to follow to do mold testing. What are your thoughts on all of that and what would you recommend?
Sean: The standards that we do follow are, I believe, from the UK, right? And then the US doesn’t really have their own standard of mold. I truly feel that wherever you are, you should have your own standards, right? And I think the United States has a different mold than UK does. And so it would be nice to have a standard come into the US that we can follow better. I guess the standard I would follow is zero mold, right? Is that going to ever happen? No. We all have mold in the house. Sometimes we open up the fridge and our strawberries… Or if something’s gone bad and we look at it and we say “Ah, it’s moldy.” We’ll just throw it away. But then when it comes to the standard of mold in the house, people see that and go, “Oh, man. There’s mold in my house.” I’m really getting sick and then it starts to go down that rabbit hole. But the first question I’ll always ask is make sure you… When’s the last time you had your HVAC cleaned out or the ducts cleaned so we can get to a standard of figuring out where’s that mold coming from? Let’s get it out of your house. I want people to make sure that mold isn’t so scary for them.
Sean: You guys have done such a great job even just to offer the way you guys do mold tests. We’ve had other people call with mold tests that they do and they don’t do an extensive job like you guys do. And the way you guys investigate things to help us tell the story better is truly awesome. And I think having Hausman on here to flip the script on mold in the house it’s a big deal. We can do this, we can get it out. We can help people live better, live more healthy lives, right? So I guess I really just wanted to say thanks for even having us on this podcast and thanks for including us and partnering with us.
RS: Yeah, well, Eric tells me it’s been a good partnership and if that’s what he says, I trust him. That’s the word. If people want to get ahold of you Sean, how can they find you guys?
Sean: You can go on our website, you can search All Dry Twin Cities. There’s a couple of different All Dry so make sure you’re searching for Twin Cities. You can call us directly. If it’s okay to give the number 763-299-4379. It comes directly to me and we do have a wonderful Facebook page you can go find us on, too.
RS: Okay. Excellent. Eric, any last thoughts?
EH: I want to throw this out there because Sean and I had lunch a couple of days ago in preparation for this and what blew my mind and I’m not saying this I’m not bringing this up to say they don’t have capacity because they’ve taken care of every single person that we have sent their way or have contacted them. But Sean, for everybody that’s listening, just tell them how big your team is at All Dry in the Twin Cities.
Sean: Oh man. Well, I don’t want to get us in trouble but we do have a team. There is seven of us. We are small but mighty but we actually currently we are growing but we have two techs and we go out there and we take on some pretty big jobs that we, I don’t want to say we crush them out but we do. We do them in a very timely manner We take care of customers and we just try to be as friendly as we can. We go into people’s lives and I don’t know we disrupt them. It’s a disrupting thing. We have to take their house apart like, “Ooh, I feel terrible.” But I’m going to name drop my co-partner, Justin. Him and I do some pretty good work. And if you follow us on Facebook, you’ll see why and we’ll see how much fun we have doing it. And we’ve gotten a lot of five star reviews so hopefully I can name drop that in there, too. [laughter]
RS: Awesome.
Jason: I will attest to the work that they do because we’ve done a lot of post remediation verification tests after All Dry has been in there and the work that they do is stellar. It’s definitely up to par, no doubt about it.
RS: Excellent.
Sean: Thanks, buddy.
RS: Cool. Well, Sean, thank you so much for coming on the show. Jason, thank you for making time, Eric, of course, thank you for coming on. And Tessa, taking time out of your vacation to jump on the podcast. Really appreciate it.
TM: I wouldn’t miss it and thank you Sarge, for your contribution to this podcast, too. [laughter]
RS: Yep, yep. We heard my dog barking in the background about seven times there. He’s usually pretty quiet in the afternoon but not today.
TM: Not today. He wanted to join the party.
RS: Yeah. The squirrels must be out or something. I don’t know. [laughter] All right. Well, if you have any thoughts for the show please email us. You can email us at podcast@structuretech.com. I’m Reuben Saltzman. For Tessa Murry, signing off. Thanks for being here everyone. Take care.
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