Mold Firm

Visit us today at http://moldfirm.com/ or call 404-341-MOLD (6653).

Visit us today at http://moldfirm.com/ or call 404-341-MOLD (6653).

Visit us today at http://moldfirm.com/ or call 404-341-MOLD (6653).

Visit us today at http://moldfirm.com/ or call 404-341-MOLD (6653).

Visit us today at http://moldfirm.com/ or call 404-341-MOLD (6653).

Visit us today at http://moldfirm.com/ or call 404-341-MOLD (6653).

Visit us today at http://moldfirm.com/ or call 404-341-MOLD (6653).

Visit us today at http://moldfirm.com/ or call 404-341-MOLD (6653).

Visit us today at http://moldfirm.com/ or call 404-341-MOLD (6653).

Visit us today at http://moldfirm.com/ or call 404-341-MOLD (6653).

Visit us today at http://moldfirm.com/ or call 404-341-MOLD (6653).

Carson Jeffries: Good morning, I'm Carson Jeffries with the Mold Firm and I'm here today with long-time friend and owner of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. Richard Johnson: My name is Richard Johnson and I'm the President/CEO of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. Well the best thing is a good filter in the HVAC system. They have ratings on filters that can describe how small of a particulate it can capture and including mold spores, because mold spores are basically a particulate. A filter with the equivalent of a MERV8 rating will capture a particulate down as small as 3 microns. Now, most mold spores are 3 microns or higher, aspergillus, penicillium for instance are in the 3.3 micron range, stachybotrys is around 5 microns. So if you have at least a MERV8 filter in your furnace, you're going to be reducing the amount of mold spores that are in the air. It's not going to eliminate them, but it'll be healthier. If you're looking for the background particulate due to the deterioration of the indoor environment, ther

Carson Jeffries: Good morning, I'm Carson Jeffries with the Mold Firm and I'm here today with long-time friend and owner of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. Richard Johnson: My name is Richard Johnson and I'm the President/CEO of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. We do have data because we've done thousands and thousands of these samples over the years. We have data that we can say, if the amount of mold spores in the carpet is normal, if they tend to be water damage spores or if they tend to be what they call phylloplane spores, which are much less likely to have some kind of a problem and we can give some guidance. In carpet dust for instance there's only three things you can do with a carpet, you can vacuum it, with a HEPA filter, if you don't use a HEPA filter vacuum, you're just going to broadcast it out into the air, and even with the HEPA filter vacuum, some of that stuff is going to get out into the air, the real fine particulate in spores. Or you can clean the carpet. Or you can replace the carpet. And we p

Carson Jeffries: Good morning, I'm Carson Jeffries with the Mold Firm and I'm here today with long-time friend and owner of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. Richard Johnson: My name is Richard Johnson and I'm the President/CEO of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. When we talk to a client on the phone when they call us, it is to understand what their questions are and what their concerns are and then we will come up with a sampling strategy to answer their questions, and it would be at that point that we would decide whether or not just knowing what the genus level name is, like aspergillus or penicillium, will be adequate or if they need to go more deeply and learn about these species. It is more expensive to do a species analysis than it is to do something to the genus level in the analysis. And cost is always a concern, that's a trade-off between what you're learning and the cost of doing it. We look at it as if we're painting a picture and every sample that we take adds a color, adds a line, adds some detail tha

Carson Jeffries: Good morning, I'm Carson Jeffries with the Mold Firm and I'm here today with long-time friend and owner of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. Richard Johnson: My name is Richard Johnson and I'm the President/CEO of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. We not only provide the report from the laboratory. And a lot of inspectors will just provide that report, and they enhance it, they call it their expanded report and they'll put some colored graphs in there and that kind of thing. But they honestly in many cases don't fully explain where it might be coming from. And, if they do say where it's coming from, they don't necessarily say what to do about it to take care of it. And, presuming that everyone is operating honestly and professionally and all that kind of thing, in trying to deal with these things, we find a lot of times when we do clearance test these things after work had been done that they have not passed. And almost every single time when that happens we say, “Well, did you take this step tha

Carson Jeffries: Good morning, I'm Carson Jeffries with the Mold Firm and I'm here today with long-time friend and owner of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. Richard Johnson: My name is Richard Johnson and I'm the President/CEO of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. As I've mentioned before, we can imply some things about pest control, for instance, that might be in there. We can learn if there's likely to be some chemical collision in the indoor environment. In some cases, we can read that into it. If we know that, let's say, we know there's visible mold and you have a real low airborne count, but you know it's being suppressed for some reason. We can tell something from the symptoms that the people say is whether or not there can be. Carson: What do you mean suppressed, Richard? Richard: I mean that they maybe growing and they maybe causing the chemicals to be done and toxins and that kind of stuff to be contained, but they may not be sporiating into particular time that were there because the growth pattern’s be

Carson Jeffries: Good morning, I'm Carson Jeffries with the Mold Firm and I'm here today with long-time friend and owner of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. Richard Johnson: My name is Richard Johnson and I'm the President/CEO of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. We can do a similar kind of sampling that we do in the carpet for furniture. We have a portable vacuum with a special nozzle and a special gasket that will be able to capture the dust that contains the mold spores. We can vacuum that furniture and we can learn something about it in terms of the quantity of spores that are on there and whether or not they’re likely to be growing at that time or not. If it's a fabric, we're measuring the dust that has settled down into the fabric. If we're looking at the framing where it's been water damaged in the bottom, there we would maybe take a tape sample or swab to find out whether there's mold growth that's associated with water damage. We can learn about that in terms of furniture by taking those samples. Our data

Carson Jeffries: Good morning, I'm Carson Jeffries with the Mold Firm and I'm here today with a long-time friend and owner of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. Richard Johnson: My name is Richard Johnson, and I'm the President/CEO of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. Absolutely, we can tell by the kind of molds that are in the environment whether or not they have had problems with high humidity, for instance. Because all mold needs to grow is oxygen, food, and moisture. And if you can hold the humidity down below around fifty percent, you're going to retard the growth of almost all mold spores. But that's just not possible here in Atlanta, unless you use dehumidifiers, particularly during the summertime. So, in most homes, the environment for growing mold is there all summer long. Sometimes from April to November, they have an environment that mold can grow in.

We absolutely try to identify that, if we see that there's circumstances, and we often learn why we're there is because that there's a suspected mold problem, whether it be a leak in the wall or whether there has been a leak in the wall. So under those circumstances, if we're looking to see whether that has an effect, we can take air samples inside the wall cavity, we can take samples on surfaces, we take air samples and other samples that might be related to that, we could take bulk samples back to the lab and have them analyzed. So we absolutely can do that and try to help that. But, even beyond that we can tell them the nature of the kinds of leaks and the kinds of problems that are associated with that. For instance, if it's a toilet backup, they could have a sewage type backup. There's guidelines that are published by the EPA or the CDC. If that happens on a carpet, that carpet should be replaced. Anything that's a porous material, if you can replace it, it should be replaced. If it's a material like t

Carson Jeffries: Good morning, I'm Carson Jeffries with the Mold Firm and I'm here today with a long-time friend and owner of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. Richard Johnson: My name is Richard Johnson, and I'm the President/CEO of Air Allergen & Mold Testing. Oh yeah, we find mold damage, spores are everywhere in small quantities, but if the environment is right to grow them they will start to grow. An example of not needing light, certainly in wall cavities would be a good example about that, but another place is behind wallpaper, particularly vinyl wallpaper on an exterior wall, there's in enough moisture from the condensation, if that wall is not well insulated, to form moisture on the back of the vinyl wallpaper. And the mold will grow in the glue of the wallpaper and then that could wind up having adverse effects on the air quality as well. As far as in growing water in the wall cavities, let's say you have a leak above a window or something and it gets into the wall cavity and you wind up having mold