Is Your Home Healthy?

Podcast Transcript

Is Your Home Healthy

 

Mon, Nov 27, 2023, 2:33PM • 36:39

 

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

home, vocs, mold, buildings, HEPA filter, Jason, VOC, filter, house, chemical, live, air, HEPA, pollutants, particles, healthy, formaldehyde, carbon, moisture, paint

 

00:03

 

Welcome to live in a home that pays you back the podcast is for people who want to get the absolute most out of owning a home. Your host is Anna De Simone, who explains how your home can be healthy, and sustainable, and provide long-term security for you and your family. Guests include technology leaders and innovators in the housing industry, who share the kind of knowledge you need to meet the market with confidence and make informed decisions about home construction, renovation, energy scores, water conservation, wind, solar, geothermal power, and lots more. It’s time for you to live in a home that pays you back. Now, here’s your host, Anna De Simone.

 

00:49 Anna De Simone

 

Hello, everyone, this is Anna De Simone welcome again to live in the home that pays you back. And we have a very special show today. The name is “Is your home healthy?”. And I’m so lucky that I was able to get Jason Earle, who was the founder and CEO of GOT MOLD? to visit us again because we did a great show with Jason several months ago on mold. After all, he is the creator and the founder of a home testing kit for people to find out if there’s any mold in their houses. But what if you listen to that podcast, you’ll find out that Jason is so knowledgeable in every aspect of a healthy home. So I asked him to come back here again. 

 

He’s an adoring father of two kids in diapers. He’s a man on a mission and has personally performed countless sick-building investigations, solved medical mysteries, and helped 1000s of families recover to help and peace of mind. He’s been featured on Good Morning America, the Dr. Oz Show, Extreme Makeover, Home Edition, and more. So Jason, welcome. Thanks for coming back. So good to be here. Yeah. Well, we want to start today, just by having you tell us what people should be aware of when it comes to pollutants in their homes. 

 

Sure. Well, first of all, thanks again for having me. Come back. And thanks for that very generous introduction. You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here. So, you know, indoor air quality is sort of the last frontier of awareness around environmental hazards. I mean, you know, food has been almost everyone’s aware that organic is better. Right? Right. 

 

And such that Walmart is now the largest seller of organic groceries in the world. And that wasn’t because Walmart decided that that was a good business decision. It was because the demand was there demand, right? The awareness preceded the demand, and then they put it on the shelves. And, and you can say the same thing about water. Tap water, everyone drank tap water 25 years ago, and then that shifted over to filtered and bottled water. Now we know the problems with bottles. 

 

But the bottom line is that most people are now very reluctant to just drink tap water. And that’s a great thing because tap water is patently disgusting. It has all sorts of pollutants in it. But pipes are old and all the stuff that’s gone into them. I mean, the GE now makes a water filter that goes on the refrigerator. And one of the bullet points on it is that it removes pharmaceuticals from your drinking water. 

 

Yeah, that doesn’t tell you enough about drinking tap water, you know nothing does. So you know, food, water, and shelter. You know, more and more people are thinking about healthy buildings in many ways. But the air quality inside even though breathing is something we do more than almost anything else. 

 

Air is the last thing we think about it’s air, water, food, and shelter. And you can live with that shelter for a good long while you can live without food for a few weeks. You can live without water for a few days. But you can only live out here for a few minutes. And yeah, that’s the thing we think about last because it’s literally if we were fish, that’s our water. You know, and I once heard someone say that whoever discovered water, wasn’t a fish.

 

03:59 Anna De Simone

 

And so, you know, the reality is that we’re too close to it, to see it for what it is, we’re too close to it, you know, you breathe 13 to 15 times a minute, which comes out to 20,000 times a day. Wow, that’s an outrageous amount of activity around something that you don’t think about very often. And the air is such that you don’t think about it unless it smells bad, tastes bad, or you don’t have enough of it. And so it’s one of those things. Again, it begs awareness. And so oftentimes, it is an unfortunate circumstance, like a mold problem, a flood, a leak, or some sort of chemical problem in a home that brings people to this awareness, as we talked about before the recording began. 

 

And oftentimes when that happens, the awareness never goes away. People then start thinking and becoming more aware of the fact that there are lots of things in our buildings that could potentially cause disease. Beyond mold. Of course, mold is a major concern because it’s a moisture problem, right? moisture problems don’t just cause disease. 

 

They can also take your building down, right mold eventually becomes rot and decay, you know, it ultimately affects

 

05:00 Anna De Simone

 

All things in a building living things and nonliving things? Well, right. And the thing too is if there’s a pollutant in the air, it’s moving around from room to room. And if you’re in an apartment building, the germs are moving around from apartment to apartment. So I think the whole idea is that people need to have control of their indoor air environment. So can you can you tell us what defines a healthy home? Jason? 

 

Jason

 

Sure. So Well, first of all, let’s explain why buildings are unhealthy. And mostly that has to do with the fact that we make buildings out of very mold-friendly materials. So the buildings that we now live in, you know, some 100, and some odd million of them coast to coast, are primarily made of sheetrock, which is very mold friendly. And then we wrap it up in plastic. And then we also bring in all these toxic chemicals to paint and put in our furniture in our finishes, the polyurethane floor for finish toxic stuff, to most of the furniture, all the all of the stain resistant coatings and things like that, loaded with toxins to flame retardant all these things. 

 

So all of these things get into our buildings, which are also very, very tight for energy efficiency, right? Ever since the 60s and 70s. During the fuel crisis, we tightened up buildings for energy efficiency, and we didn’t have air exchange. That’s a really common commercial building. There’s requirements around that there’s requirements around air change, which got rid of sick building syndrome in the 90s. We don’t have that in residential construction. So we live in these very tight chemical boxes to get moldy quickly when they get wet. And so that’s the reason that’s the underlying cause of most of this. 

 

And I would argue that that’s the underlying cause of much of the cancer and autoimmune disease that is now plaguing our world. I mean, the statistics are crazy, one out of two men will have cancer and their adult men will have cancer and their life not including skin cancer, and one of the three women, these are these are new statistics, but they’re shocking. And they largely come to not just mold, but mold and the chemical built the chemicals that we load up our buildings within our food supply, you know, too. 

 

So it’s there’s, a lot is going on there. But, you know, if you wanted to find a healthy building on the obverse of this, it’s essentially no mold and moisture problems. So clean and dry, and has a low chemical load. And so that means that you’re not using paints that have a lot of VOCs. And by the way, now again, going back to the Walmart conversation, Lowe’s and Home Depot now sell paints and building materials with low VOCs. Now, what’s a VOC volatile organic compound very important to define, that’s a chemical that’s a liquid at one temperature or even a solid, and then it evaporates. 

 

And so the most common one that we might think of is alcohol. Alcohol is liquid at one temperature, and it evaporates, in the way made by microbes. It’s a microbial voc. But they’re also manmade ones that we’re familiar with, like formaldehyde, right? And they use that a lot. It’s the worst one of all, one of them. Yeah, it’s a group one carcinogen, and it’s yet it is embedded in most of the insulation that’s in most of the homes throughout the country, and the pink and yellow stuff that’s in your walls. 

 

But you had mentioned some of the building materials like the lamination, that puts the cabinets, the kitchen cabinets together, and the varnishes around the floor, I mean, all those VOCs are in the floor. And from what I understand they are emitting the toxins slowly, over some time. So if your house is 30, or 40 years old, it could be it could look spotless, when you walk in the door, and everything is shiny and clean. But the VOCs that were legal in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, when a lot of our homes in America were built, are still giving off some talks. 

 

And so I think by the time you hear what everything Jason has to say, today, you’re gonna think that maybe that fixer-upper, you were looking at isn’t so bad, because at least if you do a top-down renovation, you can get rid of all of those old laminated cabinets. And, you know, you know, the old-fashioned paneling that was on the walls. When you watch The Brady Bunch, every room is paneled. And you know, there were shag carpeting on the floors. 

 

Well, those are the things that as Jason will explain the carpeting is what’s keeping things like mold hidden so that you’re not seeing it. And indeed, the paneling of the 70s That was so popular is made with a lot of VOCs. Okay, so go back to shopping for paint. That will have a little pop-up sticker on it that says no VOCs that’s right should say no VOC or low VOC and the trick on paint, by the way, is that you can paint the base paint is almost always no VOC in the price of the pigments are often where the VOCs are. So it’s tricky stuff you have to this buyer beware right you have to become an informed consumer. You have

 

10:00 Jason 

 

to ask the question now there are resources. greenguard.org, for example, is a great website where you can go and find building materials that have gotten that have been vetted. And that it all goes down even things like caulk and adhesive, the stuff that you might put a floor perfectly in NERT flooring, LLC, you got great bamboo, sustainable, you know, carbon neutral bamboo flooring, well, then the flooring contractor comes over and slaps down some voc laden mastic to glue it down. Now you got it, that’s true. So there are little things that slip in that aren’t so little. 

 

And by the way, they’re off-gassing to your point can be 510 1520 years. And actually, the biggest problems we see as much as the old buildings had, you know, whether it be asbestos, and other things like that, which are much less harmful than these VOCs, by the way, because they’re usually pretty stable, and they’re not airborne, but VOCs are, by their very nature airborne. And, and they impact us in so many ways, mostly cognitive, but also we can an immune system to make you susceptible to things like cancer and autoimmune disease and other things like that. 

 

So, you know, ultimately, listen, we all know the standing hanging out, if, if you’re at the gas station, for 10 minutes filling up your car, and you catch a whiff of gas, you know, you know that that’s not great. But imagine if you had that gas can in your living room. Oh, right, just, you’re gonna get sick, the lighthouse in an airtight house. And we’re doing something very similar, but it’s a potpourri of chemicals. And it’s and it’s actually, the biggest problem we have in modern construction is modern construction. It’s the new buildings that are the biggest offenders. 

 

Because those are the ones that are built the fastest and the cheapest, we’re profit motive is the primary focus. And they’re going to get those houses out. And they’re not choosing no and low VOC but that new house smell is where it has been, we’ve been conditioned to think that a new car smell and a new house smell is is alluring. It’s you get this very visceral Pavlovian reward for that. Meanwhile, when I smell that I smell cancer, right? And it is the thing that’s making us weak as a society. 

 

And it’s and it’s also the stuff that we’re buying online. And for importing from China, where they’re making fast, cheap stuff, fast, cheap stuff needs to be secure quickly and cures quickly because VOC’s there are based on adhesives, paints and finishes on those things. And so, ultimately, our desire to have fast, cheap, pretty stuff is the thing that’s causing our short-term gratification, as a society, is what’s causing us long-term weakness and disease. And so what can you talk about the VOCs that are in cleaning products, and deodorant and personal care products, because no VOCs are all over the place, but with formaldehyde and formaldehyde is all over the place all over the place.

 

12:51Jason

 

So you can smell it when you sometimes walk into a big department store, especially the clothing department because clothing manufacturers before they were shipping the close-up to the stores, their distribution, there were spraying some kind of a formaldehyde-based spread. And whenever I went shopping, I always felt like I was going to faint

 

13:16 Jason

 

smell of formaldehyde would just not be over. And it’s because those stores did not have to weigh external ventilation systems. And there’s the sources are outrageous there too. You know, you go into a store, and you’ve got the cleaning products, you’ve got the perfume, the perfume counter, there, you’ve got the clothing that has the stain a stain resistant coatings, which have formaldehyde in them often.

 

13:43 Jason 

 

These are abundant in our society, you have to as like I said, as an informed consumer, you have to be very, very careful about you know, the food you eat the clothes, you buy the the building materials you select for your building, because the vast majority when I say the vast majority, I mean it’s like 95% of what’s available out there is a bad choice, you have to become a very discerning consumer. 

 

And so this is the responsibility of all people who care about their health or care about their children to become educated on these things. Because what if you don’t see it, for example, with food, if it doesn’t say organic isn’t right? And the same thing goes? If it doesn’t say low VOC or no VC voc, it isn’t because they would be promoting that, that that otherwise, so you have to assume that whatever you’re getting calls into the No Category unless it has been proven to be in the Yes. category. 

 

So you’re talking about cleaning chemicals, and personal care products. You know, these are obvious ones because we’re spraying them on us and around us. And again, we don’t have good ventilation in our building. So this is a problem. So you want to make sure that you’re getting stuff that’s as inert as possible. That doesn’t have propellants in the sprayers, right? You want to use propellant freeze spray

 

15:00 Anna De Simone

 

Do you want to use things that don’t have fragrances, these fragrances are nasty. And oftentimes they’re they’re embedded in forever chemicals which will stain lodged in your fat cells and things like that. So, just being very discerning about being minimalist around personal care products, there’s a great product of cleaning product called Force of Nature. And it’s a it’s made with it uses electrolysis, it’s a really cool thing. 

 

If you’ve got kids, it’s fun to watch, too. You put you fill it with with filtered water, and you put a little a little squirt of vinegar and salt mixture that they give you pre-made. And it uses electrolysis and it creates sodium, sodium hypochlorite hypochlorous acid. This is a very powerful cleaning agent, it helps to cut through grease, it also helps to sanitize and that leaves no residue. 

 

And you can buy, you don’t have to buy the bottles so that you’re not dealing with shipping costs and all the embedded energy and the carbon issues associated with heavy cleaning products that are water-based. And so forces nature is we’ve been using it for six years, my family swears by it. And they’re now using it in daycare facilities. Four Seasons Hotel just started using it in their spa. 

 

So I’m a big fan of chemicals like that, that are chemical free, rather our cleaning agents or chemical free agents, well like vinegar. So, Jason, I’m gonna ask you to remember when children’s pajamas were marketed back in the 70s and 80s to be flame retardant, or flame resistant. And then 

 

Weren’t there some environmental protection agency studies that found out that the chemicals that were used to treat the material that made the children’s pajamas, made them flame resistant, but the chemicals in that were being used were actually more harmful and created a larger incidence. So you talk about consumers and thinking everything they see the majority of what they see is bad. But let me tell you this, the majority of what they see and read is also confusing. Because in the in the organic food industry, the USDA has certain requirements that a farmer has to adhere to, in order to call a food organic, but the

 

17:15 Jason 

 

term organic has been used way, way, way more than it legally should be for sure. And then you have locally sourced food. And local farming is basically within 100 miles of where you bought it. But that might work in rural areas. But if you’re in a metropolitan area, 100 Miles is further away. And so what, what I’ve learned is that you know, what, a lot of men, you know, grass-fed meat and local, you know, sourced poultry and chicken and eggs, I think what we’re, we began to see more of, you know, to support your local farm, and not emphasize what the USDA defines as local but saying, you know, we’re right here, where you live, and in this county, and I think that that was the beauty of farmers market because you were able to shake hands and meet and greet with people that had farms, and fisheries, you know, people that were catching fish, you know, all within the county or two or three counties where he lived. 

 

And I think you can still do that, by the way, you know, you can still do that. And there’s but also local doesn’t necessarily mean organic, or that has been raised in a sustainable way. Oftentimes, I live in Minnesota, we’ve got lots of lots of farms around here. And the reality is that I do, I have to be very, very careful about what we buy, because oftentimes they are corn fed with you know, traditional conventional methods. And so unless it says it isn’t, and so you know, they it’s a very, it’s the have to look for the thing that’s not being said,

 

18:58 Jason 

 

but you know, the essence of a healthy home circles back to the home, it’s no mold and moisture problems, a low chemical load, and high biodiversity. These are the hallmarks of a healthy home. So that means that you’ve got no more than one year that’s obvious, right? So if you’ve got any leaks, floods, moisture issues, ventilation issues, those kinds of things, you need to deal with that properly, because mold grows within 24 to 48 hours. 

 

So that is a major, major problem and it can take your building down the chemical load, we just talked about that. But there are things that there are places where these things are hiding and you brought up flame retardants, things like mattresses, you know, there’s a whole new line of match a whole new Legion of mattress companies out that have latched on mostly driven by Casper mattress, which started the whole thing. No flame retardants, nope no vocs no springs, in many cases, natural latex, these kinds of things, and they’re only about 1000 bucks. 

 

They’ll deliver them to your house you get 30 to 60 days to try them out. I’m not plugging Casper I don’t get paid by Casper or force of nature, by the way. But these are products that I use and you know, I’ve sourced these things out. I should probably put up a website of just the things that I’ve done.

 

20:00 Jason 

 

So I’ve selected over the years and ship, ship, because these are super important and you spend 30% of your life in bed, you know, you spend the rest of them in your shoes, so you might as well have good shoes and a good mattress. And so, but the whole point is that you have to become aware of the things that you become exposed to the most. And so air again, you’re exposed to a lot 20,000 breaths a day, and you’re supposed to your mattress an awful lot, and you’re supposed to your clothing.

 

So that means you want to wash your clothes, in soaps that don’t have residuals also, so no fragrance is very, very important. You know, they’re, they’re also there’s some great dryer, laundry sheets. Now instead of the soap, you can buy these sheets, and they are actually coconut-based, and they don’t have fragrances, and they’re really, really easy. You can travel with them well, too, by the way for parents who have kids, you know, and so they’re called sheets. And I also don’t get paid by them, but I love their product. 

 

And so it’s just the you know, it’s a little it’s a you know, it’s just it’s every day, you just have to keep looking at say, you know, how can I how can I make this a little bit better. And so by slowly saying no to bringing in less toxins into your home, getting rid of the ones that you have, and then there’s the mechanical stuff. So what do you do if you have a moisture problem or rather an air quality problem, you obviously want to deal with the source, that’s the best thing you can do. 

 

But the other thing you can do is dilute open your windows and get some fresh air ventilated. There are also mechanical ventilation systems like energy recovery, ventilators, and heat recovery ventilators that are very, very good for buildings that are too tight, which means almost every home in America, and so they should be installed ie RVs and HRVs. We could do a whole podcast just on those. 

 

But that’s very powerful, especially for homes that have a voc problem because it’s hard to get the VOCs out. In fact, it’s impossible to get the VOCs out of you the only thing you can do with VOCs is, is ventilate, which is hard to do without one of those Mechanical ventilators or filter the air what my ideal is you do both and filtering the air. We can do a whole show on filters too, because they’re not all created equal. 

 

And you want to get HEPA filters to deal with the particles, especially by the way, the building perhaps of particles. What’s the super HEPA filter HEPA? Yeah, yeah, so that’s, that’s actually an oppa which is HEPA removes micron point three microns and up. So particles that are tiny, a tiny little part of point three microns, and up and up takes up point one microns, and up. So we’ve taken out atmospheric dust viruses and things like that with the oppa. But open and hope HEPA does not take out VOCs they only take out particles. So VOCs are gases and particles are captured the by the traditional HEPA and ULPA filters. 

 

So what you want is a really good air purifier that has a lot of carbon in it. And it has a lot of that has a good HEPA filter. And that is your swiss army knife for indoor air quality, right? So the carbons are extinguishing the toxins that are in the air and the HEPA is catching and trapping the particles, the carbon does this really cool thing where it actually captures it on the outside of the carbon particle. So it’s almost like a magnet, it adsorbs as opposed to

 

23:23 Anna De Simone

 

I get it. So RB and then and then the part of the HEPA filter actually capture them in the in the folds of the paper pleated filters. So one of them captures they both capture. But the thing that’s different is the carbon gets saturated pretty quickly. And so you have to replace the carbon much more quickly, much more often rather than you would have to replace the traditional paper based HEPA filter. 

 

So they do have ongoing expenses. And this is something that people need to be aware of is that they know they take up space, and that you should put them in your bedroom and the other rooms that you spend a lot of time in. And basements are an obvious one because a lot of pollutants come from the basements, especially mold and moisture issues. But then you also want to make sure that you’ve got budget and that you’ve set a schedule for replacing those filters on a regular basis. 

 

Otherwise, you’re just running up your electric bill without much but with Mike with that, but yeah, well you know, I have a whole house air cleaning system. And I have a portable system on each floor because I happen to be a fanatic. Plus I open a lot of windows. But you know what I bought when I bought my house I walked in the door of the last two homes I purchased I walked in the door and I could smell wetness I could smell Old, old old you know how the smell you get when people’s milk and you walk into the house and it just hit you over the head. And so the first thing I did was I had my air ducts cleaned out. And every time I’ve had that done and one house that I bought in Boston, I went and ordered the chimney sweeper guy

 

25:00 Anna De Simone

 

to come. And he said I don’t think this chimney has been cleaned into 20 or 30 years. And I said, Well, considering there was a rolled up pack of Chesterfields, you know, in my fireplace I can’t, that’s kind of a clue. Somebody was sitting there smoking and throwing away so that there hadn’t been around for 20 years anyway. And so I think so with air quality. For our listeners, Jason, I want to, I want to make sure that we’re very clear about the need to exchange the air and take the stale, warm air out of the house that’s been polluted, and send it outside through a strategic bent, and then have clean filtered air come back into the house. 

 

And that’s that constant ongoing air exchange and filtering system. But what that’s doing is driving out the allergens and the pollutants and the particles that pollute your home and the air that you breathe. But the other side of that coin is what is really dangerous. Like you were talking about those really bad diseases. One term

 

26:15 Anna De Simone 

are the toxins, not not the environmental exposures, but the carbon so can you talk a little bit about how people can shop or go on Amazon, this is not an infomercial for Amazon. Of course, we all know they don’t need advertising. But how to somebody somebody’s renting an apartment in a big multifamily building and they don’t even open windows and someone’s renting an apartment and a three-family house or a condominium? 

 

They’re not. So not all my listeners are homeowners. So why don’t you give some tips on purchasing cleaners like mine, two of mine are portable and good, roll them around on the store on the floor, and give people some hands whether they are a homeowner and they want a whole house system how they do it. And if they’re not whether or not they are homeowner, talk a little bit about the portable ones. 

 

Sure. And you know, by the way, it’d be important to have HEPA filters and portable air cleaners, or air cleaners in general, is not just to remove spores and, and allergens. But actually the building materials like when you paint a wall, the moment that that dries, the airflow around, it will actually slowly erode that paint. And it seems very, it’s hard for people to get their mind around. But the same thing goes with flooring. Of course, when you walk on it, you’re causing these micro-abrasions. And so it creates these tiny, tiny pieces of dust that are embedded with the chemicals that are made from the paint and the ends. So this becomes this gets embedded in our dust, and then it gets retrained says my pets and babies are so susceptible to these kinds of, you know, to environmental illnesses is because they’re disproportionately they’re low to the ground on our hands. 

 

Right. You know, there’s something called incidental ingestion, they estimated kids can get up to 100 milligrams a day worth of this kind of dust in through their mouth, you know, eating it. And so, HEPA filters and HEPA-filtered vacuum cleaners are extremely useful tools to reduce that load. But again, it’s not if you have a mold problem, air purifiers are not going to solve your mold, you have to solve the moisture. And you have to soften that and then deal with the side effects. But you’re but these HEPA cleaners are very, very powerful. And I look at them more as a way to reduce the chemical load in the building. 

 

Especially when it comes to the dust that comes from that then it is really about controlling moisture, and microbes because the third tenant of a healthy building is a high microbiome. My biodiversity high biodiversity means lots and lots of different kinds of microbes in your house. But the distinction is none of them growing, which means no moisture problems because that’s what allows my microbes to grow. 

 

And what that means also is that you want to use those filters and use those HEPA-filtered vacuum cleaners. But you also want to open your windows and let the outside in. The reason I say to humans, the root word of a human is humaneness, which is soil. And we are so disconnected from our true heritage, which is that we’re Earthlings. But yet we live in these boxes and we put rubber on the bottom of our feet and we make sure we wash our we don’t get any dirt, no dirt. Meanwhile, you know what we’re for resistance. Yeah, and our digestive system is literally soil microbes. We are composters. 

 

We’re not really digesting our food the microbes are and the microbiome on and us and around us is really us. You know there are 37 trillion microbes in us and they’re about 35 trillion that are our us. And so we are microbial so we don’t we have to stop killing stuff first.

 

30:00 Jason 

 

of all. And second of all, we have to be willing to let nature back into our lives. So that when we go outside, we’re not shocked by nature. You know, our lungs are a natural interface, this naked interface with the world. And every particle you breathe is a little piece of data. And so your body needs to be trained of what’s what’s normal and healthy. What we do indoors in modern buildings is neither natural nor healthy. We’re taking away nature and introducing chemicals, and in a concentrated way, and then re-breathing that stuff 20,000 times a day. So my suggestion is get your house clean and dry, reduce the chemical load, and let nature back inside. Well, you make a lot of sense and

 

30:44 Anna De Simone

 

Spoken like a true farm boy, J.

 

30:48 Anna De Simone

 

a farm boy who grew up in the city. That’s right. I know you went from New York to Minnesota, but you were getting a little, you know, conspiracy theory there that you know, the way we live inside our homes. Yeah. But listen, I have to do a little infomercial for Jason because she was kind enough to share his knowledge about home health, and the millions of different ways and little things that you can do to have help at home. But I want you to know that his website is called www.got mold.com.

 

And he and his assistant have set up a special welcome page, just for our listeners today. So if you go on the website got mold.com, you can read a free booklet about mold and I want to tie it it’s a very well-written and illustrated booklet. And if you decide you want to order one of Jason’s inventions, which was a fantastic mold kit, you can enter a coupon code home 10 H o m e one zero, for a 10 percent, I guess that’s a 10% discount, right? That’s right. But I want you to know that you can learn a lot on Jason’s website, because he has very crystal clear illustrations and videos that describe so many things about the dangers of mold and how it starts. 

 

And I was really impressed with your mold testing kit. Thank you, I almost emailed you because my granddaughter lives in Canada. And she was sick. And I thought she had mold because they had a flood in the building. So I was gonna say, Jason, how can I get my daughter a mold testing kit?

 

32:40 Anna De Simone

 

But anyway, no, I have actually my daughter was up there visiting her. So I’ll let you know what happens and get the scoop, but I did have her go on Amazon and buy an indoor air purifier and cleaner. So two days later, I got the test, Grandma, it made such a difference before and after. And so I don’t care whether you’re living in a tiny apartment or a 5000 square foot house just to get that air circulating get fresh air, and don’t you know, I might take you up on your offer for some more podcasts on the air exchanged in the heat exchange system. 

 

Because I wrote about that in my book. And it’s easy to explain when you have infographics. But when you’re talking about ERP and HRV, you know, it’s hard to describe but Jason, you so much fun to this. So are you, I think we should be on YouTube, because your antics would really add a lot to, you know, maybe we could do some visuals and diagrams, but for sure you have to try to picture the airflow going in and out of your house. You picture the HEPA filter as trapping in the pollutants. 

 

And think of things like carbon as zapping them and ultrasonic filtering systems, they extinguish the poisons and it will make a difference in your indoor air environment. And by the way, once you have a filter, and you get the chance to change the filter when you turn it upside down and you see how much it captures next trivialize that stuff, just as you escaped breathing that right when you see it, there are very few things you can do to really illustrate air quality. And that’s a great one. You know, it’s just turn your filter over and look at all the stuff I captured. It’s amazing. It’s horrifying, really. My father used to say either biofilter or be a filter. And

 

34:35

 

it’s so true. You either buy one or you are one. And so that goes for water too, right? It’s air, water, food, shelter, you know, these are the things we need to worry about. And if we get your basic human needs down pat, then you can start optimizing and be amazed at the energy vitality, and longevity you will add years to your life with these simple solutions. You have two little boys right? I do two and four. Yep. Okay, so when your boys are in school

 

35:00 Anna De Simone

 

And they come home and say, Dad, I don’t like the way these kids are talking to me. Are you gonna say, either

 

35:08 Anna De Simone

 

filter or filter?

 

35:12 Anna De Simone 

 

I haven’t crossed that bridge yet. But I want to know how you’re going to teach your son how to take the high road when they’re in school. I don’t know. I love your metaphors. And I’m glad that your dad gave you that good advice. 

 

Okay, so don’t forget, you can go on my website, and I’m going to give you the email address for GREENGUARD dot org. And what that talked about, don’t forget, if you’re looking for a Mold Test, or if you know someone that might need one, it can be a lifesaver. www got mold.com and we have been speaking with its founder and inventor of the Add Home testing kit. Jason Earle. 

Jason

 

 thanks so much. Thanks for having me. And

 

35:57 Anna De Simone 

 

thank you for joining us today on the live in a home that pays you back podcast. We hope you tune in again where we’ll share more insider secrets so you get the absolute most out of your home. Check out entity someone’s award-winning book, live in a Home that pays you back. available at Amazon and major booksellers in print, audio, and ebooks. For more information is that ener D Simone dotnet. If you like what you heard, remember to follow live in a home that pays you back and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts