Ep 473: Your Home’s Air Quality Could Be Toxic! With David Milburn

If the air you breathe in your home isn’t healthy you may struggle with chronic sinus issues, allergies, rashes or it could be the underlying cause of your aches, pains and inflammation.  Air quality is an overlooked and often misunderstood challenge when it comes to achieving optimal health.  David Milburn is the VP for the Young Trust, a tech focused VC firm, and the CTO of Hypoallergenic Air, LLC aka HypoAir. At HypoAir, David has spent over 10 years solving some of the world’s worst air quality issues for clients ranging from aerospace manufacturing facilities to hospitals in Brooklyn. Over the last decade he’s assisted thousands of business owners, homeowners, and biohackers of all walks of life to solve their unique air quality challenges.  In this episode of The Health Fix Podcast Dr. Jannine Krause interviews David Milburn on tips and tricks to improve your home’s air quality. 

Resources From The Show:

• Free Air Quality Consults – hypo air.com/consultation
• Healthy New Home Wish List 
• Air Quality Testing – https://www.gotmold.com/

Our Partners

Podcast Transcript

5:05 – Air quality breakdown

6:00 – Mold

9:47 – Clues that your home may not be breathing well

17:46 – What to do if you suspect air quality is affecting your health and you live in an apartment

26:49 – Vehicle / traveling air quality

28:57 – Hotel air quality travel tips

31:24 – Different technologies used in HypoAir products

46:53 – Considerations if you’re building a new home

50:02 – Some bad air stories David has come across

56:49 – Air quality testing – The good and the bad

103:35 – Where to find HypoAir

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[Intro] Welcome to the Health Fix Podcast, where health junkies get their weekly

fix of tips, tools, and techniques to have limitless energy, sharp minds, and fit

physiques for life.

Hey health junkies, on this episode of the Health Fix Podcast, I’m interviewing

David Milburn from HypoAir on solving air quality challenges.

Air quality is a majorly over the challenge when it comes to optimizing

your health and actually it can be a root cause of why your health just doesn’t seem to improve.

And so this is a very important podcast. If you are struggling with mystery illness,

trying to figure out what’s going on with you, or you’re just not feeling your best.

So David is the VP for the Young Trust, a tech focused VC firm. And he’s the CTO of

hypoallergenic air LLC. So at hypo air, David has spent over 10

years solving some of the world’s worst air quality issues for

clients ranging from aerospace manufacturing to facilities of

hospitals like during COVID and trying to figure out air

stuff. Then he also has assisted thousands of business owners,

homeowners, biohackers from all walks of life, solve their

unique air quality challenges. And today we’re lucky to have

him on to share some stories as well as tips and tricks he’s recommending for improving

your home air quality. We dive deep in the mold, we talk a lot about just optimization

of airflow in the home and we talk about my favorite tool, the portable air angel that

can help with air quality while you’re traveling. I guarantee that you’re going to learn something

about air quality from this podcast. And if you don’t, you got to let me know. But nevertheless,

this is a good one. We do geek out. And I hope you enjoy it because you’re definitely,

I’m thinking going to learn something about air quality. So let’s introduce you to David

Millburn.

JANNINE: Hey, health junkies, I have David Milburn on and we’re going to be talking about air

quality because he has a company that he’s working for that I love their Hypo Air and

the Air Angel and can’t get enough of them. So that’s one of my little like, I can’t live

without things. So David, I’m excited. Welcome to Health Fix Podcast.

DAVID: Glad to be here. We like to have these longer conversations because it does get a little

complicated from time to time. So– 

JANNINE: Well, yeah, because the air quality for a lot of folks,

you know, folks will think like, yeah, well, I changed my filters in my my furnace.

Um, maybe like once every four years, you know.

DAVID: Yeah!  Exactly! It’s about 80% don’t on time.

So yeah, if you do, then you’re already ahead of the, the game.

And we do know people that have spent probably six figures on their health

and they’ve never changed their filter and their HVAC or they spent a lot of

money on like HEPA products and they’ve got like the cheapest home depot

filter possible in their HVAC.

So yeah, there’s a lot to learn.

A lot of this is just getting to know yourself,

how you interact with the environment,

but then also your home and the other places that you’re at

and how these things can affect us.

For a lot of people, air quality is just one piece

of the puzzle and maybe a really big piece for you

and maybe a really small piece and maybe just preventative.

For some people, it’s gonna be really a dramatic piece

to kind of the health journey.

So.

JANNINE: Absolutely, absolutely.

I personally always ask everybody,

like how’s the air in your home?

Have you seen your, did you look under your sinks recently?

You know, those kinds of things,

especially with my practice being in the Pacific Northwest.

But one of the things that I’m sure that you see

with a lot of folks is that they’re like,

but my house is clean, like a vacuum.

Like, why do I really need to worry about my air quality?

So tell it, like give us the scoop.

DAVID: Well, actually, we’ve been doing this.

– We’ve been doing this for about 15 years.

And for the 10 years, first 10 years,

we were focused on convincing commercial clients

that they did have a problem.

And that was a hard journey.

So we’ve worked with some of the biggest names in the world,

hospitals, aerospace, casinos.

But we kind of made the shift probably about five years ago

where we’re not gonna try to convince anyone

that they have an air quality issue.

We have all kinds of hundreds of free articles

and free resources, but we actually talk to primarily people

that know they have a problem

and tend to have really extreme problems.

So it’s not for everybody.

I would probably say 20-30% of our clients

are just trying to be preventative,

trying to be smart, trying to get ahead of problems.

But then we also kind of get referrals

for someone like the worst situations,

both for a home and for a business.

And so, yeah, we’re at the kind of stage in our business

where we’re not trying to say,

hey, there’s mysterious things in your air

that can affect you.

We’ll have these conversations.

We loved having these conversations

to get the education out there.

But we’re really here, just as another option, another tool with resources in order to solve

those problems.

And so, but I mean, back in up.

So with air quality, you breathe about a swimming pools of air every day, kind of the equivalent.

What’s in your air?

You often can’t smell, you often can’t see, you often can’t feel a direct immediate impact.

So it’s really tricky.

In the air quality industry, I think has oversimplified things and over-promised.

And so there’s a lot of confusion.

There’s a lot of like marketing fluff and marketing terms

that make it really confusing for everybody, myself included.

You go on some website and it’s like,

well, what are they saying?

(laughs)

But so you’re trying to navigate all this.

Sometimes it’s as simple as a filter

or like in your case, changing like an HVAC filter.

And if the home is built right,

then that maybe is all you need.

But what we’re finding is that our modern homes

and our modern structures are built almost with the opposite

response where the air quality is substantially worse than the outside air.

And with something like mold, you kind of alluded to that under the sinks.

You know, mold you’re going to naturally find outside, but we’re finding a very

disproportionate impact of mold on people’s health because of the extreme

concentrations found in our homes. And a lot of times like how we describe it is

outside, there’s all kinds of natural processes that are going to be suppressing

things like mold, viruses, purifying the air, filtering out things, all kinds of incredible

processes outside.

Inside there’s often nothing.

So a lot of times our homes are trapping contaminants indoors in the hope of being energy efficient.

And then something like mold is going to find its way into the house.

It’s in about 100% of homes.

But then if you add like a material like drywall with dampness, well, mold’s got a great place

to grow.

Mold is just one of those things.

Water-based bacteria is sometimes just as big a problem

for people.

They’re gonna be pretty indistinguishable,

but as far as their impact on you.

And for like the skeptics out there,

mold is gonna produce chemicals

that are literally used as bio-weapons in war.

So these are mycotoxins.

We often describe that as the sweat of the mold.

It’s not accurate, it kind of makes sense to a lot of people.

So you’ve got this living creature

that’s producing spores, kind of like a dandelion.

And then those spores are carrying this like sweat,

this liquid, mycotoxin.

And then they’re also off-gassing kind of these body odors,

these gases.

But mold is just one of those things.

But what we’re finding is the disproportionate concentration

that is then over-whelming the body.

And for some people, you don’t have the right genes,

you have other things going on in your life

that’s gonna make you more susceptible and more reactive.

And probably in, I wanna say 99% of our clients

over the years, they or someone in their house

is the only person in that family reacting to the environment.

So a lot of times it’s a very individual response.

That doesn’t mean it’s not good,

like bad for everybody or good for everybody,

but you tend to have a different reaction

to different sort of contaminants.

And it’s not just things like dust or pollen,

but it can be everything from chemicals off-gassing,

from that new car smell or paint to bacteria to the viruses.

There’s lots of things in our air that you can’t see.

So I don’t know if that’s a long-winded intro,

but it’s gonna be a very individualized, I guess,

experience both from your problems as well as the solutions.

And I’ll just, I guess I’ll tell you one more story.

Where sometimes purifying the air’s answer,

sometimes we’ve got, I remember one client,

they had a water heater installed without a vent.

So it was leaking poisonous gases.

So in that case, instead of trying to purify that,

let’s get that vent fixed.

So the poisonous gases are going out of the house.

You’re not bringing them in, you’re not breathing them.

So sometimes what we try to help our clients do

is identify potential structural issues

because just because it was built to code

or just because it looks right,

doesn’t necessarily mean it makes any logical sense at all.

So you kind of have to get to know your own home.

And then that way you can kind of get ahead

of all these problems.

And sometimes it’s a simple fix like that.

JANNINE: Interesting on the modern homes

because one of the things that we had happened,

and I’ll explain my situation,

and we’ll talk about modern construction a little more

because my house was wrapped completely in plastic.

And when I found that it was wrapped completely in plastic,

of course, my knowledge, I freaked out

because I’m like, oh my God, this house doesn’t breathe.

And I can see the condensation building up on the windows.

So I think what I’d love for folks to kind of get a sense of

is with modern construction, what kind of things could be clues

that perhaps you might wanna look into this a little bit

of course someone might be sick in the house.

But like what kind of other clues are we looking for?

Like what can folks sleuth out that maybe my health

doesn’t breathe well.

DAVID: If you have a home built in the last 100 years,

that’s a clue first of all.

So some of this is gonna be pretty easy.

Basically every home is gonna have its own challenges.

Things like moisture is gonna be a really big one.

So mold is not the biggest issue for everybody.

But again, we just see it as being such a huge problem

because of the current way homes are built.

And so part of that is where your home is.

So if your home’s in Florida,

it’s probably not worth taking a mold test

because you probably have mold.

So we probably wanna just focus on managing moisture.

So a little $5 humidity sensor,

you can get them on Amazon, you can get them on our website.

There’s nothing special about these.

You just wanna get some humidity sensors in your home.

You mentioned under the sinks,

Sometimes a leak detector can go a long ways.

So you don’t want standing water.

You don’t want water damage

because then that can facilitate either mold or bacteria

kind of taking root.

And you can kind of think about like a weed in your house.

So if you’ve got the nice soil for it to grow

and it’s gonna keep coming back.

And if you live in a place like Texas, Dubai, Australia,

some of these places where we have clients

and they’ve got humidity levels in their home,

80%, 90%, 98%, like extreme levels of humidity.

So if you live in someplace like the Northwest,

like what you were saying earlier,

sometimes that’s just making sure your roof

doesn’t have leaks,

making sure you run your bathroom exhaust fans efficiently

and a little humidity sensor is gonna give you

some indication of are you venting out that bathroom enough?

So you’re gonna wanna manage leaks,

but then some places it’s just the humidity in the air

is gonna be very conducive to mold growth.

And so you can either ventilate the house more

if you have central air.

You can use dehumidifiers potentially,

a whole home dehumidifier, those also grow mold

because you’re concentrating moisture.

But these are important steps.

But I guess the first thing though,

it’s just getting to know your home,

where it’s located,

because sometimes it’s what’s happening in the house,

sometimes it’s what the home is made of,

sometimes it’s what your neighbor’s doing.

Sometimes they’re smoking cigarettes

like every day at a certain time,

and then you have a really nifty HRV system

that’s pulling outside Aaron, which is unusual.

And that’s a good thing, right?

Except for when it’s bringing that cigarette smoke

into your house.

Or maybe it’s, you know, you live near a busy highway

and the air quality during rush hour is 50 times worse

than an hour before.

So the air is very dynamic inside and outside

and it’s just getting to know where that house is.

Your air quality at your home and in your backyard

is gonna be different than a cross town

or in a different city or down the street even.

So the topography, the proximity

is all gonna come into play

with what’s in your air at that moment.

And it’s not necessarily just like,

oh, your air is green, it’s really good.

It’s probably gonna be a mix of things.

A lot of it’s gonna be good, maybe there’s some mold,

maybe there’s some pollen in it.

And so you wanna just take the good and get rid of the bad.

But it’s just coming to get to know your house.

For some folks, it’s gonna be things like,

if you have central air, changeing the filter,

That’s a good one.

But it’s getting to know your HVAC system.

Sometimes we hear people you moved into a house,

no one ever told you where the HVAC system was,

no one ever told you the tonnage,

no one ever gave you an education on these things.

And so don’t feel like you’re ignorant or something.

It’s just no one ever taught you.

And it’s something that you can look into

because for a lot of folks,

your HVAC system is located in these kind of extra spaces.

So they’ll put it in an attic or a crawl space

or in a basement or something like that.

And a lot of times, those extra spaces are not finished.

So they don’t wanna spend the money

when they build the home to insulate the attic

or to even treat the attic, like the to heat or cool the attic.

And so in a place like Florida, it’s extremely common

for the HVAC to be located in these uninsulated attics

that are very prone to mold growth.

And I had one client, she built a brand new home,

platinum lead certified, which is kind of like the best

of the best modern like energy efficiency and everything.

And within about two months, she had black mold in her attic.

And that’s where her HVAC was.

And so it’s just the way we build our homes

doesn’t necessarily is conducive to air quality.

And with something like a central air system,

the people that install those are often very well

educated, very professional, but their focus is on energy efficiency and temperature, not

air quality at all.

And so you could have someone that’s been installing HVACs for 40, 50 years, and they

know next to nothing about air quality or mold.

And yet their system is going to be extremely susceptible to mold growth inside of the HVAC,

like on the coils or in that attic or in the basement.

And eventually over time, those contaminants in a place like the attic can get into the

back and affect you. Now, if you have a crawl space, about 50% of your air is coming from

that crawl space in that first floor due to the stacking effect. And so these extra spaces

are going to affect you. And then something like a multifamily home has its own challenges,

because you could be super careful in your unit, then the person below you, maybe they’re not so

careful. Maybe they use detergents that you’re reactive to, maybe they run their shower all day

without a vent on, maybe they smoke marijuana all day, you know? And those things are going

to be coming through the floorboards because as solid as the floor feels like to us, to

something like a chemical gas, eventually that’s going to come into your unit. So what do you

do? So yeah, so some of this that we focus on is getting to the root cause, understanding

it. And then if you can address it there, otherwise you got to do things like exhaust

the bad air or purify it or reintroduce natural processes found outside to suppress mold growth

or to get rid of it or, you know, to break down VOCs.

So there’s lots of solutions,

but it just starts with kind of getting to know your place.

And a lot of us have had that like experience

and you mentioned it like, how’s your air at home?

But a lot of us have had an experience

where you’re like, oh, I feel worse in this position

or this room or something.

And it’s not until years later, you’re like,

oh, I wonder if something was in the air.

Like, I wonder if something was affecting me.

But I mean, I personally have had that experience

that I’ve talked to a lot of clients that it just,

it wasn’t until a long time later

that you kind of connect the dots on,

oh, I feel really like brain foggy in that space

or I sneeze a lot there.

Maybe there’s something I can do about it.

So yeah, it’s just kind of getting to know your space

and then you can find the appropriate tool to fix it.

JANNINE: Well, I mean, the way I kind of look at it now

is it’s part of your overall health.

You have to know what’s going on.

But yes, I mean, for many people,

it doesn’t come to later.

It’s like, man, every time I leave my house,

I feel amazing, you know?

Every time I go in there, it’s the same name, right?

DAVID: Well, right.

Yeah, maybe there’s a reason.

Yeah.

And maybe there’s something you could do about it.

‘Cause like, that’s one of the big things for us is,

you know, in my own personal experiences

years ago in college, I was working overseas.

And I just thought I had to deal with it.

I was very reactive to a room.

It was probably mold.

It was a very moist environment in Africa.

And at the time, I just thought,

yeah, I’m a young, young college kid.

It’s just allergies.

I just, you know, I just deal with it, you know?

And looking back, it’s like,

Well, there’s things I could have done.

And so it’s understanding that there’s a problem

and then there’s things that you could do

to reduce your exposure.

And I think it’s a lot easier for people to think of like food.

Okay, reduce the toxins in food or water,

reduce the toxins in water.

Air, you can also do the same thing.

And you wanna reduce your exposure to those toxins.

JANNINE: So one of the things you mentioned,

like being in college, obviously college students

in dorm rooms, right?

DAVID: Yep.

JANNINE: There’s that.

Now add that to– that’s tricky.

You could add that to also things like apartments,

like big high-rise apartments.

I’ve had a couple of patients in like 100,

yeah, like big plus 100 plus unit places

and they’ve got mold and it’s all connected

and their apartment, like let’s say owners, managers,

whatever, they’re like, yeah, that’s not a problem.

DAVID:  Right, yep.

JANNINE: What do we do in this case?

Like what have you guys done in terms of helping clients out

in that department?

DAVID: Right, yeah.

And I’ll tell you some stories there.

And I’ll also give you a plug for the free consultations.

like hypoair.com/consult.

A lot of times it’s talking through those situations

totally free, you know, whether it’s your daughter

or you or somebody, you know, reach out to us,

tell us what’s going on, and we can either give you

articles on your legal rights as a tenant

to practical solutions, and then we can also figure out,

hey, can you move?

Maybe it’s a really bad situation, maybe that’s best,

or hey, you’re gonna be there for three months,

let’s just kind of triage or what the situation is.

So as far as like Dorm room,

my favorite story that always stuck with me

is I was talking to a lady and she said,

every time her, the AC came on in the Dorm room,

it smelled like an old man.

And I don’t know if that’s mold,

I don’t know if that’s, you know, VOCs,

I’m not exactly sure what that is.

It could be a few things.

But in a case like that,

you don’t have control of your,

the air coming into your unit.

And that’s a problem

because the air is gonna be coming in at a pre-high velocity.

What you don’t wanna do is another client in New York

was saran wrapping all the vents

and is how New York high rise.

And so he was trying to seal off the bad air,

but he was also trapping all the bad air,

which was probably resulting in an even worse effect.

And so in the case of like that one dorm,

if you have a window mounted AC,

the first thing we recommend is we’ve got an article

that outlines how to clean that AC.

So you can take some matters into your own hands,

clean that AC if you can open windows.

Sometimes that’s gonna be a good option for you.

If it’s a vent coming out of the wall,

sometimes it’s something like buying bulk carbon media,

cutting it out and taping it over that vent.

And so sometimes it’s trying to have

like a first line of defense against that air.

And that would be true of some offices

that we’ve talked to where the office unit

that you’re renting or your businesses in

has a common like plenum or common AC

that’s shared by multiple systems.

Well, sometimes putting a filter over that vent

is gonna be a good way to protect you.

That’s not a good way to treat the error in the HVAC system,

but it can help protect you.

Now, in your home, I wouldn’t recommend that

because in your home, you wanna deal with it

at the source, kind of at the root.

And we have a unit that installs inside of that

and can basically convert the HVAC into an air purifier.

But when it’s not yours,

You want to put that filter over that vent sometimes.

So you’re absorbing chemicals and particulates

as it flies into your unit.

‘Cause you can buy in a really expensive HEPA unit,

run on turbo speed, but the air coming out of that vent

is going very, very fast.

And so you may have less than a second

to purify something coming out of that vent.

And no unit on Earth is gonna be real practical

to suck that out before you breathe it.

So you wanna try to trap it out the source

before it comes into your unit

in the case of like a dorm or an apartment.

Now with an apartment most of the time, not all the time,

but I would say probably 95% of the people I speak to

in apartments and condos have a separate system

for their unit.

It may be a really small one.

It may be something called like a mini split

or maybe it’s in a closet.

Or this is same would be true of a hotel room.

And so in that case, you can take ownership over your unit

and you can use something like an Air Angel, one

of our units. You plug it in near the intake vent. You change the filter yourself. You

get carbon into that filter so you can absorb some chemicals. Sometimes you can take control

if it’s in your unit. We had one client in, I think also in New York, that she had a high

end apartment or whatever, but she had no control. It was just a vent coming into her unit and

she installed in the duct with one of our systems in the duct that fed to her system.

things that you could do on your own without building management’s knowledge or buy-in

doesn’t matter because it’s not going to have any negative effect on the system.

You’re not going to be cutting or screwing or damaging or anything like that.

You’re only going to be improving things.

And then sometimes it’s advocating for yourself.

It’s moving units.

Sometimes building management is all in.

They don’t want the liability.

They don’t want mold.

Sometimes they’ll actually take good steps.

But I’ve had a few clients that are bought in for their own home and they’re like, you

know what, I’ve got a rental.

I should do that for them.

That’s rare.

We definitely have people that are being intentional now as like the landlord because

they’re seeing the benefits to themselves as far as liability and long term cost, but

then also to the people there.

But yeah, there’s just so many situations and so many interesting setups.

Like we’ve had things like, hey, my neighbor makes spices

in their bathtub and the smell is coming through the pipes.

Like, OK, that’s interesting.

So let’s talk about that.

And so then there’s things that you could do that.

One of the pitfalls we do see in multifamily

is people may use their vents too much to exhaust bad air.

But one of the problems with that is every time you push air

out, you’re creating a suction.

So air kind of acts a lot like water in some ways.

So it’s really hard to visualize some of these things,

but if you run your bathroom and exhaust fan

in an apartment too long,

you’re sucking air from somewhere else.

And so what we’d recommend is opening the window,

maybe putting a filter in the window,

so we have window mounted filters,

we have nanofiber window screens.

So you wanna crack that window

so you’re being intentional with where the air is coming from.

Otherwise, what you may be doing

is the opposite of what you’re trying to do.

and you’re actually sucking air from your neighbor’s unit

or from the laundry room down the hall

because our rooms are not fully sealed.

You mentioned the problems with like

seemingly too much moisture in our walls,

but the cracks in the windows, cracks in the doors

are also going to allow air to come in.

So we kind of have the worst of both worlds

where we’re trapping moisture in a lot of contaminants,

but then we’re also have unintentional sources

of air coming into our unit.

Things like from that water heater closet or from your neighbors, you know,

laundry room or from the floor or from a crawl space that’s moldy.

And so anytime you’re venting air out, you just want to be intentional where

you’re pulling air in. And so we would prefer to filter that ideally from the

outside. So you’re making up for that air.

JANNINE: Wow.

So it does behoove you to really understand your air system in your house.

And that’s, I’m guessing where you guys help folks to really nail this down.

Cause I’m– 

DAVID: We’re trying, yeah, we’re trying. Yeah.

Because there’s a lot of things that when we first get into this, a lot of people, you’ve

got this big unit outside of your home.

It’s got a big fan.

Well the air’s coming through that, right?

Well, no, it’s not actually.

That’s the condenser outside.

There’s no airflow from that in 99% of the cases.

In most homes you have a closed circuit of some sort where there’s no outside air coming

in at all.

It’s just recirculating the air.

That would be true of a window mounted AC system in most cases where you’ve got a portion

of it that’s outside for the heat exchange, but it’s just recirculating the air inside.

And so that’d be true of most hotel rooms, you know, and we could talk about tips for

travel if you want, but you know, like these, these bases are really tricky. But anytime

you have a heating or cooling device of some sort with event, we want to pay attention

of that because a lot of those are going to be problematic for air quality, but they could

be one of your best tools for air quality because they’re moving a lot of air.

We work with clients around the world and central air, kind of like the HVAC systems,

is pretty unique to North America.

So if you’re in France or Dubai or something like that, it’s very unusual to have central

air systems.

But even systems that are going to be covering one room, you still want to pay attention

to that because a lot of times that’s going to be a damp, dark environment.

A lot of times, you know, they have no filter or they’ve got a super cheap filter that’s

never been changed.

Um, but you want to just pay attention to these heating and cooling systems in our houses.

JANNNE: Okay.

That’s huge.

That’s huge.

You know, one of the things you mentioned is travel.

And this is where I have the air angel for in particular because I do rental cars.

We do rental homes as we travel and the heating and cooling in a rental car can be atrocious

sometimes.

And, and the fact that you can plug it in, let’s tell folks a little bit about the

air in a car and traveling with sensitivities in addition to like, like–

DAVID: Yeah.

Yeah.

So any vehicles going to have all the same challenges that a fixed structure

has plus some.

So it’s going to have its own little kind of HVAC system.

It’s going to have off-gassing VOCs.

It could have mold, it could have bacteria, it could have any number of these

things. And then you add in the complexity of, okay, you park the car outside in the snow

or something like that, or you park it in a garage, attached garage is one of the biggest

sources of chemicals in your house. But now you throw in rentals. So anytime that you’re

renting something, you don’t get to make most of choices. So if it’s your car, if it’s your

mountain cabin or something, well, you can make some choices. But if you’re renting a car or

you’re renting a VRBO or a hotel room, you don’t know what you’re going to step into.

So depending on how long you’re going to be in that space,

it’s going to kind of change a little bit of how we approach it.

In the short term, we’re just going to say vent as much as you can,

get it fresh air as much as you can, roll down the windows,

you know, if you can.

That would be true in a hotel room or an Airbnb or a car if you can.

Try to get rid of some of what’s in there,

because it could be cigarette smoke, it could be new car smell,

it could be a brand new car.

It could be something like mold.

And then if you can’t vent, like you can’t open the window,

it’s raining, it’s snowing, it’s cold, it’s hot,

then you have to purify.

So that’s where some like the Air Angel could come in,

it uses multiple technologies.

We can talk about some of those technologies if you want,

but the idea with that is just to give you a tool

for on the go, whether it’s plugged into a cigarette lighter

or into a hotel room, or in the case of like an Airbnb,

what we recommend is just focusing on the bedroom.

You’re not gonna fix all the problems in that house,

but just focus on the bedroom to try to create

like a safe place as much as possible for you to sleep.

And so you want to mitigate your exposure,

reduce concentrations of mold spores, bacteria, chemicals,

you know, particles that wanna reduce your exposure

to those things.

You’re not trying to solve the issue in the rental car,

you’re just trying to protect yourself.

And when it comes to like a hotel,

so like our favorite travel tip is just to ask the hotel

if they have options because we’ve worked with some really,

really high end hotels over the years and they have a lot of money and they

never spend it on all of their hotel rooms.

So what they do is they will buy some air purifiers or a few rooms of their

hotel for problem people like you guys.

So they want to have some rooms available for when someone walks into a room and

they say, wow, this stinks.

Like this smells like mold.

This smells like, you know, chemicals.

I can’t sleep here.

So then they’ve got sometimes different rooms.

They might even have hardwood floors,

most of them have carpets.

They might even use different cleaning products

or different bedding.

They might have units like ours installed

in the HVAC systems.

Maybe they have Costco, Hepa, or Purifiers.

So like whatever, maybe they’ve got some things.

But if you ask, sometimes they have some options for you.

And then that at least is a better starting point.

Then you can do things like open the windows

or some other things you can do.

you can ask them to change the filter in your system.

Maybe they forgot to do that for a while.

So maybe you asked the, you know,

made service or something to change the filter

in your little unit in the system.

And then with something like an air angel,

it’s only about two pounds, very compact,

maybe, you know, seven inches by five inches or so

by three inches.

So very compact, you can take it in a suitcase with you.

Then you would plug that in, go out to dinner,

give it a chance to work.

because a hotel room after clean is the highest VOCs

we’ve ever measured anywhere,

highest chemicals we ever measured.

You’re gonna have mold, bacteria,

don’t turn a black light on.

I mean, there’s a lot going on there, right?

So you wanna get the Air Angel a chance to work

and then if possible go out to dinner.

The same would be true of a rental car.

Try to give it a chance to work

because you just don’t know how dirty that space is.

JANNINE: Yeah, yeah, there’s some things

we definitely don’t want to think about the black lights

and hotel room. No.

DAVID: Sorry. Yeah.

JANNINE: So let’s talk about that for a second, the hypo air and

it’s technology because I think for a lot of folks, you know,

they might be interested. Well, at least a lot. I talk about it

because it’s something that I take with me all the time

traveling. And so if we’re thinking about the ionizer in it,

the like, let’s, let’s just go– 

DAVID: Yeah. 

JANNINE: Cause people are like, “it smells

funny. What is that?”

DAVID: So yeah, so we use lots of different technologies for different products and

different applications.

I’ll put that out there.

Um, there’s no silver bullet technology for all air quality issues.

Um, the air angel has two primary technologies in it.

We have other products.

So that’s one product on our website.

You can contact us if you get confused.

But, um, so we, we have the polar ionization technology in there, which is,

um, one of the challenges in the air quality space is they take something

like negative oxygen ionization,

and then they call that ionizers.

Well, they’ve kind of branded one segment of ions,

and it kind of confuses everybody.

So this is not a typical ionizer,

in that it’s not producing negative oxygen ions only.

It’s also producing positive hydrogen.

So with a lot of ionizers in the past,

and there’s some famous lawsuits,

it was just producing high concentrations

of negative oxygen.

Well, the problem with that is that leads to ozone production.

It leads to a buildup of static because you’re only producing negative.

And it’s not natural.

So all the technologies that we focus on and we’re an R&D company are trying to

replicate what happens outside.

So, you know, despite what a lot of articles over the years have said, you know,

you go by water, you measure a bunch of negative ions.

Well, if you actually go by water, you actually measure negative and positive

ions.

And there’s a lot of other ions taking place outside, tons and tons and tons.

And we even have an article not to get sidetracked

on our site about ancient building methods

and how they use lime plaster

and how it produced ions when they applied it.

So there’s all kinds of ionization taking place outside

and through natural processes.

But going back to polarization, the Air Angel,

that’s splitting water into positive hydrogen

and negative oxygen.

It’s non-ozone producing.

And it’s very effective in its ability

to not just suppress growth of something

like a mold on a surface as well as the air.

It can also disable things like viruses or bacteria,

but it’s also able to help with the particulates.

So with mold getting back to that whole conversation

of mold kind of like a weed or a dandelion,

and it’s putting out all these little dandelion spores,

and then those spores, if you killed them all,

you killed everything and you wait two to three years

and you come back into the unit,

well, those fragments are still there.

They haven’t evaporated.

And those fragments still carry that sweat,

that micro toxin sweat, that liquid.

And so then if you walk on the carpet,

you’re kicking up those pieces of that dandelion

or those fragments of those little dandelion brushes.

And then the smaller they are,

the longer they can stay airborne,

you can’t see these typically.

Then you can breathe them in,

and then that’s kind of the vector

for you kind of ingesting that sweat,

those bio-weapons essentially.

And so what the polar ionization is able to do

is to be able to naturally suppress growth,

but then also remove particulates from the air.

And so it has multiple modes of action with something like that.

And then the Air Angel also has a different technology called AppCo,

which the short answer is it’s our proprietary version of a PCO,

photocatalytic oxidation technology.

The reason why we have it in the Air Angel is it’s really good against chemicals.

And so in your home,

a lot of times you can make choices about the cleaning products you use,

the detergents you use, the paints you use,

but in that hotel room or that car, you don’t get to make those choices.

So the app code provides a much stronger efficacy

against complex chemicals.

It’s the same technology we use in something like a casino

or sewage plate.

And so we combine those technologies for that application.

So it’s both compact but effective for something

like hotel room, car, RV, boat.

But then over the years, what we found is,

even though we designed it primarily for travel,

the air angel, most people don’t just use it once a year,

when they go to a hotel, they use that.

They’re home all the time.

So we just kind of kept it along as like a primary bedroom unit for larger bedrooms.

And then you can also do things like if you have an apartment or in the case of a hotel

room, if there’s a central air system inside that unit where there’s a closet with a vent,

you can put the air angel near the intake and then basically you’re purifying the air

as it goes into that HVAC system and sanitizing it, helping improve the efficacy of that filter.

And then as it’s coming back out, the polarization can continue to come back into the unit.

So that’s a way to maximize the efficacy of something like the air angel, whether it’s

at home or when you’re traveling.

But yeah, so those are two technologies.

Something like HEPA, we can talk about HEPA if you want.

HEPA is just one kind of rating system for a mechanical filter.

If you can travel with a giant bulky HEPA filter in your suitcase, more power to you,

it would only be a good thing.

But a lot of times it’s not necessary and it’s not practical when you’re on the go.

And it’s only going to be as effective as the air you can force through it.

And so HEPA is one tool, but it’s only one tool.

And the air quality industry is kind of latched onto the term HEPA because people will buy

it so they put HEPA everywhere.

Sometimes it actually means HEPA.

Sometimes it doesn’t mean HEPA.

Sometimes they add other terms like super mega ultra HEPA.

But it’s just HEPA.

It’s just, HEPA has a rating system.

It’s very standardized.

So you have got a grade of HEPA like an H11, H13, H12.

And it’s not the greatest version of purifiers either.

So UOPA filters are even denser.

Most residential applications don’t need a UOPA filter.

And so you just want to find the right tool for the job.

Something like UV light can be a beneficial technology.

But when it comes to like mold, well maybe you kill that dandelion, but you haven’t evaporated

the dandelion.

like annihilated it from existence. So you’ve just killed the weed and then all the pieces

are still there, all those mycotoxins are still there. And so UV can be an effective tool,

but it’s not the only tool. Same with, for like an HVAC application. You don’t want

to just kill the thing and just leave a bunch of pieces everywhere. You want to naturally

suppress and UV sunlight is a good thing, but naturally suppress and then remove particulates

and something like chemical, it’s totally different. Something like carbon can absorb

chemicals, but I just talked to a client, I’ll be a little vague because his application

was unique, but he was using carbon in his home and he hadn’t changed it for several

years. And he was doing it to be a good thing. But the problem with that is carbon is going

to act like a kitchen sponge. It’s going to absorb chemicals. And then once it’s full,

it’s full. It’s going to be actually leaking chemicals. And so he probably had a negative

benefit, the opposite of a benefit from his carbon because he hadn’t changed it for years.

And so it had just concentrated the chemicals there and now it was probably off-gassing.

And with something like radon that’s even more dangerous because now you’re concentrating

something that makes it even more potent. But yeah, so all that to say, Air Angel has those two

technologies, polarization and APCO, specifically for the needs that we see for residential homes

and then travel without the bulky side of things like a large HEPA unit.

You can combine that with any other HEPA product, physical filter, HVAC system,

to get a fast removal particulates, a lot of times it’s not necessary.

But you can combine technologies to get different benefits and speeds and removals.

JANNINE: I think for a lot of people, they wouldn’t have even thought about the combination,

right? Because we’re kind of sold on you need the filter or you need the machine,

You know, or you also have the implanted ones too.

But I think multi factorial makes sense.

It makes sense.

DAVID: Yeah, more redundancies is better.

It’s often not necessary or cost effective.

Um, when I talk to someone, I’ve got a bunch of kids myself, like they’ve got a sick kid

and that kid is reacting.

We’re going to recommend throw everything at that situation that you can possibly

handle and just be a weirdo about it until you can get relief. And so you’re going to combine

every technology, every possible solution, mitigate every potential source of reactivity

until you can get relief. Because it’s not just about, okay, this technology does x, y, z,

but it’s how fast does it do that? And if you’re walking on the carpet or if you’re laying in the

the bed or it’s you’re breathing there in the HVAC system.

I mean, it’s a little bit more complicated in the real world.

So you want to provide the right solutions.

And when you’ve got someone sick,

yourself or someone in your family,

you want to check off all the boxes possible.

And the same would be true if we’re working

with an operating room.

The levels of redundancy that we want there

is going to be greater than your bedroom.

It doesn’t make sense to spend all the money in your bedroom

that we would want in an operating room.

It’s not necessary.

It may not even be beneficial.

It’s just extra redundancies.

But when you’re talking about an operating room,

you want to go to a more extreme degree of removal.

So yeah, you’ve got to kind of balance goals,

sensitivities, budgets, and we have people that,

you’ve got a lot going on in your life.

You’ve spent a lot of money already on things.

You don’t have a ton of money you spend on this.

So is XYZ mold test a good thing?

Yeah, it’s probably a good thing,

but maybe that’s not spend the money on that.

Or maybe you don’t even spend the money in the Air Angel.

Maybe you’re only in the apartment for three months,

and you’ve got a hundred bucks to spend.

Let’s open the windows, let’s make your own lime wash,

let’s maybe get a mold guard in the bathroom.

Like maybe there’s like shortcuts that you can take

that are more practical for life

than just, you know, burning your house down

and starting over or something like that.

And then, you know, so like we have to kind of meet you

where you’re at.

There’s a lot of things we’d love for people to do.

And sometimes it’s like, we wish you could move

because your home was like so extremely built

for bad air quality, but they’re not gonna move.

They’ve been there for 30, 40 years.

Maybe they don’t have a lot of money.

Maybe it’s a family thing.

Well, we gotta mitigate as much as we can where you’re at

and then you can use different tools to do that.

So yeah, a lot of times something like a HEPA product

is gonna be very impractical for a home.

To cover probably the average home you’re probably looking at.

I don’t know.

$3,000, $4,000 upfront cost to get HEPA,

this sufficiently cover a house.

And that’s just upfront.

That’s just without the filters.

And a lot of times if you have the greatest HEPA on earth

in your bedroom and then you’ve got a humid bathroom,

well that HEPA’s not having any impact

in the mold growing in that bathroom.

It’s not even killing mold in the filter.

So you’re trapping mold in the HEPA

and then potentially feeding it more organic matter

and then continues to grow.

So, HEPA is a great tool, but it’s not the only one.

And a lot of times it’s not practical for the fit.

And that’s why we stress the HVAC,

because we know people that spent

four or $5,000 on HEPA,

and they’ve got the cheapest Home Depot filter.

I think I mentioned that.

But that HVAC system is probably moving

five to 10 times as much air

as all their units combined.

And the benefit is only for how much air

you can force through that thing.

So, not all the air, not all the contaminants

up to go through a filter. Even if you look at like a ceiling fan, to like put it in perspective,

like a thousand dollar happy air pure fire probably moves, let’s say 500 to 700 CFM of air on turbo

speed. Like when it’s on like, it sounds like a jet engine. Your HVAC system probably moves 1200

2400 CFM and it’s probably very quiet. Something like a ceiling fan can move something like 4,000 CFM,

10,000 C-FIM even ones on the high side. And if you look at how the air moves in a room with a

ceiling fan, it’s like stirring the air. Not all the air is like lining up to go through this. So

if you have a contaminant, it’s not just about how many times the air goes through it, but you have

to actually force that contaminant to go through the filter to have an impact. So it gets tricky.

But yeah, so these are just different tools, but you can think of something like a vacuum.

It’s just a vacuum for your air.

And the louder it is, probably the more effective it is.

The bigger it is, probably the more effective.

Because the diameter of a fan directly impacts how much air

can force through a system.

JANNINE: Wow.

So now I’m kind of thinking if someone’s going to build a house,

right? They’re getting ready to build a house.

It sounds like–

DAVID: We have a new home wish list, contact us.

[LAUGHS]

We could give you some free advice.

Yeah.

JANNINE: There you go.

Because yeah, I’m thinking like you do need

to think about all the factors, not just the HEPA,

something in the HVAC, you know, and the intake, you know, I never thought about the intake kind of

situation. 

DAVID: Well, like if you’re building a home, so just as like an example, so most homes that we

have kind of done the calculations on, their HVAC system was underpowered for their their home

and the filter size was too small. And so the analogy that works for me is sucking a milkshake

through a tiny straw, like the filter size is just physically too small. And so if you’re building a

home and you put a sufficient size filter in it, you could have a high grade HEPA in your HVAC

without adding pressure, which just has to have enough surface area. So a lot of times what they

do in commercial applications is instead of like having a filter like this where the

air is, it’s perpendicular to the airflow, that’ll look at V-bank or multiple V’s. And so you take

take the same filter, but you should take it like this and you put another one, same size.

Well, it’s twice the surface area. You can have twice the density of filtration without

adding any extra pressure to the system. So if you’re building a new home, we’re going

to say get a big, big filters, create a V-bank yourself. There’s a company called– very

expensive V-bank Filter that you could do yourself. So you can look at that. But there’s

all kinds of commercial applications. But basically, you just want the V-bank where you have

maximized surface area. And I have a colleague that when we ran the calculations on her HVAC system,

it was too small. And she was able to spend 50 bucks at like Home Depot, and she’s very,

you know, do it yourself her. And she added a second return filter, the kind of in the box

that she had. So she doubled her surface area. And she was able to double the density of the filter.

or she can, so you’re getting like significantly more filtration without adding density and

pressure.

Because what you don’t want is to take your existing HVAC filter and you go on the hyper

side and you buy a Mer 14 with carbon and you break your system because you’re putting

too much density in that HVAC filter that your fan system wasn’t designed for and the

surface area isn’t big enough.

That straw is not big enough.

So you have to find ways to increase the size a lot of times to have a better density filter

JANNINE: Another reason how folks consult with you because these are things that I don’t think I’ve ever thought about

You can have a huge event. 

DAVID: I mean our ideal is that if you have central air

That’s the only air

filter purifier in your entire house and

It’s gonna be

financially more powerful than trying to put a bunch of bandaid approaches to the existing way we build homes.

Now, the majority of us have to bandaid approach our homes.

And that’s where our focus is right now.

But if you’re building home from scratch, there’s a lot you could do with the materials, the types of systems that you put in place,

and then just being a little intentional with air quality.

Architects are not thinking about this.

HVAC contractors are not thinking about this.

And things like those extra spaces, like let’s not put a unfinished attic in your house in a human environment and then put your the lungs of your home, your HVAC system in the attic.

Let’s not do that. Let’s find ways to either treat that space, you know, insulate the top because a lot of times with a attic, what they do is they they they they insulate kind of my thumbs down here.

And then the roof up here is totally uninsulated. So a lot of humidity moisture temperature is all getting up in there.

And depending on where you live, maybe there’s a benefit to vent.

Maybe there’s a benefit not to vent that attic.

There’s a lot of its geography, but, you know, we don’t want just this extra space.

That’s unfinished that, you know, you’ve got a, I think in New Jersey, if you get bats in your attic,

you’re legally not allowed to remove them.

So like I don’t want client, they’ve got, they’ve got bats in their attic, you know, like, and it’s like, uh, it’s like a thing you have to keep, you know, until like once a year or something like that.

So like there’s all kinds of situations you run into let’s not have those extra spaces that are gonna affect your air if you can help it

Yeah. 

JANNINE: Oh my goodness. I do not want bats in the belfry of anywhere by me.

Oh my goodness Wow, well hopefully folks you guys know where you’re at in your rules, but boy

I think I think everybody needs to do a consult with you guys just to know like what what are they up against?

DAVID: It’s the thing is like we wish it was simpler. We wish we just had like this one product and

You know don’t worry about all this just buy that one thing, you know, but like it’s just not the case

You know cuz like we have people that

The reason why we have nano fiber window screens so like they replace an insect screen is because I

Personally talked to another people in our company was talking to people that the only way they’re cool their house is opening the windows

And they happen to live next to a train station. They live next to a farm

they live next to a busy road or a port. Well, let’s not just let that come straight into the house.

Let’s find technologies to put in the window to filter it as it comes in. Then you can exhaust

the bad air on the other side and then also cool the house all at the same time. But for a lot of

people, this whole central air conversation is completely meaningless because you’re not central

air. But for some people, it’s going to be like the critical thing. So we do encourage people to

to reach out and we learn from our clients every week. Again, we’ve been doing this for

15 years or so. Every week we hear a question, a situation that’s totally new. Never heard

of that before. And we go, “It’s interesting. How should we solve that.” And so that’s

where a lot of our patents come from. Our IP is just hearing these situations that people

find themselves in and trying to solve for them.

JANNINE: That’s neat. That’s neat. I mean, I, I’m sure that you’ve got some pretty darn good stories of wild stuff.

DAVID: I’ve heard some wild ones. Yeah, that’s for sure.

JANNINE: Okay. What’s your most wild one?

DAVID: Honestly, I don’t know. We hear so many. And we hear so, so many situations.

And we don’t want to apply any like fear tactics to any of this. You know, like we never want to crumb across as that.

And we have to be a little careful because we hear the horror stories like we hear like some of the more extreme scenarios where it’s like yeah

It’s like 98% humidity and there’s a leak in the wall and there’s mold in the HVAC and you know like these extreme scenarios like we have people that

I remember one lady. She lived out in the desert

The only way she cooled her house like 115 degrees opening the windows. She has a wood

Word furnace to heat the unit in her living room with no vent

She’s got like no winter screens no money

No airflow no kitchen vent no bathroom vents like it’s just like the way the home is made the neighbors

I mean, it’s like it’s just bad situations, right?

You know we have people that live like next to steel factories

You know next to like something like a farm is probably most of the time really a good place to live

but when they’re spraying pesticides, not as good a place. So it’s like trying to kind of understand

the dynamic elements with where you live can go a long ways. But yeah, I mean, we hear all kinds

of stuff. And again, like we talk about mold a lot. It’s not because mold is the worst thing out

there, but it’s just we hear mold having the worst impacts on people, both financially and

and health-wise because of just how extremely overlooked it is.

And then you get these very, very unnatural concentrations.

So you go outside, you breathe mold.

But when you trap it indoors for years

and you create like the perfect environment for it to grow.

‘Cause like, I mean, we have people that,

oh, and just to go back to the humidity sensor conversation,

anything above 60 is starting to become

a nice place for mold to grow.

You know, we prefer to be under 50.

You don’t want it to be too low

or you have your own issues with low humidity.

But once you’re getting above 60,

the issue is that yeah, there’s humidity in the air,

but also surfaces are staying damp longer.

So you take a shower, the towels are still damp

like a while later.

Well, the surfaces aren’t drying out.

And so something like a leak

or even just the natural moisture from a shower or otherwise

is gonna be conducive to mold.

And yeah, we have people that it’s like 80, like all the time.

And so it’s like, you can’t get rid of this.

And we’ve worked with places like winery aging sellers,

where they’ve got a cave that’s like a–

they’ve been doing it for like 100 years.

And they have to keep the humidity at like,

I want to say like 64.

And they’ve got these really expensive like barrels

or something like barrels of wine.

And if you get black mold on it, you ruin the entire barrel.

And so you can’t get rid of the humidity.

It’s a cave.

So it’s a very musty, stale environment.

So you have to then introduce natural suppression,

technologies that are gonna kill mold,

suppress it, stop cross-contamination.

But yeah, I mean, things like casinos we’ve worked with,

I mean, those are gonna be horrendous situations.

And yeah, we work with a lot of homeowners,

but yeah, the commercial clients deal with

incredible issues.

And like a casino is bad air quality, for sure.

But then you go underneath the casino,

a lot of times it’s where the offices are,

it’s even worse.

And so that’s where a lot of times the staff are.

And these are really really really bad environments

that a lot of times the ownership doesn’t care about,

but the individuals trying to protect themselves.

Those are tricky situations.

Like people that work in race car garages

or 3D printing labs,

like a lot of times these commercial applications

are gonna lead to very extreme exposure

to search and contaminants.

And then if your home is in proximity

to these types of operations,

and that has its own challenges.

But yeah, I mean, I’ve heard things like HRVs and ERVs

are systems that bring outside air into the home,

and they try to conserve energy.

It’s really a good thing theoretically.

They’re still pretty new in the US for homes.

A lot of businesses are forced to have them.

But like, I remember one lady,

I think she was bringing in smokey outside air

from maybe a neighbor.

And then the return for the HVAC,

the person that installed it was like,

oh, the bathrooms are a great place for it.

So they put a return, the only return vent

was in their bathroom with no filter.

And so all their air is sucking all the moisture,

all the smells, everything from the bathroom

back into their HVAC system,

and then mixing it with the, like,

I think it was cigarette smoke outside.

And so it’s like this system that theoretically

is a really good thing, like theoretically,

you want to be bringing in this fresh outside air,

in her case, it became like a really bad thing.

So, we hear those kinds of stuff all the time,

but yeah, and then we hear incredible stories

where you might be sleeping bad because of air quality,

maybe you’re watching too much news,

you’re worried about your kids,

but we hear really, really extreme health issues

that air quality is probably a piece of that,

and it’s hard to say how big a piece it is,

but really extreme, extreme, extreme life derailments.

the railments based off of their reactivity.

So yeah, we hear a lot of stuff like that.

So–

JANNINE: I’m sure.

I’m sure.

No, it’s so important to think about the air quality.

And gosh, David, you blew my mind

with a whole bunch of things.

I have to rethink my whole house now.

I think I’m going to have to call you guys

to figure this out.

DAVID: Well, you can be very successful.

I don’t want to–

we don’t want to oversimplify it.

We don’t want to make it so complicated.

It’s unattainable.

but you do have to kind of put your inspector hat on a little bit

because something like, we had one client where

the way the roof connected to the wall,

they had proper water ceiling all in the wall,

but the way the roof connected wasn’t.

And so the water from all the rain

was getting behind the water ceiling,

going all the way down their two-story home,

down to their basement.

So their entire walls were just behind the walls,

cover your mold, very, very expensive,

all because these people didn’t seal it right.

And so you want water sealing in all the right places,

but if you can get ahead of those issues,

keep an eye out for those kinds of things.

I can save you a lot of money down the line

and protect yourself too.

So yeah, but you kinda gotta put that inspector hat on.

There’s no really easy way around it.

And we haven’t talked about air quality testing,

But I don’t know, I’ll give you a quick blurb about that.

None of it’s perfect, none of it’s appropriate

for every situation, a lot of it’s very expensive,

a lot of it’s very impractical.

That’s a challenge.

In the future, hopefully it’s the near future,

we’re gonna have a device that’s better than a dog’s nose

and it’s gonna smell everything

and give you good readings, but right now it just doesn’t exist.

We’ve used multi-multi thousand dollar sensors

that measure chemicals in a casino

and they’ve registered zero parts per billion

’cause they’re not looking for the right chemicals.

Various types of mold tests are gonna be

pre-contaminated before you get it.

So even if you don’t take any swabs

and you send them to the lab, they’ve already got mold.

So you gotta be a little careful with some of that stuff.

You try to get something that’s too affordable.

A lot of times it’s gonna be very nonsensical.

It’s not going to give you a good perspective.

It may give you a lot of false positives, look very scary,

and maybe that’s not the truth of your situation.

We have people that come to us and they give us these reports,

they spent $2,000 on, and the report is useless.

It doesn’t tell you anything.

We like things like gotmold.com, I think, is the site.

They’ve got an air sampler.

That’s not gonna be for every situation either.

But a lot of things like Ermine,

things like that, we have lots of articles on our site

that break this down in greater detail.

If you don’t use them properly,

they’re gonna just really scare you

and they don’t get you any closer to a solution.

So unless you’re trying to convince a spouse or a landlord,

a lot of times we’re gonna say focus on the solutions,

especially if you’re getting a $5 humidity sensor

and it’s 70% in your bathroom.

Well, let’s focus on that versus spending $3, $4, $5, $600 on mold tests.

Because maybe that’s not feasible to really do.

But yeah, testing for chemicals is all but pointless at this point.

Any type of device that you buy that gives you like a TVOC reading,

I don’t think is real, super helpful.

It’s probably going to pick up things like synthetic fragrances that you

smell spray in the air. We talked about that if you want, but don’t add chemicals to the

air to make it smell better. But it can probably pick that up, but it’s not going to pick up

most chemicals. Things like a particulate sensor can be effective, but that’s only one thing. So

it’s only measuring that one thing. So there’s particulate sensors that are going to measure PM10

or PM2.5. And those can be pretty accurate. And that can give you like a kind of a general

slice of air quality.

We have some clients that maybe use it near a window

or something to pick up things outside.

So particulate sensors can be pretty good.

Sensors that are gonna look for something very specific,

like a carbon monoxide are highly recommended

and can be very effective and very affordable.

But it’s when you start to measure

kind of the full spectrum of what’s in your air,

but they’re just not there yet.

And something like mold is very tricky.

So that’s why we kind of focus on humidity

because if you can find the humidity or moisture,

you’re probably guaranteed to find mold at some point

versus maybe you’re measuring an Erme and it’s coming back,

like you’re already dead, like it’s so extreme.

Like, and maybe that’s more of a picture from the past.

Like you took a swab behind a refrigerator

that hasn’t been cleaned forever.

Maybe that’s not an accurate snapshot

of where you’re currently at

because we don’t want you to be overly scared.

So we tend to focus on trying to find tests

to give you accurate concentrations.

And then if possible, taking a benchmark outside.

So you kind of have like a,

okay, what do you expose to outside?

And then what’s inside?

Like how do these things line up

to kind of give you a more accurate view of your air?

But yeah, it can get you tricky.

So again, contact us,

but there’s articles on our site

that break down Ermy and Emma and air samples

and mold VOC test kits and all kinds of stuff out there.

You know, the grass is not always green or too.

So like the new place is not always better.

The new home construction is not always better.

The old home construction is not always better.

So a lot of times it’s just getting to know where you’re at

and taking practical steps to make it better.

JANNINE: Yeah.

And consulting with you guys to find out what they can do.

DAVID: We’re here if we can help, right?

And yeah, so it’s just, it varies so much

between you live in the city, you live in the high rise,

you live in the country, you live in the humid place,

the cold place, the dry place.

It’s going to change a lot.

But yeah, definitely reach out to us.

And we’re constantly trying to make new solutions.

Some are not going to be relevant for homes.

But we just brought out our total clean spray

where over the years we kept coming across,

oh, there’s so many chemicals in the air.

And probably the biggest contributor to that

was cleaning products in the home.

Not the only one, but there’s a lot.

And so yeah, we invest in lots of technologies and companies,

not just not just hyper or not just air purifiers.

And we had a company that was doing

the five largest waste treatment facilities in the US,

purifying water and purifying the air at trash dumps

and dumpsters and garbage trucks.

And so we brought out, it’s a patented iodine

copper-based formula.

It’s a spray, totally zero VOC, non-toxic.

And it’s just like another tool.

So is it relevant for everyone?

Maybe not, but like it’s another tool

to reduce the source of chemicals.

we’d rather not purify the air from chemicals,

we’d rather not be there in the first place.

So, just giving people another tool

to clean carpets, appliances, kitchen counters,

all kinds of stuff.

So we’re constantly trying to come up with new solutions

to address some of what we see as like gaps in the market.

And we hope to with that product,

specifically go after this industry

of adding chemicals to the air.

So instead of spraying something into the air

to mask an odor.

Let’s actually remove the odor and not add chemicals

and use something that’s non-toxic,

so that you’re not contributing to,

like the classic one is casinos,

where it’s getting rid of the smoke,

they add synthetic coconuts,

I know you have smoky coconut with extra chemicals,

and it’s like, this is the opposite,

like of how we wanna approach it.

And so with your home, we don’t want you doing that either.

We wanna get rid of the odors

without adding synthetic fragrances.

So– 

JANNINE: That’s cool. What’s the name of that product?

DAVID: It’s called Total Clean.

JANNINE: Total clean.

DAVID: Just a spray. We sell you there as a spray bottle or a concentrate that you can mix yourself.

So it’s another tool.

Very, very effective against organic odors and stains.

So any water safe surface as well as just airborne sprained, you can use it to clean.

JANNINE: Awesome.

Love it. Love finding stuff like that.

All right.

So let’s tell folks like hypoair.com.

And then of course for the consult, guys, we were talking about that.

That’s forward slash consult.

Now, are you guys on social media?

Are you anywhere else folks can find you?

If they want– 

DAVID: We’re pretty bad at social media, to be honest, but like we are in Instagram.

We’re on Facebook.

Um, it’s not our strong point.

We’re trying, you know, are we all?

Um, so you can find us on there.

Best to just reach out to us.

So, you know, if, um, if email is better, we can email with you.

Um, if phone calls better, we’ll schedule that time and jump on with

somebody. I’ll jump on with anyone here that’s interested and

we’ll talk through situations. But yeah, we’re on Instagram

and Facebook, but not sure if we’re on anything else, honestly.

And then our site has, you know, over 300 articles, they’re all free

on the blog and we put those out basically every week. And

just what we’re researching, what we’re looking at. So–

JANNINE: Good stuff. Well, thank you so much, David, for coming on and

sharing all the info. I’m there’s so many things I got to

listen to this one like four times to get all my my info straight and then of

course your articles huge. A lot of people are gonna benefit from that and I do

hope that a lot of folks do reach out to you guys to do a consult just to figure

out what’s going on in their home because boy I can’t tell you how much my

patients have you know are coming in and air quality is a huge part of their overall health

DAVID: Yeah yeah yeah well if you made it this far really appreciate it

hopefully it was beneficial and happy to talk to you guys if it would be helpful.

JANNINE: Awesome. Thank you.

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