Mold Mentor 12/14/25

Boots speaks with Zach Duffey about mold lurking in the winter!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I mean co hosting with me from stand and speak
up on current issues. But we have his other buddy,
the mister mold mentor himself on the hotline. Man, when
you have that many kids, I guess they do get sick, right, Zach.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Oh Man, it happens overnight?

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Literally was it projectile puking? And does that cause mold?

Speaker 3 (00:23):
It was the kind of that that you know they're
hurling it still loud.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
It wakes up the baby.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
The whole family was a poor kid.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Yeah, we're awaking.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
An awakened baby is worse than a puking teenager.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
I'll tell you that.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Yeah, I'll give you that. Yeah, because the baby can't
find out what's going on there and it's mad. You're right, right,
So we we have a good question for you and I.
And I was thinking to myself, is mold?

Speaker 4 (00:50):
You know?

Speaker 1 (00:51):
We we think I know cars, I think a battery
is going bad in the winter. But is mold scary
and winter as is in the summer?

Speaker 3 (00:59):
Yes, the misption to think that mold just happens mostly
in the summer. It's actually our houses breathe different in
the winter, that's the difference, and so moisture shows up differently.
Moisture problems show up differently in the winter, absolutely, so
basements get colder, which causes relative humidity in the basement

(01:19):
to rise. So everybody needs to open up their heating
vents in the basement. Go check them now, and if
they are closed, it's likely you have mold growth to
some degree, and you may want to have your your
basement tested the air quality tested.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Yeah, mean, because it's cold and because you have your
heater blowing it. You know, we all as be honest,
we all put it at seventy two most people, we
don't care. I try to keep it at sixty eight.
But then when it gets super cold, I'm out. But
with the temperature changes that make the mold go a
lot faster or slower, what's that do?

Speaker 2 (01:51):
It shows up in different places.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
An example is sweating windows in the winter when it's
freezing outside and.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
You're heating the house.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
He causes moisture to rise into the air, and then
that'll cause condensation on your windows. So chuck windows because
you can get windows that that sweat really bad. The
water's dripping down inside the wall. And we just opened
up somebody's windows.

Speaker 2 (02:16):
We removed the drywall around their wall.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
The fine mold growth that had been accumulating due to
condensation on the window windows.

Speaker 4 (02:24):
Do that, So Zach, the next few days, we're going
to be warming up a little bit. I think it's
gonna be fifty by Thursday. So I think you're going
to see all the snow melting down, and there's gonna
be a lot of moisture, a lot of things in
the ground and stuff. Does that pick up the possibility
that there can be some moisture in the basement or
something that could grow some mold well, So.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
When the snow melts, what we see.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
Often are the rooftops that have accumulated all this snow
begins to melt. And if a lot of roofs have
what's known as as an ice dam, it's a portion
of the roof that doesn't drain well during the winter,
and so snow turns into slush and then freezes, which
causes a dam. And then the next snowfall that melts

(03:13):
backs up into that dam, and over time it gets
bigger and bigger, and it lifts up shingles. The snow
expands and contracts, and so it causes nail pops and
it finds its way in, so once the weather starts
to rise, that dam will slowly melt and leak in
through small holes in the roof.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Well, you know, I've always want to ask you this,
how do you become a mold expert? You've been on
the show for over a year now, and I'm like,
I gotta asking that someday. I mean, when did you
how do you know? I mean, are you just were
you a chemist as a kid or what made you
get into this?

Speaker 3 (03:47):
No? I think it was my love for brewing, for
fermentation is where I started.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
I always thought I was going.

Speaker 3 (03:54):
To make honeywine and have this sort of romantic, you know,
image of being somebody who creates you know, honeymoon beverages
and you drink it and you make love and get pregnant,
you know, and what you which you do a lot.

Speaker 2 (04:11):
I wore a different.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
Hat in that, so when you were trying to build
that stuff, you had to fight mold all the time.
Or because I never just enjoys.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
I read the Yeast Bible. There's actually a book called
Yeast and it's about as thick as the Bible.

Speaker 3 (04:25):
And I had an operation in my basement. I was
fermenting that kombucha. I was making mead uh and and
people were loving it. And but it kid was very
challenging business model. There's a lot of regulation laws around
it and so then so, but understanding yeast cell it's
a cousin of mold, was a strong foundation for me.

(04:46):
So when I found a job as a home inspector,
the closest thing I could find what is mold.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
That's how I got into it.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
So you said home inspection. So a lot of my
real older friends hate home inspectors. I'm I mean, if
you bring that up, that's like talking on to a
liberal about Trump. I mean they lose their mind. I
mean why, I've had many homes inspected and you guys
have found stuff that you know, and did you find
mold a lot? And where the realtors ticked when you

(05:15):
found it?

Speaker 2 (05:17):
Well, So the main problem I solved.

Speaker 3 (05:21):
As a home inspector is how you talk about mold,
because it's it's like the four letter words to realtors.
They don't once you say it, everybody's scared and break
the contract.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
And we're not the laboratory.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
Though. What we have to understand is that I shouldn't
be telling somebody that that's mold. I have to be
I should be saying, hey, that looks like mold, and
and you know it may or may not be a
big deal.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
So you have to remain neutral.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
But when you get excited, oh look at all that mold.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
You're going to die.

Speaker 3 (05:48):
Did you look at it?

Speaker 1 (05:50):
Well, what do you do? Do you scrape it up
and like send it to a lab? Or do you
have a little test kit or Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
There's ways to sample that.

Speaker 3 (05:57):
You use tape, you can use a sterile swea, we
do air sampling.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, there's various ways to test for mold.

Speaker 4 (06:05):
And you're developing a novel way of home testing for it,
aren't you, Sack.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. Yes, air testing specifically,
anybody can do a serial swab or a tape lift,
but air quality testing requires a calibrated pump. It requires
special knowledge and training. And so in order to get
air quality testing, which is a very thorough way to test,
it's very much data driven. You have to call, you

(06:32):
have to try somebody. Trust you're subjecting yourself to high
pressure sales because this person's coming into your house. And
over the years of doing this, I've had people say
to me, I wish there's a way I could just
do this myself, and so I am working on an
air quality testing device that would allow you, as a homeowner,
to receive this testing device. Simply press start, enter the

(06:55):
information into an app, your home address, your name, the
locations that you're testing, and then just ship it back
to the left and you would have the same bulletproof
chain of custody on your library report that you would
get with me or with another professional. And you would
have the same live grade accuracy on your data that
you would have with another professional.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
All right, before we go to break zach, how often
do you believe in your heart with all your knowledge?
How often should people have their house tested? Yearly? Six months?
What do you think.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
I like? I liked at least twice a month or
twice a year. Twice a year because freezing season it's
dry inside, and then the summer it's it's humid. Insign
cause airborn, most sports to become airborne. Differently, we can
see different results.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
All right, So how they get a hold of you,
how we want we want everybody to do. Especially come
you know an hour comes spring because Christmas is right
around the corner. You have a bunch of people the house,
spilling drinks and who knows what's going to be going on.
So how they get hold of your brother.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
Mold mentor oh Hi dot com, mold mentor Ohio dot com.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
How a phone number would they call?

Speaker 2 (08:05):
They would call? I don't have a memorized.

Speaker 4 (08:08):
Everybody website.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Yeah, we had the website. Nowadays, I'm just talking about
that one seventy eight year old guys, I'm not getting online.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
All right, We're gonna, We're gonna, We're gonna get six
six six mold here.

Speaker 1 (08:20):
That the mold is the devil. Well, we love your
brother and I please get your kids healthy. Hope everything's okay,
and hopefully you can come in soon. I'll get Mindy.
So we went in here physically, okay, yes, sir, love
you got man? All right, Hey, thanks for all your helping.
Subarry you are he rocks. He did a lot for
our little girl, and I owe him a lot. So
that was awesome. All right, man, We got we got

(08:41):
Linda from Vance coming up next segment. So this is
uh Raw with Mindi and Boots on news Radio six
en w TVN