Comment by andsoitis
3 days ago
Usually you have to spend thousands of dollars for an expert with the right equipment to focus on select areas of your home (areas that are suspect).
Are there ways to do a full-house scan yourself?
3 days ago
Usually you have to spend thousands of dollars for an expert with the right equipment to focus on select areas of your home (areas that are suspect).
Are there ways to do a full-house scan yourself?
I've had success using my nose and a cheap $15 moisture meter against walls and ceilings. In my case I was already pretty sure the moisture came from the roof when it rained so went looking right after rainstorms. This was after also running a dehumidifier in a formerly damp basement.
If a home has an active mold problem, it probably has an active water or moisture problem. What mold remediation people sometimes do as well is use an IR camera to try to find unusually cold (thus damp areas).
> If a home has an active mold problem, it probably has an active water or moisture problem.
Mold can't grow or spread without moisture, so a moisture problem is a necessary prerequisite for a mold problem.
So focusing on fixing any moisture problems is a great place to start. Feeling around walls and baseboards or climbing up into the attic in the hours and days after a big rainstorm is one way to get started without any equipment investment. Air circulation also helps dry things out, so make sure every space has some openings for air exchange.
> or spread
Not explicitly true - dry spores get anywhere dust does.
Whether they become active growth or not is a different question.
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Infrared thermometer is also good to survey a room and look for cold spots which are associated with moisture (condensation and/or structural dampness increasing thermal transfer). A thermal camera even moreso (but more expensive).
I've seen situations where experts put different colored water soluble dye on different spots outside the house, so that when it leaks through you can determine the source. Presumably that's within reach for an individual as well.
Yup, look at anything with temps below the dew point and badly vented areas below (condensation follows gravity)
The IR camera idea is clever, usually we use them to find hot spots. Gonna try this next time I suspect we have a leak.
or unusually warm!
(When your shower is improperly installed, for instance)
Swabs and a microscope. Oh and a degree in biology might help!
That's what I had to do to figure out source of my asthma and allergies.
Without any microbiology degree and while suffering from delibitating disease it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease while in other subreddits people post their poop for analyis.
In tune with the saying of "it can't be what mustn't be" ("Weil nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf") a lot of medical professionals outright dispute mold-caused sicknesses. Their imaging can detect late stage fungal infections in the lungs and head of elderly people wholly consumed by the fungus, but they have no methods to detect early stage infections. And instead of realizing they're lacking appropriate analytical methods for mold detection they outright deny that it could be the cause of the problem.
Luckily the microscopy helped me to figure out which samples to send to a professional in order to pin down and remediate the cause of my sickness.
> it was very hurtful that reddit posts with requests for help identifying objects were regularly deleted from the major microscopy communities. They simply refused any discussion or assistance with DIY microscopy related to any human disease
Unfortunately, this is the only way to keep a hobby subreddit on topic. Once a subreddit becomes known as an outlet for non-hobbyists looking for one time assistance, the same requests get posted over and over again until the people who want to discuss the topic get fed up and leave.
Mold topics are particularly sensitive on Reddit because mold exposure is a huge red herring theme on TikTok and social media. People with difficult to diagnose medical conditions will often go through a phase thinking that mold exposure must explain everything and there are thousands of TikTok accounts and Facebook groups that will tell them it's the only explanation.
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Fungus in general is not well-understood at all. We didn't even realize until a few decades ago that it's pretty much the backbone of life on Earth. All of our research into it is highly specific (using fungi as chemical factories in pharmacology, for instance), but besides that, it's largely a very mysterious branch of life. In medical school, you learn about fungus as it pertains to a few common infections and some classes of drugs, but otherwise you don't hear much.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's just not something they're willing to speak on professionally because it's a huge blind-spot for science.
Wie Ghets. Hope youre condition has improved. I went through something similar 10 years ago. I eventually isolated the cause of my illness. Its a general allergy to fungus probably. It is believed that after being infected with a virus, your mastocytes encode to react to fungus. As such, vast numbers of mastocytes are constantly firing off when you encounter mold or fungus. Here's the thing that took me a while to figure out. Traces of these protiens are common in food. Effectively, any food that isn't alive or microbe free, will cause a mild to moderate reaction. Foods that didn't cause problems, where things like, fresh meat, eggs, fresh leafy green (still alive). Anything that might have been stored in bulk, or might have had microbial activity, would cause a mild reaction. The good news is that with dietary restrictions and a clean dush and mold free home, you can live a comfortable life. Also, I think it may be the case that the encoded mastocytes eventually die out after 24 months and with it, the allergy. Not sure, but eventuntually i returned to normal and no longer am sensitive. Hope you are getting better.
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This is really interesting. I haven't been the same since I stayed in an extremely moldy place and have wondered about fungal infections/candida infection.
What was the remediation, some kind of anti fungal course/Nystatin?
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I gather that airborne mycotoxins also play a role in inflammation, in addition to actual fungal infections.
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What sort of an indoor drone could this sensor be most usefully added to?
Attaching an air sensor to a giant high-speed fan is not going to help you pinpoint anything, it's just going to blow the air around.
Getting accurate room-based location requires even turning the HVAC off and avoiding a lot of walking through a building.
UAS move a lot of air - I can't imagine this would be practical. At the very least, you'd need to put the sensor on a boom long enough to make it unwieldy.
Many of the described robots in the mujoco_menagerie gallery could probably do the job: https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco_menagerie
The sensor recovery time limits the sampling time. A 28 second sensor recovery time with SnO2-Gr (graphene oxide) would be more useful for sampling larger volumes than minutes with just SnO2 FWIU; https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=46521695
Maybe check out AirAnswers.
https://www.airanswers.com/
Everything about this website screams alternative medicine scam. "Integrative medicine" and "book a consultation" is not what you want to see on your mold testing lab's website. It means they're out to sell you things. I can almost guarantee that everybody who gets one of their test kits will get, surprise, a positive result that requires more expensive consultations and treatments from them.
One of the founders is a friend of mine that has been an IVD researcher for decades. I don't smell any scam. They are just looking for traction in the consumer and real estate sectors. They already have customers in agriculture, especially with cannabis farms looking for molds. They don't sell treatments. It's more like a radon sampler you leave in a house for a day to get a reading.
The AirAnswers website blocks visitors from the EU.
Most likely because they are in violation of GDPR and have no plan to care about data privacy. This is a really big red flag for all AirAnswers customers.
> Most likely because they are in violation of GDPR
Why do you say that’s the most likely reason? You can’t imagine other plausible reasons?
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