Carson Jeffries: Good morning, I'm Carson Jeffries with the Mold Firm and I'm here today with long-time friend and owner of Air Allergen & Mold Testing.

Richard Johnson: My name is Richard Johnson and I'm the President/CEO of Air Allergen & Mold Testing.

We do have data because we've done thousands and thousands of these samples over the years. We have data that we can say, if the amount of mold spores in the carpet is normal, if they tend to be water damage spores or if they tend to be what they call phylloplane spores, which are much less likely to have some kind of a problem and we can give some guidance. In carpet dust for instance there's only three things you can do with a carpet, you can vacuum it, with a HEPA filter, if you don't use a HEPA filter vacuum, you're just going to broadcast it out into the air, and even with the HEPA filter vacuum, some of that stuff is going to get out into the air, the real fine particulate in spores. Or you can clean the carpet. Or you can replace the carpet. And we put instructions in there if you're gonna replace it, how to treat the floor underneath it ahead of time, if you're gonna clean it, what kind of stuff you should use to clean it and how you should handle that. And the fact of the HEPA filter vacuum and that kind of stuff if you're gonna vacuum it. 

So that's one of the kinds of sampling that we do and we tell them how to handle the carpet, but more importantly we find out what else is going on in the environment from that, that we can tell them about. Another kind of sampling that can be done in addition to air samples and the carpet dust samples is a tape sample. We have a slide which has some adhesive on it and we can take the cover off and place it on a surface and then take that and examine it, similar to the way we examine a slide that's in the air sample set. And we can identify to the genus level what's on that surface. 

If you're trying to identify a particular kind of mold on the wall, just to the common names that you hear like aspergillus or penicellium, you can take that sample and you can identify it. And what you learn from that is what's on that square inch that you've sampled, it doesn't tell you anything about a foot away or two feet away or something else that might be in the room but if you're trying to identify what's a particular thing and try to tie it together with what else you're finding that can be a useful sample. To be able to go in and use that sample though to say that the house is mold-free or something like that is not accurate. 

The other kind of samples we take, we can take a swab sample. The purpose of the swab sample is if you want to get to the species level of a particular mold type. Things like aspergillus and penicillium, that we can see in the air have perhaps 200 different species between the two of them and different species have different health characteristics that I mentioned, from the headaches and the respiratory and the allergy things that we find in the carpet dust, that's done at the species level. 

So if you go and you take a tape sample, you can't identify the species, you can say if it's aspergillus or penicillium, but you can't say what species it is. 

Carson Jeffries: So there's different types of aspergillus and penicillium?

Richard Johnson: Absolutely, there's a couple hundred different kinds. And so with a swab, if you take a swab on a surface, you can take the swab and put it into a dilution and you culture that and then you can identify it to the species level to find out some of the health characteristics.

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