Finding low ERMI housing

[MA1949]

I've had to abandon my house because of my extreme reaction to the mold in it. I also have an estimate of $25-$30k to remediate it, with no guarantee that I will not react once the remediation is done. I live in the desert where you would think there is no mold but the houses were built with evaporative coolers that "always" leaked, plus humidity inside the house during monsoon season was excessive. So there can be a LOT of mold in a house in the desert.

 

BTW, it took me ten years to find out that mold was the source of my health problems because my house has no visible mold. Most of it is in the carpet tack strips, with some in the furnace/AC closet, the water heater closet, under the kitchen sink, under some windows that leaked, etc. LOTS of invisible mold. No basements here. The house is brick.

 

My problem is how to find a place to live; I'm in temporary housing that is relatively low mold, but the situation is far from acceptable for long term.

 

Those of you who found places to live with low ERMI scores (less than 2,) how did you find them? Where do you live (city, state?)

 

MA

[Familyof5]

I have performed about 20 or so ERMI tests for housing. And, that does not include the ERMI testing I have had done at the school. We moved into a house with an ERMI of 3 (the best score we could get out of the 20 or so) and made it less than 1 over the course of the first year living there. It was extremely difficult. I will PM you with the radical steps we had to take to make the new house livable.

[JuliaFaith]

I have performed about 20 or so ERMI tests for housing. And, that does not include the ERMI testing I have had done at the school. We moved into a house with an ERMI of 3 (the best score we could get out of the 20 or so) and made it less than 1 over the course of the first year living there. It was extremely difficult. I will PM you with the radical steps we had to take to make the new house livable.

Can you include me on this info. too? We redo ERMI test on our current house in 3 months to see if we can stay here.

Edited October 16, 2011 by JuliaFaith

[Familyof5]

Ok, will post this publicly--sorry for the length:

The lowest ERMI we could find when shopping for a new home was a 3. We decided to bite the bullet and move in since it was lower than the house we were moving out of and the lowest ERMI score we had found out the very many we had performed. When we moved in, it was a disaster. We all got sick all over again. We did move in the furniture from our old house. Even though we bleached it, cleaned it, vacuumed it. Bringing it in the new house made us all sick. So, we moved it all out of the house again. We sold all our belonging on craigs list, etc. We lived in the new house without any furniture and it still made us sick, although better than with the old furniture from our toxic house. I could write a novel on all the things we did and found, but I'll try to summarize as best I can:

Removed all carpeting from the house, installed all hardwood or tile

Cleaned out the heating/ducts unit (found a moldy peice of cardboard inside the unit which was probably the biggest culprit in the new house being initially unhealthy). After this experience, I suggest that if you have a forced hot air system in your home, open up the unit everywhere that you can and vacuum it out and inspect it for mold. We couldn't believe that the plumbers who installed the unit had left a piece of cardboard on the bottom (inside) of the unit. Condensation dripped on it and formed mold which blew throughout the entire house. Remove all flexible duct and install hard ducts. Flexible ducts can form condensation, hence mold.

After that, our kids were still ill so we decided to shut off the unit and not use it. We bought electric heaters.

This made a tremendous diffference. , we still have not turned on the air unit. I believe it is the most efficient delivery system of bioaerosals/toxins. I don't think I'll ever live in a house again with this type of heat.

Remodeled all bathrooms, found small bits of mold in all of them. Remember, when you are sick from toxic mold, any little bit of mold will make you sick. You have to get rid of it all.

My husband installed vanities that are off the floor with legs to prevent mold growth in case of leaks on floor. All holes in walls where plumbing comes out of are caulked or taped up. Toilets are caulked around the floor. We even caulked where the baseboard meets the floor in case there are leaks from shower, toilet, etc. Removed all ceiling fans in bathrooms. One of them had real bad mold above it because it was not installed properly. We buy the highest powered fans you can get. Don't install it if it can't suck a peice of tissue paper up from 2 feet or so below. The other thing we found with ceiling fans is that if you leave them running for too long, it can draw up the air from the basement. Usually this is a bad thing for mold patients, so don't leave the bathroom fans on for longer than you need. And also remember that if you don't tape up all the holes in the walls and around toilets, then when you have the fan on, you are also drawing up the air inside the walls and even inside the toilet. This won't make the normal person sick, but it will make a moldy person sick. Installed a new kitchen sink, in doing so, found mold around the old sink. Opened up the ice maker in the fridge to find a nice sludgy chunk of black mold. Removing this mold also made a huge difference. Since we don't use the air system we have not only shut the vents, but we put tape over them so that no air can flow freely through it into the house. To keep the kids rooms the safest, we made their doors air tight by putting a strip under their door. We have closed up the firepace and sealed it off to keep outside air out. We installed a fresh air ventilation system. We don't use it yet, but hope to some day. We do use window air conditioning units when the humidity gets too high. We even taped up recessed lights in the kitchen because they were located below the bathtub which I could see had leaks. I didn't remove the tape until the bathroom was remodeled. We bought leather furniture, easy to clean. Wrap all the mattresses (including the box spring) in plastic. Buy only cotton clothes and blankets. Never wool. Never anything you can't put in the washing machine. Always take shoes off. Keep any cardboard, plastic bags, etc. outside. Don't bring anything in the house without wiping it down first. Swiffer wipes are known to attract the spores and attach to them(it will minimize spreading them around) Don't ever bring anything from Home Depot, Lowes, etc and leave it in the house in the bags, or boxes it came in. Those stores have so much toxic mold in them. Installed a central vac system. This is the best way to clean your house. Make sure it vents to the outside. Have three dehumidifiers running in the basement constantly. The condensation is pumped outside and they run on timers so we don't have to worry about overflow. We do not use air purifiers. We stay away from fans. We typically don't like anything that picks up air and moves it around. It has just been my experience that it just makes us sicker. When we first moved into this house, I washed the blankets every other day. Now I do it about once a week. I have the kids take a shower every night to be as clean as possible during their restful, healing sleeping time.

When you do buy new furniture, never let the furniture movers take the plastic off in your house, huge mistake. We use a product called "mold control" made by Scott's. This claims to be almost the same formula used to kill the anthrax spores at the NBC studios (just the consumer version). We spray this on all new furniture we buy or even some old things that we are nervous about bringn into the house. I think it is a great product that claims to neutralize mold spores. When you paint your house, treat the painting project like a remediation. don't do any construction without controlling the dust and airflow.

I'm sure there is much more, and if my husband were answering this question he could probably write twice as much, we are vigilant about keeping mold out of our lives.

All these things together have helped us move on in life. We are much, much healthier now.

PM me anytime if you have questions. Good luck.

[MA1949]

Thanks! What type of climate do you live in?

 

Only one thing I don't get:

We have closed up the firepace and sealed it off to keep outside air out.

 

Why would you want to keep outside air out? I feel best when I am outside, unless I am either freezing to death or dying of heat stroke, and the more outside air I can flow through my house, the better I feel. Maybe it's because of the difference in climate? We typically have about 4% humidity here if it is not monsoon season. And....living without an air conditioner is tantamount to suicide here; it is still 97F this week (and I have the air conditioner on,) and in June it was 112. I can't live in those temperatures, literally. I would die without air conditioning.

 

Do you know your HLA haplotype? (I have two of the four mold genes, and was sort of middling along not healthy but not dramatically ill, until I lived in this really moldy house for ten years.)

 

MA

[JuliaFaith]

Have either of you looked at EMF's? They have quite an influence on mold (faster growing by 600 times, I believe) and other things. We just put in Stetzer filters all around our house. Was surprised to find that the room my son spends most of the time in was the worst of all the house. After putting them in I immediately felt some kind of relief in my sinus area. Was pleasantly surprised since this is very new to us.

 

Thank you Familyof5 for your information. It will be very helpful as we proceed forward.

 

Best wishes for you and your family.

[Familyof5]

I live in New England. We closed up the fireplace because we were afraid there was mold growing in it (since it grows everywhere else)....it is never really used.

 

I have the "dreaded" genotype for mold. 1% of population has it. And guess what, I married a man with the other gene that only 1% of the population has. Hence, all three of our kids have one form or another of the mold genes. We are lightning rods for mold. Crazy.

 

But we are doing great considering where we were three years ago.