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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
This podcast is sponsored by Hiya Health. It’s a company that I love for my younger kids because typical children’s vitamins are basically candy and disguised. They’re filled with up to two teaspoons of sugar, unhealthy chemicals, or other gummy junk that I personally don’t want my kids to ever eat. And that’s why Hiya was created. It’s a pediatrician approved superpower chewable vitamin. Now, while most children’s vitamins contain sugar and they contribute to a variety of health issues, Hiya is made with zero sugar, zero gummy junk, doesn’t have the artificial colors, flavors, additives that we don’t know where they came from, but it tastes great and it’s perfect even for picky eaters.
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Katie: Hello, and welcome to The Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode is all about the biggest impact changes that we can make to our homes. And today’s guest is probably one of the top experts in the world on this topic. Brian Johnson is a licensed general contractor, a project manager, a healthy home builder, and a building biologist with over 23 years of experience in this industry. And as you will immediately hear when he starts talking, he has a deep passion for helping people to create the healthiest environments possible in their homes. As a general contractor with a deep understanding of building science, he’s earned triple certification from the Building Biology Institute, an achievement that underscores his unwavering dedication to creating healthy and sustainable living environments. His passion for building performance is rooted in his lifelong commitment to health and athletic performance. As an elite top 1% all-world athlete, he intimately understands the crucial role that physical and environmental factors play in achieving peak performance and just living our best lives and feeling our best. And recognizing the profound impact that space has on one’s health, he prioritizes construction and remodeling methods that use modern technology to create natural environments indoors. I learned a lot in this episode. I’m going to be doing further deep dives with Brian into addressing things in my own home. But I hope that you will enjoy this wide-reaching conversation with Brian Johnson. Brian, welcome. Thank you so much for being here for this long overdue conversation, because I’ve known you in real life for so long and finally get to talk to you here.
Brian: Oh, my goodness. Such an honor and a pleasure. And thank our good friend Todd for helping making this happen.
Katie: Yes, immense gratitude to Todd. And I’m super excited. I know that we could probably do a thousand episodes and not reach the end of all the things you could share with us. But I really am excited to dive deep and tackle sort of the biggest impact changes we can make to our homes, whether we’re living in homes already or if we’re ever going to build a home. And I know that your knowledge runs so deep on this topic. I know there’s also very multifaceted, so there’s a lot we’re going to get into today.
But one thing I think about when I think about health is that we breathe oxygen much more than we drink water, much more than we eat food. And I feel so much of the health conversation tends to get into the nutrition world, which is important. But I feel things like air quality and even water quality don’t get enough talk time for how impactful they can be for our health. And most of us spend at least our sleeping hours and a lot more hours in our homes. So I feel like home air quality is a really important place to start and that there’s a lot of factors here that many of us haven’t even considered that could be really contributing either in a positive or negative way to our indoor air quality.
So I know that’s a broad question and I know your expertise is far reaching, but can you jump in there and kind of introduce us to the topic of air quality and some of these silos of things we need to be aware of?
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Indoor air quality, and of course, air quality in general is a big one in the highly populated areas, we have what’s the air quality index, right? So back in the day when our parents used to read the newspaper and we used to have newspapers, they would always look, oh, yeah, the air quality index, you know?
And of course, our homes, it’s interesting you’re saying like, well, of course, we spend like, hopefully eight hours of sleep, optimized sleep in our beds and in our bedrooms. But we spend a lot of time in our homes. And there’s a lot of studies out there that say that we spend 80% of our time indoors of our entire life, which is pretty crazy. But when you think about it, we’re either home, we’re in an office, or we’re in a car traveling. So, we’re trying to protect ourselves from the environmental aspects of poor air quality, and then that within the structure and then the building.
And of course, until pretty recently the industry is starting to make a real big shift of air quality. You’re starting to see a lot of air conditioning companies, even general contractors talking about indoor air quality, which is phenomenal. And basically, what that looks like, it’s focus on like air filtration, the types of filtration, you know, all of the RHVAC systems or whatever kind of air climate control system that we have in the home. And then focusing on passive air, airflow and exchange, which is really important. And that was something that was really overlooked for the longest time, even in building codes. They’re looking at passive airflow, which is bringing in a natural form of airflow into the mechanical systems, the climate control systems. So we’re constantly getting like this fresh air exchange, but there’s a lot that goes into the play into that, right?
So if we’re bringing it, say we live downtown in an urban area and we have that poor air quality or we’re in a fire prone area and there’s fires and forest fires. Well, then you’re just pumping all of that, all of that toxicity right into the house, you know? And so that’s where the filtration ties into a big piece to that. So we’re looking at bringing fresh air. We’re looking at filtering that fresh air. And then we’re looking at filtering it through our climate control systems, you know, preferably like we refer to in the industry as HEPA, which is like a MERV 16 filtration. So it takes it down to a fine particle size, micron size.
And there’s portable systems out there that are great. So if we don’t have those luxuries, the next best thing would to be to have these portable systems. I know you’ve interviewed some great people out there that have good systems. But as a builder we’re looking at the home holistically as a unit, like the home itself is the lungs. That’s the air that you breathe in that, right? And we should be putting a lot of emphasis and a lot of focus and filtering and conditioning that air. But there’s a lot that ties into that.
You’re talking about exposure of toxic chemicals and things like that. You know, what we refer to in the industry is outgassing. So different building materials. We use a term called VOC, volatile organic compounds, or TVOCs total. And what we want to do is we want to use a zero VOC product in the building industry. There’s a lot of high VOCs and formaldehyde type products. And what they do is they outgas. And so pretty much for the life, like, plastics, plastics, they’re always degrading. They’re always oxidizing, just like we oxidize, right?
And so all of the building materials and everything oxidized, well they’re constantly releasing and out gassing these fumes into our environment, in our home environment. That brings in the ventilation aspect of why we want to have this constant fresh air exchange versus than just having just a portable, because a portable is more of a band-aid because you’re kind of just treating, you’re trying to cover up what’s going the underlying cause, which is so much bigger than that, and it’s the home.
Katie: That makes sense. So the air filters are like a band-aid approach versus more like a functional medicine approach to the home and figuring out the root cause of what’s actually going on.
Brian: There you go.
Katie: Okay. And I would guess most people listening already are living in a home of some sort. I know if I was going to build a house, I would immediately hire you and just do it right from the beginning. But like me, I guess a lot of people are living in a home already. So I’m curious if we just bought a home that was already built. Probably like me, I have no idea really the intricacies of my HVAC system or what’s going on with air quality. How do we begin to figure out what’s going on and/or what are things we can do to an existing home that can positively impact our air quality?
Brian: Yeah, definitely. Oh, man. Of course, with me, everything is really extreme. And I want to make this really simple. I think just from the simple basics, the basic basic is to whether you do it yourself or you hire your handyman or have an HVAC company come in to do a visual inspection and a filter change. Just as simple as that, right. Like, we’ll just keep it super simple or depending if you have like a dehumidification system or whatever types of mechanical systems, have somebody come in and do an inspection and walk you through the process so you can understand that.
What I see a lot of the times, and again, I’m just keeping this super simple, if I’m doing like a healthy home inspection and I’m looking at the HVAC system, the actual air handler, I’ll find that the filters aren’t sitting right. And like all and then the plenum, which is where the air comes in, it’s just it’s got cobwebs and just looks really scary looking in there and the filters are not even sitting right. And all of that air is like literally bypassing that filter. And then what happens is it goes through the whole unit, goes through all the duct work, and then you have all this compromised dust, not even filtering properly and going through the duct work.
So, definitely bring in somebody that’s probably qualified to walk you through. Take a look at the unit and then taking it even a little bit further. There’s a lot of companies out there that will actually clean the systems. So it’s not too expensive. Basically, what they’ll do is they’ll dismantle the air handler and then they’ll clean the coils, especially like if you’re in a real humid environment. These coils, what they’re doing is they’re working to trying to dry the air, but they’re extracting a lot of condensation and moisture, and they have water pans and what happens, they’re designed to do this. And so what they do is the condensation collects on the condensation pan and then it pumps the water, hopefully outside away from the building. What we see is a lot of microbial growth because what happens is the dust bypasses, well, we need water, humidity, and a food source such as like dust, like cellulose for mold to grow. And so then what we see is microbial growth in these air coils. And so you want to inspect those as well.
And also too occasionally, you know, maybe every five years, clean the duct work through the home. You know, there’s different ways of doing that. And definitely you want to work with somebody that’s very skilled. There’s different ways of doing it. So you want to do it in the most safest fashion. You don’t want to damage the duct work. You don’t want to blow the dust all through the house because it could be compromised and it could have mold in it.
Katie: Any tips for knowing and evaluating if someone is going to be qualified or understand how to do that work without sort of circulating that through the whole home?
Brian: Yeah. You know, the questions, like, I always, you know, depending on your region, your area, asking the questions to like an HVAC company is, you could even say, hey, you know, I’m very sensitive to dust. Do you guys offer duct cleaning? Do you guys offer inspections and replacing filters and are you guys qualified for indoor air quality and doing these types of assessments? So it’s kind of like these terms or, hey, I’m sensitive. I want to work with somebody that specializes in indoor air quality.
I think that’s a really a big one right now because a lot of the HVAC companies, again, I’m just kind of talking specific to one trade, because again, this is the lungs to the home, right? And so we’re putting emphasis on what is it we would look for. We would want to come in and do an annual maintenance with a qualified company that specializes in indoor air quality that offers safe duck cleaning and things like that.
You know, it would be consult with a building scientist or a building biologist, of course, you know, to help. They could help advocate or walk you through the processes of making sure that you’re hiring a good HVAC company that they’re asking all the right questions, too, such as the indoor air quality and focuses on things like that.
Katie: Makes sense. And you mentioned the topic of mold, and I feel like this one is important to talk about as well. I’ve seen firsthand and close friends who had mold in their home and the extensive process of remediating that. It seems like this is an area where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And perhaps people, when they think of mold, think of more just if there was a leak or there was a flood. But as you just explained, this can even be from things not being cleared correctly in the HVAC system. So with the idea that an ounce of prevention probably is worth more than a pound of cure, what are the things we can do, whether it’s if we’re building from the ground up from a materials perspective and/or from an indoor air quality perspective to help minimize our chances of mold in the future?
Brian: Yeah, definitely, if you are doing design and you’re going to build a home, I would definitely work with, again, like a building scientist or a building biologist or somebody like me on the design of everything. Because then we could focus on the building materials. This is a big one.
So we talked about just briefly non-toxic building materials and VOCs, right, and the outgassing. But also, too, we want to use building materials that are breathable. And this is a big thing. So the materials themselves, that they’re breathable, or they’ll have natural antimicrobial types of materials within the material itself. We want to kind of be careful of using disinfectants and antimicrobials themselves because they themselves can be toxic. So we want to use materials that are breathable, that have natural antimicrobial, but also to the building design.
We want to build our buildings, obviously watertight. We want good performance of building like, roof designs, all of the penetrations, flashing details, windows, proper overhang to protect the windows so the windows aren’t just facing the bare element or wind driven rains, because typically if it’s not the roof that’s going to fail, it’s the windows that are going to fail. And you could have the most expensive high-end commercial aluminum grade window but if you don’t have good details, the water can just come in right around that and then potentially get into the wall system.
Again, now speaking into, we want a breathable wall. So even if we do build a watertight envelope, we still have a wall cavity, right? If we’re using standard stick frame, wood framing, which by the way, I’m a mass wall builder, and we can talk more about that later, what mass wall is because there’s no cavity. It’s could be rammed earth. It could be insulated concrete forms, things like that. But if we’re building again, a conventional, because most builders build that way, there’s good builders that build for performance. So they’re using like these different zip wall systems and they’re sealing everything and they’re doing proper flashing. They got plenty good overhang, but they’re doing metal roofs and things like that.
But we’re using membranes on these wall systems that are breathable. So basically what they do is they hold water out, but if vapor was to get through, it can still breathe, right? But it works in both directions too. So say for example, we’re insulating, we’re using insulation for exterior walls, of course. You know, again, using non-toxic like forms of insulation, lambs wool, havelock wool, there’s some great companies out there, mineral rock wool, hemp wool, or I mean, hemp insulation. But what’s nice about these products are they breathable. And so they have natural antimicrobials in them and they’re breathable, which is going to resist mold. This is all about resisting mold and keeping from mold growth, right? And then of course, you know, whether we’re using drywall or some kind of a, I prefer a plaster wall system. And then we’re using a smart barrier on that as well.
So here I just described, say a two by six wall that ends up finishing out about seven and a half inches that’s watertight, but absolutely breathable. So if water was to get in through a window penetration, or maybe there was a flood in the house, or maybe there was a condensation issue because there was an imbalance of the design or whatever. And that’s why we designed home because I’ll talk about that piece too. But now what we’ve done is we’ve built this breathable wall system so we’re no longer trapping the moisture because in the old school way of building, all the materials are so watertight or the building was so watertight, if water was to get in, it had nowhere to go. And so then it would sit there and it would grow on the back of the paper from the drywall. It would grow on the paper from the insulation. You hit the right condenser, the right humidity with the right amount of moisture, then we have mold growth. So that’s a big piece of when we’re doing the design and we’re working with an architect.
So the most important part is working with somebody such as myself or building scientists, working with a building biologist, first, or I mean an architect, the architect has to know a direction like, oh, okay, I understand that. Yeah, we’ll incorporate a breathable wall system. That’s great. But they have to be directed. Architects and builders, we cannot assume that they know this. Good ones that are into performance building by default do know in science and technology materials are coming, they’re so far advanced now. So we’re starting to see that, but still, we want to advocate in the design phase, working with builders also too and architects, but also from the science side of it, if we’re in a high humid climate or in a dry climate or a cold climate, it’s really important on how we heat and cool that environment and how heat and cold is transferred through walls and through glass and windows and things like that. Because that’s where we get these condensation issues, right? And it’s typically from a lack of ventilation.
Now I’m tying back that whole piece to it, right? So we talked about it from like an air conditioning, air quality side, but now we’re also looking at it from the importance of ventilation to reduce the amount of condensation and to control the amount of humidity in that environment to even reduce that. So if we’re building good design, that’s the first line of defense, right? But then the second line of defense is acclimating that environment. So we don’t even have that condensation issue. Or if we do have, say, for example, we did have a flood and say there was a pipe burst or whatever the case may be, if we’re building using these types of materials, the building is less likely at risk for mold because everything is breathable. Everything is moisture resistant itself and has its own natural antimicrobials. So the benefits just go on and on and on through the design of using these types of materials to reduce the potential of microbial growth.
Katie: Yeah, so much to consider. And I know you have written a lot about this as well. I’ll link to your website because I know you have blog posts that deep dive into a lot of these and that you work with people if they have an acute thing they’re trying to resolve and/or if they’re starting from scratch or building all of this preventative stuff that they can take into account. But I think, like I said, this is a mold can potentially be a big issue. I live essentially in a swamp in Florida. So it’s something I’m aware of and I’m going to be very intentional about testing and making sure of going forward.
But I think another area that people maybe have a not complete understanding of is our exposure to things like EMFs in the home. And we’re living in this rise of sort of smart homes where every plug-in light and everything is connected. Our refrigerators are connected to the network. This is also something that in the span of human history is extremely new. And we don’t fully know long-term how this is going to impact all of us. But I know many people listening are at least aware of EMFs and want to mitigate as much as possible their exposure to EMFs, especially when they’re not necessary. I know this alone could be a series of podcast episodes, but from a home perspective, what do we need to know about EMFs and what can we as homeowners do about them?
Brian: You know, a friend of mine came to mind when you were talking about all the EMFs. You know, we want our cake and eat it too. We want our convenience of our cell phones. We want the convenience of all the smart technology. And a good friend of mine, he’s all into this stuff. He’s all into the tech big time. But he’s really big into health. And I stayed with him, and I had all my equipment. And he says, hey, do you mind doing an assessment for me? And I said, yeah. And so I was like one hour into it, and it was this, his whole home was smart. Like he had wired it all for wireless. Or he set it up. No, he didn’t wire it for wireless. He set it up to be wireless, which was kind of an unfortunate thing because he had so much money in technology. But it was so complex. We would have to shut the power down to the house. And literally take every little piece. Okay. So he laughed. And he says, oh, he says, so it’s pretty much hopeless. He says, well, I said, we got to start from scratch. And which he’s willing to do.
So all said, there’s four different types of EMFs. And I know it’s a lot to cram in here. One is the electrical field. That’s the electrons traveling through the power of coming into the home. It’s almost kind of like imagine a electrical line, like plumbing, like a water line, because that’s exactly what like plumbing is delivering water. A cable delivers electrons. It’s the same thing. And then AC electromagnetic fields, AC magnetic fields. AC magnetic fields is by default when power is running through a hot and a common. What they’re doing is one’s going and one’s coming, right? And so when they’re when they’re basically crossing each other, it creates this this magnetic form. Okay, that’s just that’s just the physics of wiring.
And I’ll talk a little more about it, but also to then the third RF or EMF is what we refer to as RF. So it’s radio frequency, okay? So radio frequency can come from cellular antennas or cell phones, obviously, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. And Wi-Fi comes in so many different fashions, especially probably a lot for your audiences like these baby monitors. These Wi-Fi systems are putting out 2.4 gigahertz almost into like a 5G kind of high frequency. Everyone’s talking about the 5G, 3G, 4G, 5G. And what that is, it’s different frequencies. And so the 5G is a real high frequency, but it drops off really fast. Well, what happens is like a Wi-Fi router or a decked phone or a baby monitor, that’s this 2.4 gigahertz. Imagine that’s point source. And if you’re in your office and you’re right next to one, you’re right next to this, you’re putting out this high frequency. If your baby monitor is a 2.4 gigahertz or high frequency and it’s right next to your baby, these are the things we want to think about. That’s RF.
And then the fourth one, and I’ll just keep it simple. Sorry, everyone. It’s MEP. It’s microelectrical surge pollution. Also, we refer to it as dirty electricity. And the root cause of that is typically it’s like the power supplies, power adapters, dimmers. So all of the technology, it’s not so much the solar panels themselves as it’s the inverters. So when we take that DC power and we convert it to an AC power through the home, what it does is it puts out this MEP, the dirty electricity.
So we have to understand what these four EMS are. Then when I’m looking at wiring a home and designing a home from the electrical fields is where I’ll just kind of simplify this. Like we’ll take the main electrical panel and we’ll put it like on the garage, away from the home. Okay. Because it’s a field, it’s an electrical field and there’s nothing bad about them. It’s just, we want to distance ourself from the electrical field. So for example, you’re in your bedroom and you have this daisy chained outlets, you know, to plug in lamps and things like that, TVs and what through your house. Well, we are 80% conductors of moisture, of water, right? And so we conduct energy. So if I’m standing close to an outlet, my body’s conducting that energy. It’s just the physics of what it is. It’s nothing bad, but if I was to stand next to that outlet next day, all day, or at my computer plugged in, that’s not properly grounded, that can add some stress into the central nervous system and just these underlying things, right?
So we want to distance ourself from that. So typically what I’ll do for a bedroom is I’ll just do like a kill switch. So at nighttime, we want to go to sleep. We’ll just kill all of that power to that room. So I’m just kind of using that analogy is we just want to distance ourself from these electrical fields. The AC magnetic fields, it could be outside from a high tension power line or multiple power lines crisscross in your house, because the reason why they put out a high, because I talked about one’s traveling, one’s going, and it creates this field, this AC magnetic field in a high power line, what they do is they distance these cables, so you see each line hanging. Well, the further space apart, sometimes they can put a pretty big field. And if you have them all around your home, that can create a pretty high AC magnetic field all the way to the inside of the home.
What happens is a lot of the times, they’re not supposed to do this, but electricians, what they’ll do is they’ll share like neutral wires or they won’t ground something properly. Well, what happens is that creates an AC magnetic field. So your bedroom, if it’s not wired properly or somewhere in the house, it could create this AC magnetic field, which could totally be remedied. So, it’s just a matter of working with a building biologist that’s like certified as an EMRS, electromagnetic radiation specialist, then they can come and help do an assessment and then bring in a licensed electrician to go in there to fix these types of faults, right? And they’ll come in there and they’ll give the recommendations on putting that kill switch on the wall, like I’ve talked about, or these other things.
Real quick, we’ll talk about RF. So RF, we want to get away from all the smart technology, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t have amazing technology in the home too. I’m back to like when I design a home, we hardwire all using what we refer to as an Ethernet cable. We were using them in the 2000s and that was the fastest way to bring in speeds. Well, it’s still a secure, fast way to travel speed. So I like to hook everything up to Ethernet. And then a good IT person, they could come in there and they could set up your whole home automation integration all through Ethernet cabling on new design. If you have an existing home, you’re going to, you want to be hardwired obviously you’re going to have probably some exposed cables or you could have somebody come in there and run lines behind the walls and things like that. So there are some things that you can do for like retrofitting.
You could take your router, you could put it on a kill switch, on an off switch. There’s different routers too that you can buy that are lower emissions. So you could actually tune the intensity down. Baby monitors, I would look at, they make them on an FM radio. They make them on an Ethernet cable. They make great baby monitors that have, that don’t use Wi-Fi. So I would opt out on a lot of these devices that require Wi-Fi and try to hardwire or try to use like a radio, a low frequency radio signal. They’re out there. They’re abundant. You can buy them on Amazon. They exist. So everything that I’m talking about is nothing that doesn’t exist.
You know, the whole thing about a microwave, a microwave is kind of a double whammy because what it does is it puts out an, a massive amount of AC magnetics, like an MRI or an X-ray or like that’s what they do, you know? And really high levels, but they also put out high radio frequencies, which is what heats up the molecule and warms up the food. Yeah, I mean, you’re not only, you’re kind of breaking all the enzymes and everything and changing the frequencies of everything in the food, but you’re, you’re exposing yourself to that. So that’s, so if you already use a microwave, then just, just didn’t yourself put your stuff in there, walk away from it, like 20 feet away from it kind of a thing.
But it’s all intermittent type things, right? Now we’ve got these new range tops that are these cooktops that are induction, these induction cooktops, because everyone’s wanting to go electric or maybe some code and local code are requiring it now. I’ve tested some of these and they test an AC high for AC magnetics, you know? So that’s not always the solution.
I’m still a proponent of gas, back to the indoor air quality. One of the big things about gas, cooktops is people, they don’t have the right type of air, the hoods for pulling all the air exhaust out from cooking. They’re not low enough, they’re not big enough, they’re not rated enough. And in it, and then sometimes somebody will put like a bigger fan in, this is a big no-no they’ll put a, sorry to shift it a little bit, but it just made me think about this, but, they’ll put it like a larger fan. Well, if you do a larger fan and you’re pulling more air volume, now you’re changing that imbalance of the air within the home. So what we, we use is what we use called makeup air systems. And so basically what it does is it brings air in as you’re exhausting that gas out, just to make sure you’re keep CO2 levels down low in the home.
Back to the EMF though. And then last but not least one minute on this is the dirty electricity. It’s basically the dimmers. We’re looking at getting rid of dimmers. That dimmers just put out a lot of dirty electricity, but they’re making lighting technology now that’s a lot different now. So we don’t have to rely on those dimmers. We can get into that if we have time into the lighting aspect. It’s unplugging unnecessary power adapters that aren’t being used. It’s again, having like maybe a building biologist come in there and measure the home to where, find out where all these sources of all these dirty electric issues are coming from.
So that was a lot. I know. But I kind of wanted to break it down into those four categories and what we’re looking for and how we’re identifying and addressing these and they can all be addressed. AC magnetics, like, so if you’re living in a home with a overhead power line, just because you don’t have anywhere else to go, there are ways to mitigate that. But it does get pretty costly, but anyone that’s listening to this, this is, well, yeah, I have three power lines. I’m not planning on moving. What do I do? Well, there are solutions for that. So there’s pretty much a solution for anything out there for a healthy home.
Katie: That’s important to remember. And I love that your approach is not fear-based. It’s empowerment through information and that there are ways to mitigate all of this. So it’s never a hopeless situation. I feel like that’s important to remember when we start delving into things that seem like, to me at least, very big projects.
And I love that explanation on EMFs. I’ll make sure I link to your resources around this too, as well as I’ve written blog posts about my kill switch that I have on my Wi-Fi router at night. And I would guess other simple changes, like just don’t have your cell phone plugged in next to your head while you’re sleeping can go a long way because you talked about proximity. I built a charging drawer in my kitchen that’s far away from anybody’s bedroom and all devices go there at night versus being in our rooms by our heads. I feel like while technology is not going anywhere, there are ways we can have a healthy relationship with it. And that’s also beneficial for sleep quality because you’re not looking at blue light screens right before you go to bed.
Brian: There you go.
Katie: So I’ll include those links as well. Another topic related to healthy home that is very top of mind for me right now is water quality. Because I have, thankfully, I live in an area that doesn’t have fluoride to begin with. And I do have a whole house filter as well as an under the sink filter. But I’m at that timeline where I need to either replace or update my whole house filter. I know water quality is its own whole topic. But what do we need to know about water quality? And how can we make sure that we’re having the best possible water in our home?
Brian: Absolutely. That’s one of my, that’s one of my specialties. I work with a company called Natural Action Technologies. And the reason why I do is, you know, my job as, as a building scientist, building biologists and a builder is vetting and it’s finding who’s legit out there, who’s doing the work and who has something real to offer as far as like, that’s part of the holistic healing factor of when I’m building and designing a home and water filtration is a big one, but it’s even going beyond that into the structuring aspects of it, right?
And the water structuring, it’s basically, it’s bringing that water into alignment. It changes the coherence, the molecular structure of it and puts it basically like in harmony so as it, it, it absorbs into the cells and in a very harmonious way, if you will. There’s all kinds of stuff, but you’ve probably interviewed people on structured water and there’s all kinds of great benefits. So my goal was, and I’m, cause I’m bringing this together. So my goal was as a, as this holistic builder, if you will, is I want the water coming out of my shower faucet and my bathtub to be structured, right, and to be filtered and to have the proper balance of like mineral, right? And we do. And I’ve designed several homes like that. And personally, myself, built several spec homes and several systems and working with Natural Actions, we’ve really dialed in some really mind-blowing systems out there.
And going back to filtration. The first thing that I recommend for all my clients is to do a water test. You know, whether you’re on city or a well, you know, the thing that we find with the city is, they’re doing their part by cleaning up the water. But, you know, they’re either adding fluoride into it or they’re, you know, they’re putting disinfectants, chloramine, chlorine, you know, all of these, all these different types of disinfectants, you know, for public safety, right? You know, not only because it’s treated water, but also, too, it’s going through a lot of this plumbing being serviced to your house, right?
Of course, you know, companies, you know, municipalities, they put out like an annual or biannual water report. And it’s good to know what those are. But if you’re filtering it, you don’t really have to, but you have to, in order to select the right types of filtration systems, you really want to test that water. You really want to be clear of kind of where it’s at and what you’re treating.
So one filter does not filter everything. Everybody has to understand that. Don’t get me wrong. We always typically finish with a good carbon, like a good carbon block filter. And a good carbon block filter will structured water, super amazing. But sometimes that’s not filtering out like, you know, under bigger underlying causes. OK, so it’s working with a local company that understands what the water is. Even it doesn’t have to be a Natural Action filter. It’s just working with somebody that understands, yeah, hey, you have these certain compounds. You have fluoride in your water. Well, a carbon filter is not going to take out fluoride. It’s quite a process to take out fluoride. That’s a one perfect example, you know, of selecting the right type of filtration systems.
And again, it’s just not like a one all kind of fits all approach. Like I still might even recommend like an RO system. It’s not my favorite only because what it’s doing, it’s deconstructing. It’s pulling all the minerals. It’s stripping out the water. Natural Actions has a system that actually restructures. But you still have to like remineralize that water. And there’s some companies out there that are putting out some pretty cool RO systems now as well.
Switching to well water. Well water has a whole different thing. So say even in your region, you know, you drill a well at, you know, 100 feet deep and you hit artesian, you know, some artesian aquifer. Well, in that aquifer, you could still have arsenic, right? You can still have all these different types of, you know, organic compounds and things like that or organic compounds, you know, so you can have this beautiful structured water, but you might have one element that needs to be treated in that, right? Another one that we found even in like in Florida, for example, is silica. Silica can really have a major impact. So somebody will think, oh, hey, I have hard water and I’ve got like calcification build up around all my, you know, faucets and things like that. Well, sometimes it’s not it’s not the calcium, you know, from the minerals in the water. It’s silica. And so somebody will put like a water softener, which I discourage like certain softeners, you know, and I’ll say why. But what they’re doing is they’re putting it they’re putting on a water softener that’s not even addressing the underlying cause because find out like there was some high TDS and high silica. So that’s why it’s really, really important, it is a science, you know, but a test costs a couple hundred dollars to be able to test this to know to be able to work with a local water company going, hey, this is what I have to work with. Then let the water company design a filter, a filter specific around that, right?
The goal, the end goal is we want filtered water that’s clear from all these impurities that we just talked about. And that’s structured. That’s the end goal, that’s mineralized too, you know, that’s carrying its natural, you know, minerals back into the house. So, you know, the thing on, I was going to mention about like water softening systems, what they do is it will pull out like you know, the, the calcium and replace it with like sodium and, you know, which is softer, you know, you take a shower and you kind of feel like you still got soap, you know, kind of like that, that whole effect or your hair softer or whatever. That’s not necessarily a good thing because you’re taking out one, you’re stripping one mineral and you’re replacing it. So you’re kind of creating this imbalance within the water. Not to mention if you have copper plumbing that can be a little aggressive on, on that as well.
So also to talking about like copper, like plumbing in general, you know, forever for our audience here, like I have, I can make a total case on why I would either use a PEX plumbing or why I would use copper plumbing. I get the questions all the time and the plumbing industry is cleaned, clean their act up a lot. A lot of the, the flux or the compression fittings that they’re using for copper is, is it’s very clean now. PEX has really cleaned up, you know, any, any outgassing or leaching issues that they had once upon a time. And then the problem with PEX back in the day was if it was exposed to a lot of chlorine, it would actually oxidize. We talked about oxidization, right? It would actually oxidize the plastics in that. Well, if one, if we’re filtering everything, there’s no oxidization taking process, taking place. So if I’m in an area and I’m working with a plumber and that plumber is very good at PEX, I say use PEX, you know, because you don’t want your plumber going, well, I’ve never really used this type and I’ll use, no, no, you want the plumber to use what they’re good at. You know, so plumbing, you know, is a big piece to that.
Also too, another thing is if you have, say you have an older home and you do a point of entry of the whole house filter structure, by the way, this whole time I’ve been talking about like a whole house solution. So we have under the sink types of things. So sometimes, you know, like it sounds like you have like an under sink type of a setup, you know, somebody will run like what we’d refer to as a polishing filter under the sink. So say for example, you have, you’re in a house that’s 20, 30 years old, it was copper and you had like these old moen fittings or, you know, valves or things like that, fixtures. Well, you know, they were using lead. You know, in a lot of these fixtures. And so sometimes we’ll find, we’ll clean it up at the source and we’ll have a perfect water test, but then yet out of the tap, we’ll have a little bit of a trace of amounts of lead. So in an older home, those are the types of things that you want to think about. It’s not, it’s great, like bathing in it, you know, you’re not consuming it orally. So you’re still getting that filtered in that structured water, which is great. But, you know, if there was a concern like an older plumbing, it would be nice to have a polisher filter just to, you know, just to assure that you took out any contaminants.
If it’s a new home, you know, you’re starting off with new plumbing so you’re starting off fresh and new. So you have if you have a point of entry, you know, filtration structured system, then you’re going to have pretty clean water right at the source.
Katie: Amazing. I feel like I just got a masterclass in water quality, and I will definitely be pinging you with questions as I do this in my home. Hopefully in the future, we can actually do some video content around all of this to help people get visuals of what’s going on in all these different scenarios. And I would guess the answer to this question is going to vary a lot depending on maybe the age of someone’s home, if they’re near high energy power lines, or if their water is especially bad. But we talked about a lot of topics. How can someone evaluate where’s going to be the most important place to start if they have to prioritize time and resources for kind of getting the biggest bang for their buck in improving their home?
Brian: You know, I’ve said this a couple of times because it’s kind of like it’s kind of like the simple go-to answer. And it’s to find like a building biologist or a building scientist. Because if we’re going to ask any questions on recommendations of what would my recommendations be, that’s a big one. Because that’s what the Building Biology Institute was all about. It was to educate. They’ve been doing this since post-World War II. It started in the 70s or before the 60s in Germany. And then it came here to the U.S. in the early 80s, even the late 70s. And it was all about advocating and educating consumers and homeowners and contractors on what to look for. And so it’s grown a lot.
And even myself going through the Building Biology Institute, me as a builder, you know, just FYI, I do these healthy home assessments. And I know there’s several people out there on Instagram that are that are actually doing these assessments. And it’s great, or they’re advocating to building biology, or, you know, they’re a builder, an architect that’s really educating. So I would highly recommend, you know, going on to the Building Biology Institute website, finding a professional, or, you know, whether maybe somebody has contact like a building scientist, or just works with a general contractor that just gets it, that understands the importance of like, you know, building performance is a big one, you know, so when we’re looking at the building performance, we’re looking at everything from the foundation to the roof, to the placement of the home, to understanding the environment around it, the design of it. And that’s pretty simple for somebody that understands performance. You know, so even a good quality builder, you know, maybe they became a home inspector or something like that.
We’re not, we’re not talking about home inspections. I’m not talking about just like a real estate transaction inspection because they need to have a talking to in that department, in my opinion, because they’re just out. It’s, it’s just super simple. It’s more or less to kind of close the deal to make sure that it’s safe or whatever the case may be. But a home inspection should be way beyond that. A home inspection be like, hey, look, you have, you know, potential, like the roof looks like it’s going to need to be replaced or, hey, I noticed water damage around the windows or, hey, I noticed water damage at the bottom of the wall because your neighbor, you know, water’s coming down from the hill and it’s flooding the back of the yard or, you know, things like this. So, you know, again, any good builder, building biologists, building scientists will have this basic knowledge to go on there, to do these such inspections. Did that, does that answer the question?
Katie: It does. And I know you do like comprehensive consultations about this. So I’ll put the link for that as well. Like I said, this is something I’ll be working with you on and I’ll try to document the process and what it looks like in my home. But like I said, I hope we get to have more interviews in the future because this is such a comprehensive topic and it’s certainly not one we can solve in a one hour podcast episode, but I feel like you gave us an amazing primer today and at least a lot to think about and directions to begin to evaluate for our own homes. And I for you guys listening on the go. But is there anywhere else online that you prefer people to find you and learn from you or jump in to start researching on their own to learn more?
Brian: Yeah, no, it’s, you know, believe it or not, we’ve had huge success or I’ve had huge success just on Instagram, you know, just by hashtagging, you know, healthy homes, holistic homes, water quality, you know, mold free building, EMF, you know, all of these buzzwords, keywords, they’ve been pretty effective. And, you know, I’m probably the rarity as far as because I’m a builder. I’m not just a building biologist or whatever. I’m actually a builder. I’ve been building the science. I’ve been building healthy homes or I’ve been building homes for a long time, but healthy homes really, really gotten a lot deeper into that.
And so, but the buildingbiologyinstitute.org is a big one. But also too, that’s why I’m here. I’m here to advocate and I’m here to help and direct people. And so my Instagram, a lot of people like using the Instagram and it’s synergy360 and that’s S-E-N-E-R-G-Y 360. You can find me on Instagram. And then of course my website synergy360.com. And we’re getting better about putting just very legitimate articles and blogs of information. So everything that I just talked about today, you can find on my blogs. And so I think right now we’re up to like 90 because we’re just really getting the information out there. So if you take your time, everything that I talked about is on those blogs.
Also too, there’s a book that I do recommend. This is a great resource. I’m not sure if you’ve heard Prescription for a Healthy House. This is a book written by, and we’ll link this one too, this is by a book written by Paula Baker-Laporte. She’s been sitting on the Building Biology for over 30 years. She’s the EcoNest Architecture. And she wrote this amazing book that will basically teach you how to build your own home. So it’s not like I’m saying, hey, you’re, you know, for a homeowner, you’re going to get this and you’re just going to want to go build your own home, but you’ll definitely become very educated on what a healthy home is, what a healthy house is just by reading this book. So like, then when you’re looking, you know, now you’re educated, right? So now when you’re looking for a builder, you know, the right questions to ask, or even looking for like a building biologist or somebody such as myself, at least now you have something to work with. So I can’t stress the Prescription for a Healthy House enough. I think it’ll be a real game changer for a lot of your audience here today. So that’s a great resource.
Katie: Amazing. Well, I will link to that as well as all of your links in the show notes for any of you guys who are listening while you’re walking or driving kids around. And Brian, like I said, I hope we get to have more future conversations. This has been so enlightening. Thank you so much for your time and for all of the, I’m sure, thousands and thousands of hours of research and direct work you’ve done in this area. You are an absolute joy to talk to and I’m so grateful.
Brian: Thank you, Katie. Thank you.
Katie: And thank you, as always, for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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