Water Damage Bootcamp

Hello, everyone. Hello. Welcome to the Water Damage Boot Camp. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m Kristen. I’m the event specialist here within Circle. This webinar, will cover topics such as, source of loss versus cause of loss, categorization of water, dry standards and drying goals, equipment placement and calculations, and so, so much more. This webinar is eligible for four IACRC continuing education credits. So without further ado, the reason you are all here, I will pass it over to Chris and Ken. Beautiful. Well, good morning, everyone. Good afternoon, depending where you are. Couple things. We’re gonna do polls. If you haven’t been to one of these, when we do polls, it’s completely anonymous so that anything that you answer in there, no one’s gonna see your your information, your answers. You can be truthful. We ask some sometimes difficult questions and, and just answer them truthful, and and we’ll have a discussion, kinda crafts what Ken and I do, through this. We have a a a framework of how we’ll present this, but then we usually make sure that we we talk to some of the points that you guys are experiencing. The other thing here is this flow, but what we did is we followed through hydro. And so if you’re trying to figure out, whether you’re gonna implement hydro in your business or you have hydro and you’re trying to figure out what some of the stuff is. As we work through here, this is the workflow that hydro has and then this is a little bit of the learning that goes around that. So it’s it’s supplementing what you’re doing with the tool and then it gets a a lot deeper than that with the discussion that we’ll have with Ken. So we’re gonna go through. We’re gonna source a loss, cause a loss, categorization of water. We’re gonna talk about drying chambers, psychometrics, and vapor pressure differentials, how it impacts materials, so the material permeability, and then drying standards and drying goals. And then we’ll get into a little bit of a moisture mapping discussion. I I saw a bunch of questions in the in the registrations about that. Creating conditions for stabilization and drying and why you’re stabilizing. There are a lot of questions about stabilization, Ken, that was coming in on registration. Equipment calculations, we go through that piece and explain how it can help and hurt your business. Placing equipment, reading dehumidifiers, there’s inspecting to completing, and then we also have a little bit of some of the constant, battles that happen, in the review process. You’ll get some arguments, and then we have some rebuttals and some discussion points around that, coming from this the, the standard and otherwise. First poll, we’re gonna start with four polls, get a bunch of polls out of the way, and this is more so about who you are and what problems you’re dealing with. What part of the restoration industry do you work in? And it could be part of the insurance industry. We got restoration contractor, insurance carrier, TPA, sub trade. We put in an other category this year. You might be coming in as a consultant or something that’s on the side. It might be a homeowner. We’ve had a few of them register. Right now, it looks like we got mostly restoration contractors, some insurance carriers or, adjusters, and, no TPAs this year and no sub trades so far. I’m excited to see we have some insurance, company interest. This is a this is excellent. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll give it a few more seconds. It’s, rallying in, and, looks like a, a ton of restores, one sub trade, couple sub trades, one TPA, and three or four carriers. Perfect. And then we got a bunch of other, and and I I have no idea what your other is. But that’s okay. Kristen, if you wanna close that, we we we’ve got our audience. That’s awesome, guys. Well, welcome. And if you’re not on a restoration contractor side, welcome welcome into this. It’s we’re glad you’re here for this discussion. Alright. The next the next part we have is what percentage of your jobs are reviewed where price and scope are challenged? And this is could be in the TPA environment. If you’re not in the TPA environment, it may change a little bit. Can I don’t know if you like, while these guys are answering, this has been a change in the last twenty years that you’ve seen is is the review process? I know you talk a lot about it, but, but this is something where we’re seeing right now. The numbers are coming in. Zero to twenty five percent is, it’s actually it’s almost almost split down. Zero to twenty five, a third of people aren’t being reviewed or very little. Twenty five to fifty is twenty five percent. Fifty is seventy five percent of the time is twenty five percent, and seventy five to a hundred percent of the time is is seventeen percent. And it looks like it’s sort of holding those numbers. What I find interesting here is that I first of all, I I think it’s important everybody understands that this is a very geographic phenomenon. Here where I am in Florida, as you can see from my background and no. I’m not really on a beach because I wouldn’t be wearing a shirt like this. I’d be wearing my bikini, just so everybody knows. But, no. Actually, I I what I’m really surprised about is that here in Florida, it’s really common practice that the majority, if not almost all of the contractors’ claims, are challenged after the work is done. It’s a very Floridian practice. But if you go to other places in the country, other states, it’s amazing how many contractors have their files, challenged, you know, only a a few times, like, maybe a couple of times out of ten, and it’s, it’s not very common. So I I think geographically, the the practice of file review, aggressive file review, scrubbing the file, these types of expressions to try and manage the, loss severity. This has been, something that is has become regionally focused in different pockets around, America. I know we have a lot of, people from other countries here, Australia and Canada, which is awesome, and those practices might not be as common as they are here in America. For what it’s worth, California, Texas, and Florida. Those are the worst states for file reviews. That’s what I have found. Yeah. It’s interesting. And so we got the poll finished up with thirty one percent, zero twenty five, twenty six percent. So it’s it’s, like, you know, substantial review across the board. The majority of them is is twenty five to a hundred. We got seventy five percent of people there. Very cool. Our next poll we got going on is what percentage of your jobs are reviewed where quality of restoration is there? Now this is different than a a review on on your price. Is someone coming back and reviewing your job and saying, hey, you you follow the standard or you didn’t follow the standard? So zero to twenty five, twenty five to fifty, fifty to seventy five, or seventy five to a hundred. And, the quality is is these are would be considered like a two way review where it’s like, hey. We we noticed you did the standard. You followed a bunch of the the the literature there. You were following a bunch of processes. That makes, sense. Hey. We noticed you didn’t follow this. We should go back and fix it. And zero to twenty five is leading sixty seven percent. It’s really no. This is interesting. So Ken does a bunch of legal work, and he does a bunch of file review or or site inspections. I do a lot of legal review, and I do a lot of dispute resolution. And in, I’m gonna say, all of my cases, and and I’ll I’ll I’ll maybe preference it with maybe there’s one that wasn’t, none of them received a technical a competent technical co review. And so I haven’t seen that yet. But, yeah, try challenging labor rates that do amount of I would say pricing. A bunch of this stuff is is is on the quality. Did you did you dry the building? Are they reinspecting it? So it looks like the majority, sixty six percent said no or zero to twenty five. Twenty five to fifty is seventeen percent. So we’re sending the majority is is limited review on quality of restoration. And and I saw one of the comments is, yeah, they won’t care about price. And and it’s easy. Actually, it’s interesting because price is one of those things that you can easily review, whereas quality requires a skill set that is hard to, achieve. Can you guys This question, This question, Chris, I I kinda got a scratch on my head. How many of the people that read this question, are thinking that when a the file is being reviewed for quality that the equipment use duration or quantity is not a reflection of quality. It’s a reflect reflection of practice. Because I think that the drying strategy that would have x number of pieces of equipment for extended time, is that a quality, a challenge on the quality of the drying, or is that were you when you formed this question, were we talking about something other than equipment counts and duration? No. It was it was it was quality. You know? Are you are you are you are you doing a proper, decontamination of the environment? Someone checking to see if category two is properly handled. It’s it’s in those sense. So The numbers, I think, were similar to last year. And finally, got one last poll. Thanks for participating, guys. You guys got a huge participation amount, coming in. I really appreciate that. Alright. Our next poll is how much more difficult is it to make money these days compared to years past? And your answers are, I haven’t been in business long enough to know. It seems easier, and our books show it. It’s been getting more difficult. It’s hit and miss. The longer I’m in the business, the harder it gets, and we’re struggling to be profitable or not profitable. Again, no one can see your answers, so you’re free to answer it. And, again, appreciate your your honesty. Yeah. And we’re starting to get in that a lot of new people, haven’t been in business long enough to know that that’s a predominant answer. It’s been getting more difficult. It’s hit and miss, and and that seems to be the trend that we’ve seen over the last three years of doing this this session is is that number is up. Last year, I think it was thirty percent. This year, it’s sitting at forty three percent. The long term in the business, the harder it gets is is trending right around eighteen percent, and we’re struggling to be profitable or not profitable. I tend to believe those are more full services restores, but it’s six percent that are there, and then that can be true. And we’ve seen even very good mitigation companies sort of get left in behind the pricing trends, and so we’ll do that. Perfect. So it seems, Chris, that the, you know, it’s been getting more difficult, and the longer I’m in business, the harder it gets. If we combine those two, sixty percent of the attendees here are having challenges being profitable. Yeah. Sixty six percent if you take this we’re struggling in there. So it’s a two thirds. And just to give you an idea, we did a an estimating boot camp about a month and a half ago, and we did the profitability, boot camp or master class back in January, February of this year. Just for context to this, that number is about the same number as it was for those other ones. So so you guys aren’t alone. It a lot of people are finding it more more difficult to to survive today. Alright. Here’s where we get started. Thanks for your answers. The symptom is focusing on the price. The solution is focusing on the quality, and this is something that Ken and I both have done in our reviews. We start looking at how do we how do carriers and contractors work within the industry, and one of the symptoms that you’ll see is focusing on price. It’s the easiest thing to focus on because it’s the one metric that you can have an opinion on without anyone checking it, and it’s a discussion. It’s it’s a battle of opinions. In Canada, there’s a lot of changes that have taken place. Several cases, that have gone to court have actually determined that if you’re a preferred contractor of the insurance carrier, then the insurance carrier’s actions are no different than the contractor’s actions. They they tie the two together because the carrier is bringing a preferred in. Therefore, the solution in Canada is probably gonna have to move to a quality solution because the courts have now tied the contractor and the and the insurance company together, and, and they’re bound. The solution that we start looking at is the legal processes in Australia. Australia, the insurance company is bound with the contractor. The US, there’s still some some division there, and it depends on where you are as Ken said. It’s getting closer. I don’t know if you got anything to add to that, Ken, on the percentage of files that you see go to a courtroom where where they’re connected. I don’t know if you’re involved in that very often. Yeah. We’re we’re seeing that out here in Florida that it is, getting more, aggressive. The trend that I’m observing, though, at least on the files that I’m involved in, is that, you know, there are depositions that are taken. There are files. There are experts files that are reviewed, experts that are asked to review those files to go to the jobs and to explore the the project, interview the policyholder, and they the the process, the legal process goes back and forth for the duration that tip is typical of a legal, lawsuit. It’s usually at least a year and sometimes as much as two or three years before the court date. And then they take it right up to about two or three days before the court date, and then they settle. And it’s a it’s a it extends the the whole dispute process for several years and, of course, lots of expense because of the lawyers and being involved, but it never actually makes it to the court. Now there are some exceptions, of course, where it does go to court, and that’s where the, you know, the experts have a a a field day, you know, going back and forth, and the attorneys get more aggressive and vocal, and it they’re they’re never much fun. But, I find that they settle before it actually goes to court for whatever reason that is. Yeah. And then The one thing I do wanna say about your slide here really quickly, Chris, is I was thinking that the symptom is focusing on the price. The solution is focusing on the quality. What I have noticed is that the insurers typically seem to approach the contractor with the understanding or predisposition that all contractors deliver the same product. And I think that’s the the the foundation of the error is that we are not all the same. And after reviewing many, many files, like I know you have, Chris, I’ve seen a grand difference in the quality of mitigation, performance among contractors in our industry. And so focusing on the quality is a legitimate focus. And what I particularly am resistant to is when there is a, quote, competitive quote after the work is done, that they found a competitor to produce a scope of work that is contrary to the original contractors. And they say, see, it could have been done for less. This is a really if you ask me, I think it’s a very poor practice because we don’t all deliver the same product, and we don’t all have the same level of understanding and competence. It’s not like we are all delivering the identical product. And I think that it it’s really difficult for us as contractors to say, that contract over there is different from us because of and then you fill in the blank, whatever it is on their quality control thing. But if you have a unique practice that you are particularly proud of, I would showcase it to say that this is your hamburger for the sake of discussion. This is what your product looks like compared to what their product looks like. And I think that your level of education should also be showcased that while you might have thirty years experience, the person who prepared the competitive quote might be a a new individual that is still learning the ropes of this, craft. And I think these are the, elements that should be, mentioned to those who would rely on a less on a second quote from an unknown source. I think that’s a good way of saying it, rather than the contractor that was on the job site and had to make go through the exercise of making the difficult decisions in how to make a competent mitigation strategy on that particular job with its specific needs. We’re not all No. No. And and I don’t think you’re wrong. So so when we talk about the legal process to that point is if you were to come in and provide an estimate or a quote, the most amount of money you can make is that number that you wrote. So if it’s a five thousand dollar estimate or a five thousand dollar invoice, that’s the most you’re gonna make on that job. And then to what Ken’s saying is now you go into a review process and someone else writes a quote or you get a peer review from from someone in the office saying that these prices are the wrong price, and there’s a negotiation that takes place after you’ve done the job. Well, you’re taking dollars off. So you’re negotiating on something that the work’s already done, and now you only have money to lose. There’s not really money to gain in that process. And then you also have the other side, which is the workmanship side. If you have deficiencies or you need to go back and repair some stuff or you left stuff off the scope, you also lose money when you have to then do that extra handling and carry. You’ll see that a lot on the rebuild side, little bit less on the on the mitigation side, but you’re still taking dollars off the job at this point. Now everything after that contract is signed or that invoice is delivered, I consider this the legal process. It’s a legal process of sorts. It’s a it’s a collections process. It’s a getting paid process, and then it moves into, the dispute process. So you get into an a little bit further, you get past the initial reviewer, you might be inside of a senior management discussion that’s taking place inside an insurance company or it goes from a reviewer to an adjuster, and that costs you more money. That’s time that you could be spent out working on your business that you’re now navigating through this loss of dollars, and it’s reducing your profitability there. If you move to the part where Ken’s talking about it, now you get into an appraisal position. You’re paying a party to represent you. It gets really expensive. Representation is if you find someone new, they’re probably two hundred dollars an hour, but it’s like two hundred to five hundred an hour to find someone to represent you. And and and they have to be trained and qualified and a specialist to be able to make that argument for you. So you’re finding somebody of a very high, experience level and they’re very niche in their skill set. You now are are starting to spend money. What you’re actually gonna do is probably pay money out of pocket. You lost all your profit on that job, and now you’re defending your your business reputation for the future. So you’ve decided that you’re gonna go into this dispute resolution to get the win because you’re trying to send a message to the other side no different than that’s what they’re doing to you. If this continues and it doesn’t get resolved there, you’re gonna go to trial or you’re gonna go into court. As Ken said, this may you’re in the process where you go through an appraisal or you decide to avoid appraisal and go straight to court. When you’re moving towards that court decision or that that court process, you’re gonna spend a lot of money getting there. You’re gonna lose a lot of dollars. Nobody wins in this situation, but what this is is this is a battle that you’re taking and you’re putting it on someone’s doorstep to send a heavy message or to change the precedent of a case. Both parties will fight tooth and nail. It’s hard to come out as a winner. At this point, everyone loses, but there’s a there’s a higher purpose or the reason you should be doing is a higher purpose. If you think you’re going to trial to win to get paid, you’re losing money along the way. There’s no one that comes out of trial or that process that wins. I’m gonna say that, but now I’m gonna say to Ken’s point, there’s some jurisdictions where it may pay if you are in the right to win, but it’s it’s a long process. It ***** a lot of energy out of your business. Ken, you you live in this in this world. Any any, objections to that? No. Actually, I think you covered that really well, Chris. I’m noticing some of the questions that are popping up in the the feed, and there there’s a one individual who’s asking about these alerts, high temperature alerts and and this sort. Is it do you have any comments about these alerts? Yeah. So so we’ll get into that when we get into, sending a drying plan. Ken and I talk about that a bit. All I’ll say is that the alerts inside the app are there to protect your technicians from making simple mistakes. The high temperature, you set the temperature range inside Encircle. So it’s a Encircle question. Tell you what, let’s get to it at question period, and and we’ll continue on. But it’s a good question, and I’ll make sure if I don’t cover it at the question period, let’s cover it when we get to, drying chambers. And and and I’ll explain how we use those those temperature alerts in, in hydro. That sounds great, Chris. I look forward to that. So we also talk about claim documentation and drying documentation. There’s a little bit of a difference here when we when we look at this. The two types of documentation that you have, and it’s because we serve a different party. If you only serve the customer, you would only be worried about drawing documentation. But because we have this relationship that’s really close to the insurance company, we get into the claims world, and we start to get into their nomenclature of using their terminology. And we also start catering to their needs, which is helping the customer, file their claim and substantiate their claim. So it’s it’s it’s not a bad thing. It just you have to understand that they’re completely separate. Insurance paying for water damage has nothing to do with how we do water damage. The payment of that contract, that contract could be written completely different than a normal, homeowners policy that you see, has no bearing on how you’re gonna restore the building in the sense of the steps you’re gonna take. So when we start to look at it from the perspective of doing this, it’s about legal liability. From a drying perspective, how are you gonna dry the building versus, what are we gonna do for the documentation for the claim? And so we look at the insurance policy slightly different. An adjuster is looking at the policy to see is the loss covered by the by the insurance. And effectively, what we’re saying is does that contract that the homeowner paid money to the insurance company and the insurance company then promised the the homeowner they would be there for certain losses, is it covered? And if it is covered, how much is the insurance company responsible to pay? One of the one of the easiest ways to look at this is when you look at, a roof or a roof that has actual cash value. So if we take a roof that has twenty years life, at ten years it has a loss, the insurance company says it’s at fifty percent of its life expectancy. We provide coverage for fifty percent of the roof, and the other fifty, you’re on the hook for. If we were to look at water damage the same way, it’d be a lot easier. But in water damage, most of it is on replacement cost, so you get into this battle with the insurance company wants to reduce invoicing. It’s it also comes down to is the is it covered? It has to be sudden and accidental, generally. Generally, maintenance or poor maintenance isn’t covered because you can control that. The insurance company can’t. So they put exclusions in saying if it’s a drip, a leak over time, those are typically not covered and as a water damage restorer, you would need to kind of have an idea of there gonna be who’s gonna be responsible for paying if you see a long term problem. Chances are it’s the building, owner who’s gonna pay for that, not the insurance company. But there are some policies where that rule doesn’t apply for certain situations. When we start to look at claims documentation, though, we’re looking at the other side. I got a re extra animations here that I didn’t want. They normally influence how your work. So when you look at the, customer, can they afford your services? Are you having that discussion? Are you talking to them about whether the, insurance company will only pay after certain things happen? What’s the responsibility of the customer, and do they have to take action in a hurricane or something along those lines? That becomes an issue, and that becomes a little bit of a challenge to deal with here. But we look at it from how are we serving the customer. So we look at it as two different industries with two different terminologies where we, where we serve them. Can what what’s it called? Is it called the, is it the restoration triangle? You know what I’m talking about? The the carrier, the restorer, and the homeowner? Sure. So would you like me to speak to that quickly? You may. Yeah. Absolutely. Quickly. So there are three an insurance claim is an unusual business model because there are three entities involved in the transaction, of which there are two contracts in play. One is the policy between the insurer and the policyholder, and the other contract is in play between the policyholder and the contractor. But there is rarely a written agreement between the insurer and the contractor. With the exception of Australia. They do have the insurance company will engage a contractor directly. So, in America, at least, it is a different, experience in how to settle the claim. So your previous slide, Chris, was how much is does the, insurance company owe? How much should they pay, you know, for the claim? And my, thought on that is it’s unusual it’s it’s disappointing that when a contractor completes their contractual agreement with the policyholder and they submit the invoice, not an estimate, The it it’s no longer an estimate when the the scope of work reported in your file describes the services performed, not what you speculate will be performed, but were actually done. And so you submit the invoice, and you say, here’s the the the amount that is owed, and then some third party, like the insurer, with which there is no contractual agreement with the contractor, steps up and says, I wanna negotiate that final invoice, and we agree to it. And this is where it gets really complicated is because there was a commitment to the policyholder. There’s an agreement between the policyholder and the insurer to indemnify. But the practice, as I’m seeing it, is that the insurer will negotiate with the contractor for a settlement amount as if it is an a suggestion that the invoice and the scope was a suggestion. When it’s not a suggestion, it’s a report of the services performed and the cost associated as it as stipulated in the contract between the contractor and the policyholder. And so to have it renegotiated after the work is done, I find to be difficult to accept. I’m trying to control my emotional language here. But I get really upset when I see that because that is not the model promised in the policy nor is it a an an element of discussion in the contract between policyholder and contractor, and yet we do it. And so I wonder what it’s gonna take to stop this poor practice because I don’t know of any other industry on the planet where that is usual and customary. It is a really weird practice, a nuance of this industry. So when I see new people excited to get into our industry, there’s a part of me that really relates to that. I love drying out buildings. It is the funnest challenge ever. It is truly enjoyable, but it’s that business side. Holy smokes. Is it ever messed up? And we really need our industry deserves to have that resolved in some fashion so that it’s less adversarial, and we can do our job wake up in the morning and do our job with the smile that we all deserve to have? So so part of it, Ken, is is the terminology. And and this is where over the years, you see that the two industries have blended together. Right? It’s originally started in from the cleaning industry. Carpet cleaners moved in and started doing restoration. Construction companies would do the rebuilds on fires. And then you see this blending. Well, so a carrier terminology is used a lot by contractors. We call them the insured while they’re customer. And so when we look at the two different terminologies, you kind of get understanding when you start blending. Oh, who’s the insured? Everyone knows who we’re talking about. Who’s the customer? Sometimes we know we’re talking about the insured. Sometimes it’s the insurance company. Sometimes it’s the adjuster. They have a policy. We have a contract. They have a reserve. We have a rough order of magnitude. And then they have policy limits. You have an estimate or an invoice. And this is what Ken’s talking about where that’s the business side of dealing with the insurance company. When you start to look at the restore your functionality, we’re basically working with two major organizations. You’re you’re working with the IICRC, our standards of how do we do the work, and then OSHA or OHNS and other countries where, how are we performing the work safely? And those are your two primary, functions that are on there. Now that you also have the laws and jurisdictions that go with it. But when we start to look at drying documentation, are we doing the things that we need to do to protect our workers, and are we doing the things that we need to do to dry out the buildings? And are we documenting that properly? Are we documenting in such a way that we don’t have biased documentation? And this is something that Ken and I were discussing. We’ve actually had this for probably now three years. We’ve had these talks about biased documentation versus unbiased documentation. So when you start to review contractors’ reports or we review other consultant reports, is it written in a way that is factual and unbiased or does it have a bias slant to it where they’re selling a a position? And all of a sudden you look at your paperwork and that response is, are you selling position or are you just reporting data back saying based on this data, we made this decision, or did you have a bias coming in that this is how we’re gonna draw? And what’s interesting is in a lot of the disputes we end up in, there’s a lot of bias in how a job is documented both from the contractor side and the reviewer side. That leads to conflict because it’s almost opinion based. And opinion based gets you into fights a lot more than facts. Facts, the lawyers don’t wanna deal with, but the second you get into opinions, they can tear it apart. And so most of the disputes I see are biased documentation that have a lot of opinion without a lot of substance. Ken, you’re seeing that same thing, in in the field work you’re doing. Right? Is it like, is that not true? Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. So and then what comes down to is ethics and integrity. Is is it helping you do your job if you’re following it? The biased decision making, allow you to make money in the wrong way. And and one of the things that I’ve sort of been discussed or sort of been thinking about for the last few years is that bias position that the carriers have taken from a vendor process and the bias position from a restorer trying to just keep the numbers in in check so your business makes money. Those two, interests sometimes are conflicted. And what we look at is, can you drop claim severity and increase profitability? And it’s something that you have to have intimate knowledge of the industry to be able to do. And right now, I don’t think the players that are making the big decisions have that in-depth knowledge to be able to make a system that works. And so we see the broken system needs more review, more, accountability after the fact, less discussion before it happens. It’s just a it’s an interesting trend that we’re in right now where a lot of you said it’s harder to make money today than it was before or it’s hit and miss. I think that has to do with the system. It doesn’t have to do with the people. We have more education now than we’ve ever had. We have more opportunities to get training than we’ve ever had. There’s more online training, so so it’s it’s more accessible. Yet the industry seems to be harder to work in today than it did ten years ago, and that’s that’s perplexing when you should be more knowledgeable, should have more information. So if I could speak to that, Chris. Yeah. One of the ways historically and here I am being the historian after being in the industry for forty seven years now. But going back to about the year two thousand when the applied structural drying course, ASD, was evolving and being introduced to the market, that was one of the ways that our industry tried to provide greater value, lower loss severity, and more profit was through the creation of the ASD course and doing in place drying or top down drying, whichever expression you wish to use. This practice for those that, of you in the this call that may not be aware of what that means, it is when the contractor would leave the original installation of the building materials in place. You leave them unaltered. So baseboards remain on. The pad remains in place. The carpet remains in place. You put the equipment on top of the carpet. You do not remove any of these materials, and then you will dry everything in place from the top side. Now the the beauty behind that in the year two thousand was, look. We can dry everything, and there’s no rebuild. Alright? Because everything is still in place, and we get to use more equipment. And we all know that equipment is highly profitable. So this was the unique product offering of the in place or top down drying process is that you could leave all the building materials in place, thus negate the rebuild costs, and you make more money with the drying equipment. So why didn’t that survive? Why is that becoming less common than it was in the year two thousand? And the reason why is because we have since learned that there are risks associated with leaving all the building components in place. That in fact, leaving wet carpet and pad on a plywood subfloor, there will be several days of that plywood continuing to absorb the moisture that’s still present in the pad that is in contact with that plywood. And so it gets wet for the next three day wetter for the next three days. Now here’s what’s interesting. When I’m looking at these files that contractors are submitting and I’m watching you know, looking at the drying records, I’m seeing drying records that do not reflect that truth, that the plywood is gonna get wetter while the wet pad remains in contact with the wood. There’s no way it’s gonna be saturated on day one when you got there, the plywood, and that it’s gonna start drying within twelve or twenty four hours. No. There’s still wet pad in contact with it. It’s gonna get wetter before it gets better, especially in an in place drying strategy. So what I’m finding when I read those records, I look at it, I just shake my head and go, these numbers are made up because that’s not the way these buildings dry with an in place drying strategy. And for those of you on the call who might be surprised by that message, I invite you to get your meter out and check it for yourself Because after teaching the ASD class for many, many years, never once have I seen the plywood get drier when there is an in place drying strategy with wet carpet and wet pad that you’ve extracted in contact with that plywood. The plywood gets wetter, not drier, after twenty four hours. So this is one of the truths of this, and it’s difficult to justify that to a reviewer who’s looking at this and going, why didn’t the material get drier? I don’t wanna pay you for that first twenty four hours. Well, that’s the physics of moisture movement. It’s not that it immediately starts drying the minute you plug in a piece of machinery. So these the other risk that happens is people started noticing that there are fancy colors appearing behind the baseboard after an in place drying strategy because it it dries so slowly, it’s not uncommon. You’re gonna have a microbial condition that amplifies in an in place drying strategy. So many contractors started to pull back from that attempt to dry everything in place without touching it because there are risks involved, and it’s difficult to explain why things got wetter for the next couple of days and then started to progress. And I will also say this. If there’s anybody in the call that thinks an in place or top down ASD drying strategy dries buildings in three or four days, they need to go back to the same school that you learned your ASD and check to see if the house dries in three days. The course is four days. Tell me that building is dry after three days. It’s not. And in fact, the flood houses that are out there, they did a survey, and I’m not gonna say who did it. But the average ASD floodhouse takes between eight and eleven days to actually meet dry standard. So if you’re doing top down drying and think that’s a three or four day drying strategy, that is just false because the average drying time approaches two weeks for a top down in place drying strategy if you’re checking the building competently and being intellectually honest with the process because it doesn’t dry in three or four days. It just doesn’t happen. And and this comes into where we we started talking about documentation that can be defended. So if you’re documenting to make better drying decisions, you’re actually recording the real data that’s on-site. And when you do that, you’re effectively increasing your profits and reducing your liability. And to Ken’s point, if the reading show that you’re getting wetter and you have an explanation of why that’s happening, a decision could be made. We don’t want it to get wetter. Okay. Well, then let’s take out the pad. But you’re you’re actually using real data to have real conversations to then be able to support what you’re doing. When you do that, you get some some really interesting things that come out. You have a legitimate conversation with the insurance carrier saying, this is what’s happening. Here’s what’s going on on the job site, and here’s the result. And the customer, you’re validating that the work you did on the job site is the right work. It’s when you get into the into this type of model of collecting real data that you’re getting data driven decisions and you’re an honest broker. Because like Ken said, we both have just recently have caught people submitting readings that don’t make any sense. It’s not physically possible to do what they said they did, and you have to have the questions. Like, if you wanna have that discussion, we can have that discussion, but what you said physically can’t happen on a job. Then all of sudden you get into the conflicted data, documentation that has a conflict, And it’s usually documentation to get you paid. So I’m gonna document and show that we did this great job. To Ken’s point, I’m not gonna show that things got wetter. I’m gonna say that they got drier. Well, okay. What happens there? Well, you’re following someone else’s rules even though it defies what’s what’s happening on the job site. And this is where you get some conflicts when you’re a contractor on a preferred program and you you go against the review of a a second contractor or a homeowner and your data doesn’t support it. If if Ken reviews it and it doesn’t add up, he can’t tell you that you’re in the good. So all of a sudden your data puts you as a bad actor. And when that happens, drawing problems don’t get caught and the customer gets a substandard job. And to what Ken just said, you get those fancy colors underneath, a homeowner sees that and goes, I didn’t have that before or we’ve never had water damage so why do I have those those molds, those visible molds or visible microbial growth? Why do I have that after you’re done? And it’s because you’re running with biased data. You’re just trying to get paid, and you’re not an honest broker. And that’s right now, where most of the conflicts we’re seeing are coming from is you’ve got contractors that are putting in really bad data and then selling it as if at the end of the job, it went the way that you said it was, and and you just can’t substantiate it. So that biased documentation versus unbiased documentation is massive. And if you you’re gonna see the trend. Right now, I’ve got well, we’ve got the Retramex remote monitoring system. So we you’ve got Phoenix with remote monitoring. You got all this independent data that’s coming into the into the marketplace. That is gonna change the way we do we do business because all of those readings can’t be manipulated. Well, now you’re gonna start to see the trends where things get wetter and then they dry or you remove the materials in there, but now you’re gonna have that unbiased data to start and enter the marketplace. And so we’re entering a new era. And for those of you that said, hey. Things are getting harder. The rules got harder. The the the systems are changing. The game is changing, but a lot of those the way that we played the game ten years ago doesn’t necessarily work as good today. And I can tell you this is a trend that’s happened. Ken’s been in the industry forty seven years. In forty seven years, if he stayed still, he forty seven years ago, he said this industry is easy to make money. If he stood still, ten years later it’d be harder to make money. Ten years later it’s harder to make money. If you enter the business at any one of those ten year segments that Ken’s been in the industry, you’ll always say that the the previous ten years were harder to make money because you learned the rules then and the rules change over time. And so you get stuck in those ways, and that’s why the new people entering now, they’ll say that it’s easier to make money today and it’ll be harder in ten years. It’s just how we all we all react. We get into a rut and we don’t change. We don’t notice the industry changing around us, but when you enter it new, you figure out how to play with the environment that you’re given. So we run into this source of loss versus cause of loss. Again, restore terminology versus carrier terminology. The source of loss is what we’re gonna run into, and I think it’s important we talk about this because you’ll hear a lot of contractors talk about cause of loss when really they should be talking about the source of loss. And when we look at source, source is a thing. It’s a person, place, or thing by the definition. But when we look at it from a restoration perspective, we’re looking at it’s a ruptured waterline. Okay. Is it a supply line or a waste line? Because that’s that source is gonna determine how we we we handle the loss. Is it wind driven rain, aquarium, a sump pump? What are we dealing with as our source which results in our actions to to deal with it? When we look at cause of loss, it’s an action that caused the loss. So it’s a person or a thing that gives rise to an action, a phenomenon or a condition. In the insurance world, it’s a cut water line. It’s a sump pump failure. It’s a ruptured, pipe. Frozen pipe, that’s the cause. Whether it’s a frozen sewer line or water line, it’s a frozen pipe that is defined in the policy. A leaking pipe is also defined in a policy typically as an exclusion. For us, we would look at a leaking supply line and say, well, we’re dealing with a a source that’s category one or it’s a clean it’s a sanitary supply line, and then now we’re dealing with the resulting damage, which could be a long term water issue, and that’s changed it. These terminologies we use interchangeably, but they’re not. So cause of loss, you’re talking an insurance policy term inside an insurance policy contract. Source of loss, we’re talking about restoration. If you were to look at this picture, what possible sources of the loss could you have? You could have a potential tank. You could have the water from the bowl. You could have the water from the bowl with ***** matter, with urine. It’s gonna change how you handle it. You have a a leak from around the wax seal. You could have a supply line leak. There’s all these different reasons you could have it, but your your cause of loss could be a hammer fell into the toilet or your cause of loss could be the dog chewed a water line. Your source of the loss is the type of water we’re dealing with. You have the same thing that happens here in the sink. And so what we start to look at is how is that restoration versus insurance come together? And, Ken, probably an important point is is a perspective when you look at disputes is that terminology can get you into trouble. We’ve spoken about restorers grabbing the wrong protocols. When they go to job sites, they’re treating a category two as a category one. We’re gonna get into that, where they start to get in there or the or the insurer takes control of the site and says, ah, the cause of loss is this. Therefore, you need to treat it like this. And I think that’s probably one of the trends that we started to see in the industry is the insurance company is now getting into the discussion around categorization or determining which side of the coin that this falls in. Are are you seeing much of that now? Yes. I am. You know, this whole subject of cause of loss, as I understand first of all, I’m not an insurance adjuster nor am I an attorney, so I want everybody to know that. But the expression that I am familiar with from the insurance policy is called proximate causation. Proximate causation. Now what that means, that’s the the event that made it sudden and accidental and became a covered out an element of a covered peril. And so this whole subject of causation, I have found to be a valuable understanding so that when there are disputes on a claim related to the causation of this damage, then this is a a part of the discussion that would be relevant to an adjuster who is determining coverage decisions on an insurance claim. So while we are we we in this conversation, we’re talking about the source of loss being the pipe. The causation is the fact that it froze and caused a rupture. This same line of reasoning can be taken to areas that end up going microbially amplified amplified due to a delay that can be identified. Namely, in this discussion, a delay from an insurance carrier was so long that the building went moldy, you document on day one that the job was not moldy. And then after the the job progresses and there’s delays that you’ve documented and it took an extra week, an extra two weeks, and now the job is all nasty, it’s not uncommon that the insurance the insurer or the representative will say, ah, there’s an exclusion for that microbial amplification. Here’s the limit on the policy. If you can prove the causation is not from the original event, but rather the causation is the result of the delays of the insurer, the conversation changes. Because now it’s no longer subject to the I gotta be careful. It might not be subject to the exclusion or limitation of the policy, but rather it’s an error on the part of one party involved in that claim. And if you can trace that back to a certain entity, maybe they are responsible for the condition that the contractor must now deal with. So causation is an important bit of information in the file, especially if the if the new damage is the result of delays. The causation is the delay, not the peril. And that distinction might be valuable in discussions. The challenge for us is to document these conditions so that the discussion, if it should come up, is compellingly evident. What caused it? Yep. Absolutely. And and you guys and you don’t have to take that even if you come into a job and you’re working with a with a carrier, you have a preferred contract, and I did a lot of our work in Canada with with preferred programs, you’re still documenting the job. It’s just it’s just it’s not biased. It’s we got to the job. There was no visible mold. Here’s my photos. There was no visible growth. If you do any type of sampling, here’s the sample results. It’s just collecting data, and it’s not that you’re doing it, know that things can go sideways, but you’re doing the data collection. And then later on, if someone needs the data, you have it. And you take the bias out of it and all of a sudden your data is you have a history of a process of collecting good unbiased data. You’re easy to deal with. And you’re easy to deal within a dispute. You’re you you could be a witness for the carrier, you could be a witness for the homeowner, or you’re there to defend yourself. It doesn’t really matter. Your data is impartial. And that’s the biggest thing that I think we’re getting here. We’re at questions. Kristen, I’ll let you, take over. Perfect. Yeah. We’ve got a few, great questions coming in. So the first one is, if the loss occurred on September first with CAT one, does this deteriorate into CAT three by day three on September fourth? It depends, but all I can answer it. Oh, really? Okay. Alright. So first of all, let’s acknowledge where the question comes from because there was a period of time, when the IICRC s five hundred water damage standard, on page eighty eight in the two thousand six version of the standard, there was a graphic that had three little images that showed the influence of time on category of water. And if you read the small language at the bottom of it, it said, yes. There it is. Thank you, Chris. You might remember those, that image. If you read the small print, it talks about the influence of time in changing category. And if you read that sentence carefully, it does say seventy two hours that that the category of water can change in as quickly as seventy two hours, although it is not this is being mentioned in the standard, and it’s not to be used as a threshold that defines the moment in which, you know, the water can change category. It’s a laboratory test condition, and that’s what they you know, that’s what was published in two thousand six. We’ve since had a two thousand fifteen version of the standard and now the twenty twenty one, and you will notice that that graphic is absent. They took it out. The person that made that realized it was flawed. It was flawed, and he didn’t like the way the industry was using it, saying that after three days, the category of water changes, you know, as if on the seventy first hour, it’s still category one or two. And then on the seventy second hour, it changes to a three. That is ridiculous. And the laws of, you know, life and biology just don’t work in such, you know, ways. And the the main thing that they really noticed that they were wrong on is it’s not about time, everyone. Time is not the big dis the, influence, not the greatest influence on water changing category. The biggest thing is temperature. The warmer it is, the more it it behaves like an incubator, and that’s what dictates the rate at which it changes category far more than the the time that has gone by. It’s not about time. It’s about temperature. So if you’re in Florida, I noticed in the comments that there’s a lot of people from Sarasota. I live in Largo, Clearwater area, so I’m just right north of you. And I’m telling you, it stays warm here for a dominant period of time throughout our our year. That is usually quite warm. And these jobs can change category not in days, but in hours, and in some case, minutes. That’s how quickly bacteria can germinate and multiply. And I think we’re gonna talk a little bit more about that when we get to the categories. But this point is this three day threshold. Please throw it put it in your back pocket and just leave it as a historical reference because it’s not accurate, and we don’t have those thresholds published anywhere in our current standards. It was an idea that was published, what, ten ten years ago, twenty years ago, and it’s now abandoned. So leave it in the past. It doesn’t apply to our industry in today’s market, not among competent restorers. We don’t use that threshold. Seventy two hours. We don’t use that. Chris? No. I’ll just I’ll let that that’s good enough. I’ll I’ll let Kristen go to the next one. Okay. Okay. So the next question is when you have multiple drying chambers and you have a chamber dry before the others, how do you eliminate those tasks show up on the next day visit since the chamber material is dry and the equipment has been removed? Yeah. We’ll we’ll we’ll we’ll pull that one when we get up to drying chambers. Right. So, going back to, insurance. So the insurance tells us it it is the policyholder’s responsibility to mitigate regardless of coverage. How do you get around that? For both of us or Chris, go ahead. No. So so it is in in most policies, and I’m I say most because I haven’t seen one that doesn’t have this, is that as the property owner, you have to mitigate against the damage. So that’s take care of maintenance, and that’s when a loss happens, not to just stand there and watch is to take action. That’s the expectation of the insurance carrier. It it’s it comes in this responsibility. You couldn’t ask somebody in New York of how they would deal with your water damage in Texas. If you’re the one that’s in the house and you know there’s water, there’s there’s an onus on you to to to reduce the severity and not turn another tap on if there’s a loss happening. So when they started saying that you it’s on you to mitigate, it’s effectively coming in and and and saying that you have to take steps to reasonably reduce the severity and don’t delay in reporting or if there’s a contractor that you’re working with is to allow it to take place. But there’s a financial cost that if you didn’t have insurance, how would you prevent that microbial growth? Or how would you prevent or repair that water damage? You’re gonna take action and communicate with the carrier. And there’s a whole bunch of it’s not just that one clause. There’s usually, like, three or four clauses in there, that you’ll communicate with the carrier immediately. You’ll you’ll, take steps to to mitigate the damage. So it’s it’s a matter of of what the contractual agreement is and then how that relates to the action of the homeowner. The owner homeowner has to take action. That’s that’s what it comes down to. There’s some weird things in there. Like, the insurance company has the right to investigate. So do they have the right to investigate before you take action? And some of that kinda gets convoluted and can get disputed at times because it’s based on the interpretation of contract language. I don’t know if that answers that question exactly on point, but it it is the customer’s responsibility. So, Chris, everything you said was pretty much what I was gonna say, but I was gonna frame it differently. So the question was the the policy says that the homeowner must take action to keep the damages to a minimum. That’s fine. The policy also says that the insurer must be given the right to inspect. Now if you go in there and start changing the building up and you start cutting things out and saying, I have to do it, and then we’re gonna worry about, the claim later, I have seen the claims where the insurer shows up and says, you cut out all the sheetrock. You took all the carpet out. You did everything. We must have been given the right to inspect. So since you already did the work, we deny the claim. I have seen more than one claim denied because the contractor went in there and did the job before the insurer had the right to inspect. And now granted, I’m in Florida. This is the worst market on the planet. I I’m just saying if it happens here, maybe this trend is coming to your state or country soon. I’m just saying this happens here. Claims are denied if you do the work before the insurance company has been given the right to inspect. So the contractor responds with this. They they they had the claim denied. They paid dearly for that experience. So now what they do is they notify the insurance company with the policyholder. They notify the the insurance company. We have a a covered peril. You’ve already said that this is a covered loss. We are now waiting for approval for the these steps that as a contractor, we recommend, need to be done in order to have a, a satisfactory, usual, customary, necessary, standard restoration practice. And you use those terms in your communication. And you say that we are standing by waiting for you to to communicate back to us when the the the appointment’s gonna be that you’re gonna come to the job site, and you’re going to, you know, investigate this loss. Like, you’d stipulate is required in order for this to be a covered loss. We’re asking you to tell us when you’re coming. Or that you will respond to this email and waive your right to inspect so that we can proceed. Please let us know the answer to either question. Please note that we are stabilizing the property. Our burn rate is three hundred and fifty dollars a day, and our current balance is six thousand five hundred and thirty dollars because we’re waiting for you to respond, and you send that email every darn day with a read receipt or some kind of a tracking receipt so you can tell what they did with that email. Because I promise you, at least here in Florida, what they’re gonna do is when you say, hey. We sent you an email every day for three weeks and you didn’t respond, they’re gonna say, we never got those emails. By golly, you gotta prove they received those emails. And then with that, then they sit back in their chair and they go, well, crap. Now we gotta do something. So, it it’s it’s become like I said, you’ve really gotta think ahead on what you anticipate the insurer might do because a failure to respond to these types of communications is really not uncommon. They will drag it out for many days, even weeks, even months with no response, And then they blame everybody else for the fact that the job went, you know, sour, that it became a hundred thousand dollars or whatever. But because they didn’t communicate, and you’re waiting for some communication on them. I know this sounds very negative, but I it’s a reality here in Florida. And so the only way to use to respond to them when they say you had to do something, well, we did. We followed the language in your policy that said you had to be given the right to inspect. And when we invited you and you didn’t show up or respond, that’s not on us. That’s what’s required in your own policy. And so that’s the lang that’s the the the angle that I would recommend the contractor take. Ken Ken doesn’t get involved in many jobs that go straightforward. He’s usually involved in the conflicted ones. That’s true. That no. It’s true. And so if my message comes across as negative, please understand that this is my world. This is what I’m exposed to daily from contractors, and these are the types of experiences, and they’re all very similar. These are the issues that contractors face commonly in the state of Florida. Well and and and and part of it is is you may in different areas, we see this as well. So you you might have one adjuster who takes that position, and so you’re you’re running up against, you know, someone who’s misinterpreting the policy. Typically, it’s the if you communicate well, but to Ken’s point, maybe his region, normally, if you communicate with the adjuster and come up with a plan and document it, you go forward with it, and it’s usually relatively quick. In certain regions, it’s it’s not. So, but, yeah, I like the passion of Ken. So go Kristen, we’ll do one more, and then we’ll we’ll get moving. Sounds good. So last one for this section. We’ve been seeing more and more adjusters not paying the emergency service call as it’s part of doing business. How do we how should we respond in order to get paid? So this is it depends. If you’re in a program, then you probably have signed or your organization assigned program rules where they’re not, they’re not accepting that. If you’re not in a program, it’s it’s not for them to exclude that if that’s part of your normal business operation. Service minimum service charges or service callouts is about diverting resources. It’s not about taking the call that you got the job. It’s about diverting resources from other jobs. So there’s a there’s a cost component to that. But it is it’s it’s part of your contract. If they don’t pay, it’s kinda like if you went to the dentist and the dentist said, hey. Your insurance company doesn’t cover this procedure. You’re on the hook for it. Okay. Well, that’s the same thing that goes to the homeowner is your insurance company is not covering the emergency service call out even though there’s no exclusion in the policy for it. They’ve decided they’re not covering it. You’re gonna have to pay that fee, out of pocket. That’s you know? And and that may or may not go to cover their deductible. So it could get chewed up as part of the deductible is that that service callout fee is included as the thousand dollars that they’re giving you. They paid for this service callout. There there there’s a oh, I’m not gonna get into it, but there’s some nuances around it. But this isn’t the right environment to to get in that discussion. But there’s there’s certain ways that a policy acts that your emergency service call out could get dropped into the deductible amount. It’s the out of pocket expense that the homeowner faces. Alright. We’re good. Let’s get in. This is we’re gonna enter Ken’s specialty. You wanna hear some passion, you’re gonna hear it. We’re gonna jump into the categorization of water. And and in here, I’ll tell you this is probably one of the best discussions I’ve had with Ken over the last three years is actually, it’s been longer than that. It’s been about eight years now that we’ve we’ve I’ve got behind Ken on this one. I I I battled him for a while. Maybe it’s his seniority that that allowed him to win, but it’s it’s his approach on looking at this. And so I’m gonna I’m gonna go through this and and then get Ken’s opinions on it because there’s a lot of times when we have a lot of opinion being put forward into this. And Ken’s got this quote that he uses, opinions are the lowest form of human knowledge for it requires no accountability, no understanding, but the highest form of of knowledge is empathy. It for it requires us to suspend our ego and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than than the self kind of understanding from Bill Bull Bullard. And here’s what’s interesting. Ken, put a little bit to that quote because categorization is probably one of more contentious things that we deal with that directly impacts severity. Yeah. So I’m disappointed by the entire subject of water category. So really quickly, category of water is an IICRC ism. They’re the ones that came up with the expression of category of water. So it’s not something that’s found anywhere else in any other industry that I’m aware of. So the question is now if the IICRC came up with the three categories of water, which we should all know what they are, one, two, and three, and and what each one is. What are the thresholds by which each one is measured? And there is nothing published on such a subject. Now the IICRC has given us clues that we can use in our determination of the degree of contamination of the water, but this is not being read carefully enough from the standard. And I know you’re gonna be getting into that in this section, which is good, Chris. We’ll talk about some of the elements that the standard speaks of that we should be looking at when we’re categorizing water. What I find the most disappointing is that at the end of the day, it boils down to the cut. Generally speaking, the general practice, the common practice that we see among restorers is everybody takes a wild guess that we will, you know, say, oh, the water came from this source. It’s been here for this long. I think it’s a two. I think it’s a three. I think it’s a one. Whatever. Everybody just comes up, and maybe they’ll have a little discussion between, what do you think we should make this? A two or a three or a one? What do you think? And there’s a little bit of a consensus among the the the twenty year old technicians that are on the job site with no scientific background, no understanding of biology, no understanding of the risks that we are actually facing, no real consideration of the occupants of the building and what their, needs are, No real consideration of how the microorganism, behaves in different environments and what microorganisms might be present that we should be aware of. These types of understandings are largely just, it’s let let’s just take a swing at this, and we’ll call it whatever. Well, I’m gonna say right here and now, if you were a claims adjuster, wouldn’t you take that subject and go, everybody’s guessing, and there is nothing that that they’ve got that says it is compellingly this conclusion. And frankly, nothing in the standard of care has a greater influence on the actual scope of work that would be, performed on the job. Nothing is will have a greater influence on the scope of work than the determination of water category. Because if it’s a one, hey. Dry everything. If it’s a three, cut everything out. So this is a really, really big money decision, and we just casually call it whatever and think, you know, it’ll be accepted. No. It’s not. If you’re an adjuster, you’re gonna argue that one because no matter what angle you chose, whether it be a one or a three, if it can be proven wrong, the entire scope of work that you did can be challenged that you did it wrong because there’s no evidence one way or the other. And so this is a really discouraging position that we find ourselves in because we have a lack of data and a lack of thresholds on what makes it a one versus two versus three. So the standard breaks it down into a a category one protocol and a category two three protocol. A two and a three is handled the same way, everyone. Same thing. So we only have two protocols to choose from. Don’t you think we should be able to distinguish between a category one and a noncategory one loss? And that’s where we’re gonna go with our discussion this morning after this. So we we’ve got we’ve got the poll question coming up. What percentage of your files being reviewed are subject to a category change in exchange for price concessions? Now the price concessions could be there, but it’s it’s what percentage of your files are being subject to a category change. And so if we’re getting into this, then this or maybe maybe let me better define it. It’s that after the fact, we’re saying, hey. This is a category one. You that shouldn’t have been a category three. This should have been a category one. Look. It came from a supply line. And therefore, because it came from a supply line, your determination on category three is wrong. And that’s that’s I think that’s probably the most common battle line that I see is that they use the source of the loss as the determining factor that we get into. And so, actually, the numbers are interesting. I don’t change my rates. I don’t change my the opposite, Chris. I’ve seen somebody call it a category one, and the insurer said, that’s clearly a category three. I don’t wanna pay you for your category one approach. Well, that’s interesting. Yeah. I haven’t come across those ones yet. You should have been cutting it out. What do you pay making me pay to dry this material out for if it’s, you know, not category one? And they argue. They have a difference of opinion. And why is their opinion any more or less relevant than my technicians? Everybody’s guessing. It’s a guessing game. Yeah. No. I I here’s the results. I don’t change my rates, twenty one percent. We’ve got zero to twenty five percent. Fifty nine percent of you say very rarely is that the discussion, twenty five to fifty percent. So it’s not as prevalent, Ken. It or it doesn’t look as prevalent. Fifty to seventy five percent of the time, two percent, and seventy five to a hundred percent of the time is three percent. So most people are not getting into a categorization battle very often. I guess, is the best way to to put that one, which is interesting. And and and here’s the thing. When and this is probably the world Ken lives in or the world I see where a lot of these battles that start is based on these conversations. So when they do get escalated up, a lot of the the miscommunication happens in these these files, which would make sense that a lot of you go about your business and go about your day with little or less friction, and you don’t end up in those disputes. When when you look at it from a a perspective of of communication, communication fixes the problems, and and it and it there’s this opportunity to create this bait and switch opportunity where it happens on both sides. If you ordered a burger and fries and you thought you were getting this, but in reality, you got that, you wouldn’t be too impressed paying fifteen dollars for a very plain burger and very little amount of fries. And I use this analogy because it’s a lot of what what we do. We expect that the insurance adjuster understands what your level of service is and that you’re giving them the the deluxe burger with all the fries, and they’re used to buying this other cheap burger with little fries. You you just make the assumption that all contractors are doing what you’re doing. All contractors communicate like you’re communicating or they have the gear that you’re putting in or they have the training that you have. We’re all different. All of the restores like Ken restores a certain way, I restore a different way. We get to the same objective where we might have different skills that get us there. We might have different perspectives that gets there and we have a different way of approaching it. But when we deal with source or or sorry, categorization, we’re getting into the the communication at the beginning has to be very transparent and very unique, and it provides an opportunity for a discussion and an explanation because it is gonna change the way that the job goes if we determine it’s a category one or we determine it’s not a category one. And these are the ways that you can determine that. And these are Ken highlights this and and he highlights it in his book and he highlights it in any discussions that you’re with. These would be the six things that you could look at. Five of them, you can easily do on your own. What is the source of the loss? So if the source is immediately a contaminated source, you don’t have to go any further than that. You’re you’re now stuck at the source as a category three source. You’re at a category three. If you broke a sewage line, you are not going any further. Is there visual debris that would that the water has come into contact with that would allow you to make a determination that this no longer is a category one. Actually, I’ll turn it over. Ken, you’re the master of this. You you you you take take them through this this journey. I’m still stuck on the burgers on the previous slide. I’m all hungry now. We’re coming up to break soon. I know. Actually, what I really want everybody to know is that the burger on the left with all the big fries and the tomato and everything, that’s an American burger. The burger on the right is your Canadian burger, just so you know. Okay. So the source of water, yeah, that seems to be what everybody looks at, and that is what they call the the category of the water. If it came from a freshwater supply line, it’s a category one loss. I gotta tell you the minute it hits surfaces in the building, it comes into contact with substances that might not be, sanitary. This is we found to be especially true if there are pets in the home. We’ve all seen what our dog does when he drags its **** across the carpet in the living room. That’s spreading E. Coli and coliform bacteria in the structure. And whether you want to admit it or not, any testing results will reveal this what we we know to be true, that it will be there. So the source of the water is considered in the categorization of water, but it is not the determination of what the water is. And we have found this to be incredibly, meaningful, with with with our testing process because we have found that even from a freshwater source, the quantity of jobs that where the water remains freshwater after coming into contact with flooring or shelving under a kitchen sink or, behind the toilet or down into the basement or whatever it might be that you’ve got. Even though it’s a freshwater source, make no mistake. It comes into contact with other biological organisms. And in a liquid environment, those microorganisms have a party, and that party is really aggressive. They it doubles in in population at a surprising rate, and we’re gonna talk more about this later on today. And, the meaning behind that means it it it establishes that we have hours or even minutes before it changes category, not days. And that’s why I say, and I think you’re gonna hear this talked about later, is that the real unicorn in water damage restoration are category one losses. They are as rare as you could ever imagine. These are not category one losses because category one water can be measured. And so if it doesn’t meet the criteria for being category one anymore, then it must be something else. And if it’s something else, it’s a noncategory one loss, and we must treat it as such. Oh, I’m sorry. And visual debris. I’m sorry. I got stuck on that one. Let’s talk a little bit about the visual debris. If you’ve got junk in that water, take a picture of it. Show that there’s silt in the water or some kind of a a granular substance in that fluid. If there’s toilet paper in that water, get a close-up. Okay? Get it make that part of your documentation. It might be from a freshwater source, but it came into contact with other stuff. Document that. The temperature. I doc I go around with a laser thermometer, and I will take photo like, laser thermometer readings of the variety of different surfaces that have become wet in that building to demonstrate that these weren’t cold surfaces like you would find in your refrigerator of thirty five Fahrenheit or three degrees Celsius. That’s not what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with, you know, temperatures that are more reflective of a living condition, like seventy Fahrenheit, twenty one Celsius, and warmer. Okay? These are great incubation temperatures. Microorganisms love to, multiply when it’s in root in temperatures that we find ourselves comfortable in. The odors, the presence of fragrances, things like the smell of a laundry basket or a wet dog or your son’s bedroom or a pair of nasty socks. Okay? These types of fragrances are indications that bacteria has, is present and viable and is digesting mic or organic material and producing those fragrances. That’s what we are smelling. So that’s a clue that there is a, bacterial amplification if it smells like a men’s locker room or whatever you want to try and correlate it with. I will say that if you encounter that on the job site, document what the fragrances reminded you of. You can’t there’s no meter out there that says we got this fragrance present. You it’s a very subjective measure. And so you would document what everybody is smelling. How would you describe the fragrance, missus Jones? How would you dry describe the fragrance, Bill? You know? And get those expressions written down, and it would be even best if you got them to just put their signature on whatever it is you wrote down. That becomes similar to an affidavit that these individuals documented what they smelled at that moment in time. That’s a strong indication that the, bacterial amplification has transpired. Time, yeah, I’ll document the time since the date of loss in passing, but I’m not really following the time. It’s kind of just like, oh, it’s been there for several days. I bet you the bacteria has really had a lot of time in order to germinate and amplify. And then finally, testing. For goodness sake, perform some kind of testing, some data. Take this this determination of category out of the realm of guessing and opinions, and for the love of God, get some data from some source. It’s not the sole determination. You can’t just require, or just depend only on testing. That’s not sufficient. And there’s, you there are meters available to us for adenosine triphosphate testing, ATP. There are people that’ll give pushback on the use of that technology. I say let them push back. It’s the best documentation we’ve got available to us now. It’s better and more conclusive than a laboratory test, that’s gonna get a whole bunch of comments in the chat. I’m telling you that, Will. The ATP instant hype, testing that you can get in the field is gonna be more conclusive than taking a sample, shipping it to a lab, having them do something in in the laboratory, pull some tests that are, in some cases, subjective tests. They’re looking for a color change on a on some testing process. That’s subjective. It’s not quantified. And it had to survive the transit process. So instant on the site is better and more sensitive than what you can get at a laboratory. And so I’m big on using ATP in conjunction with consideration of the other five elements included in this list. And I will I I maintain that that is a a far more compelling list of con data that will produce a conclusion that everybody can rely on if the subject of category should ever be debated in the future. Yeah. And and let let’s move forward, Ken. Let’s talk about category versus category two versus category three. We we got a lot of questions that I know last year we we went through, and we started to talk about when you also run into the hazardous regulated materials, mold is best as fireman’s water or fire suppression systems that aren’t necessarily really mentioned in the the s five hundred. And and we got to this point where it led it is funny because Ken and I got into this this discussion about, you know, what is the unicorn, and and mine’s based on on an opinion. Ken’s based on facts, so so I’m gonna eat a little crow here when I show this. But this is how we we looked at it. And over time, I’ve I’ve changed my perspective. I I thought there was a lot more category three than category two. Now I use the definition from the s five hundred from the IICRC. So is it grossly contaminated, and is there a health risk for severe illness? But when well, there’s there’s it can be. And Ken and I have argued this. He’s like, well, it’s subjective. How do you know? And I don’t know. I just have imperial or evidence from being in the field where where we don’t get sick, especially when you watch everyone’s not wearing their PPE. That level of sickness and and severe health doesn’t happen as often, so then I would move the three over here and say, but there’s a lot of probably mild sickness or mild contamination, pink eye, and other things that you get when you aren’t being careful on on the job site. But the category one versus category three, we both agree there’s a hard line on it. And I’m moving my my category ones have moved from, you know, maybe twenty five percent to ten percent. Ken’s down to, like, two percent. So he’s pulling me down. But I understand the philosophy. I understand the reasoning why, and and it makes more sense that we’re getting into how do I put this? After COVID, I started to look at things as if you apply, an antimicrobial to a COVID surface, so you clean and then apply antimicrobial. We handled that whether you you know, the sources of of information that came in are are diluted with facts and unfacts, however you wanna position them. But what we do know is that as you apply that to surfaces, what if we applied that to some category ones that Ken has determined as a category two and you’re like, well, we could we can do things to get them back to that sanitary condition, but they’re not there now. And that’s why I’ve shrunk my list down is that there’s still a two, but we can make them a category one. Okay. Do we have to do as much destructive stuff? Well, you get into a slippery slope because now you’re talking liability. And so I’ve had to move my line down because from a business perspective or protecting the business, that line has to be reduced. How you operate as a homeowner, you can do things that have more risk. You take on more risk, but there’s also no one holding you tethered for liability. And and the best analogy or the best example I can use is like asbestos. It’s a regulated substance that you as a contractor have to deal with in a certain way. You as a homeowner can deal in a completely different way than that of a contractor. So the same thing applies to water is you as a homeowner can deal with a water release in your home in a different way, but as a contractor, there’s a certain responsibility and liability you take on. And so I’ve moved my position much closer to Ken’s. Ken, I’ll I’ll let you take it from there, when we move to the the next slide here. Okay. Is what Oh, I didn’t know if you want me to speak at this point. Sorry. Sorry. I’m I’m gonna I’m gonna put this up. We had some discussion earlier this morning. We got up early to talk about this. The cause of loss versus the categorization of loss is one of those areas where you guys aren’t seeing it as much, which is good. It’s it’s it’s better that you’re able to make the call because that’s how the standard, has interpreted. And Ken pointed out why. That might be somewhat flawed if we have inexperienced people making that discussion. But if you have a causal loss that’s a a ruptured supply line and it contacts ***** matter, it goes from a one to a three. We see a lot of adjusters or insurance companies taking that that position that it’s a category one, and that’s how you treat it regardless of what it contacts. And that’s not what the standard says. Right. If it sits unnoticed for a period of time and has the ability to amplify, it’s a two or three. Doesn’t matter, and we’ll get into why it doesn’t matter. If it sits, if the site has a high temperature and Ken mentioned Florida, it’s a two or three very quickly, at room temperature or higher. So if you have a few days of a delay, you could all be past the point of being, considered a category one. And then if you smell that odor when you arrive at the site, you’ve already missed the opportunity for it to be a category one. That odor is an indicator. It’s a two or a three or somewhere on that spectrum. If you’re using these rules, it doesn’t it doesn’t take a lot to then come back and determine is it a category one or is it not? And I love the fact that Ken puts it that way because that’s an easy way for all of us in the field to be able to identify what’s a category one. We look at our source, We look at all the factors, and we rule it out as a category one. And the second you rule it out as a category one, it doesn’t matter. It’s a two or a three, and you’re gonna treat it the same way. Now I know the estimating systems have lagged behind. Xactimate has category two cleaning versus category three. You know, it’s it’s it’s incorrect. So the part of it is is the information that the insurance companies receive through the estimating software, through their training, they may be getting the wrong message, and so that’s why we have some of this this incompatible communication that happens. But when we start to look at what is category one versus category three, the only difference between the two and the three is can the drywall potentially be left, and can the carpet potentially be thoroughly cleaned? Ken, I’m gonna let you talk to this. This was the discussion we had. I didn’t get a chance to put the the definition in from the book, but can you talk to the the s five hundred and how it reads, about the cleaning and about the water being splashed on the drywall? Can I get you to go through that? Yeah. I can. So let’s I I will get to that. Let’s just very quickly review my position on what category one water is. This is the only category that is defined anywhere, and it’s defined by every major city I would suggest on the planet that every major city has published thresholds on how much coliform bacteria can be found in, in the city supply lines. And the answer is generally zero. You’re not allowed to have any coliform bacteria in your city supply lines. How about E. Coli? Again, zero. So if those are the published thresholds and I find that the water that is in in the house, the puddle of water that’s in the house, I pull a sample, and it’s got viable coliform bacteria and E. Coli, then it is no longer qualified to be considered category one. Now how does the city control the, you know, the proliferation of these microorganisms? They add chlorine to the water. Alright. So they do that, and we know that there’s a little bit of chlorine in there that keeps that, microorganism in check. Now here’s what when I bring that up to a debater, a person who wants to debate the, the what I’m saying, they say, yeah. But you’re not going to drink that water off the floor. So you can take that idea and throw it out the window because we’re not going to be drinking that water. You’re gonna **** it up, you’re gonna dry it. Well, then the next part of that question is, well, let’s talk about what that same city, what the thresholds are for E. Coli and coliform bacteria in public swimming pools. That’s physical contact, not drinking. And the answer is they have to add chlorine to the public swimming pools. If by a factor of ten x, there is ten times more chlorine in public swimming pools than there are in the typical city supply line. Why? Because when you drink water with bacteria in it, it goes into an acidic environment in your stomach, which is very inhospitable to bacteria. So if there was any in there, it and there’s only a few, your body’s immune system can handle that. But not when you’re swimming in it, not when you’re in physical contact with it because that liquid can get into your eyes, your ears, and all of your other orifices, and that is a direct into your metabolism, into your your body, and that’s why they add chlorine to swimming pools. And, I would suggest that if you are an occupant of a house and you had contaminated carpet and your restorer cleaned or steam cleaned the carpet and sprayed their favorite juice and dried that carpet out and there was still some viable organisms present on that carpet, and you had athlete’s foot, those are open sores on people’s feet. One in five people has athlete’s foot. If that happened, that is directly related to this loss or related to that peril. And I I think that we we deserve to possess that understanding so that we can make wise determinations of water category. All that being said, there’s a threshold for category one. It’s the city there you’re not supposed to have those microorganisms present. So if there’s microorganisms present like that, then it’s not category one water. It’s either a two or a three, and I don’t care which one it is. If somebody wants to argue, it’s not a three. It’s a two. I go, you win. It’s a two. It’s the same procedure. You have to have containment, PPE, take out all the materials that absorb that significant or gross contamination, and you’re gonna have to, isolate the area, contain turn up isolate the HVAC system, have a health and safety plan. Twos and threes require that. And if ones are so rare, man, we should be doing this all the time on these jobs and opening up the cavities to reveal the contaminated areas so you can decontaminate it and then begin the drying. We all know you’re not supposed to put air movers on twos and threes. Right? We all know that. No air movers on twos and threes, not until you verified it’s back to a category one. And I would suggest I saw one of the questions. Ken, how do we get how do we handle the pushback from those who say, we don’t wanna pay for five days of drawing, six days, seven days, eight days? What I’m gonna suggest is that several days of these category two and three losses, if that’s the dominant one that we’re really encountering, if we have categories twos and three losses, what we do on the mitigation process, eighty percent of the activities that we perform on twos and threes are just getting the job ready for the first day of drying. You’re isolating the area with containment. You’ve got negative air. You’ve got humidity control. You’ve got the furniture removed from the affected area. You’ve deconstructed the structure to remove the materials that absorbed that two or three water. Carpet, pad, sheetrock, insulation. You’re gonna be taking all that out. All your guys are wearing PPE. You’re doing all that work, then you have to wash. Wash that structure. Don’t just spray a juice. Read the label. It says it needs to be applied to a cleaned surface. You charge for that cleaning step because it’s federal law. You shall comply with that that that EPA registered disinfectants label. It’s a it it’s a it’s a first sentence on every one of those EPA registered disinfectants. It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a fashion that is inconsistent with the labeling. So if the label says it must be applied to a cleaned surface, then you must clean the surface. You include the label as part of your documentation, highlight that sentence, and say, this is why I had to clean it because I’m federally I’m told by federal law, I shall adhere to the rules of that label. And then you apply the disinfectant, and then you get it tested. Now all of that is not drying, but you had an air filter on that job. You had a dehumidifier. No air movers. You’re just controlling the humidity and the particulate due to the deconstruction. By the way, it’s not dust. There are exclusions in the policy for dust. So you call it particulate or debris. That’s what you are actually managing. And you will notice that eighty percent of the mitigation costs are just getting it ready for drying. Now when you’re ready for drying, you got open structure, and you have a few air movers and your dehumidifiers. The air scrubber is no longer required. Get that thing out of there. I and I apologize. I said air scrubber. It’s not an air scrubber. It’s a negative air machine. You put that in in a fashion that makes a negatively pressurized chamber. The standard has said that about four or five times. Don’t put air scrubbers in there. That’s a HEPA filter that’s just sitting in the middle of the room. You must configure it so that it produces a negatively pressurized chamber. And the standard says you might have to add some dehumidification because you’re pulling in the outdoor air when the room is under negative. And it says you’re supposed to add a dehumidifier, and you document that. And then, after all that’s done, then you can begin the drying process. What I suggest this group do is that you will create two scopes of work. One is mitigation phase one, getting the job ready for drying, and you make an invoice for that phase. K? You got a separate scope and a separate, invoice just for the decontamination and getting it ready for drying. And that’s not uncommon that it’s two, three, four, five, six days just to get it ready. And then a separate scope and equipment list for the drying effort. Separate the mitigation out into two phases. And that way you can have fourteen days of equipment use, but you’re not all for drying. Get change the discussion by by separating the two efforts, the two phases of mitigation. Combined, that’s all the activity for mitigation, but it all it wasn’t all for drying now, was it? So on category two sheetrock, if you have category two water that comes into contact with sheetrock, you’ll notice at the back of the s five hundred, it says that it’s generally restorable. If you read the legend on generally restorable materials, it says, if cleanable. If cleanable. Now if the water soaked into the sheetrock, is it cleanable? The answer is no way. Therefore, it’s not a candidate for restoration. On the other hand, if the category two water splashed on the surface but didn’t soak into the material, then go get a towel and wipe it off. That’s why category two sheetrock is generally restorable. It’s if it’s a splash. But if it’s soaked into the material, it is not a candidate for restoration. So when you’re using your moisture meters on sheetrock and you’ve called it category two, you should be recommending its physical removal, not an attempt to dry it. The standard is clear on this. And I am one one of those experts that will reveal it and say, that is not an element that is should have been attempted for restoration. It should have been recommended for its replacement. And then let the discussion ensue on what they’re going to do in order to find settlement because there is no way that absorbed category two sheetrock, a significant degree of contamination, not insignificant. It’s freaking significant. There I am. There’s my emotion getting into it. It’s significant. You’ve gotta get it out if it’s in the building. Otherwise, the structure the structure’s mitigation is incomplete, incomplete, and you deviated from the standard. You better have some good reason reason for documented in your file for why you left that significant contamination in the building. Because people like me are gonna ask you, why did you deviate from the standard? Why didn’t you recommend its replacement? When we start talking about drying chambers, there’s times when you’re looking at a structure and you’re trying to determine your drying strategy. And you can have different things that’ll happen inside that strategy. You might have a small chamber that you put into a large part of a room. You might use an entire room as a chamber or an entire floor. Whatever your your job site dictates to you is what you’re going to need to do, you’re going to have to modify your drying chamber and we get into these where you might have certain rooms that you have to build a drying chamber. But what you have to realize is those chambers when you put them in place, you’re effectively controlling the environment. And I have this photo where, I was airport and it oh, I got a bunch more from airports that I go to that you see the the drying in progress. We’re we’re looking at a small drying area. The the posts represent the actual drying area. That should be polyed in. Behind me is thirty or forty thousand square feet of terminal that we’re drying with that that dehumidifier. The dehumidifier is doing nothing in this situation. This happens a lot inside normal residential jobs where we’re processing all the air of the building. And when we’re building a drying chamber, the goal is for us to apply our control over that little wet and affected surfaces to create the environment for drying. We’re basically applying the pressure to it. That means you control how much air you wanna process. You’re controlling what rooms you’re impacting and what surfaces are getting your attention. You have to be building drying chambers, setting up your containment. And then to Ken’s point before, if you’re doing a category two, three, you need to then be controlling where the contaminated air is going. You can’t just let it go into the un uncontrolled part of the building. You’re blocking out HVACs. You’re blocking out passageways. You’re putting the environment under negative pressure. You’re dictating how the air is gonna move. You’re not allowing the building site to dictate. Alright. Let’s get in the partial drying chambers here. K. When we start to look at this becomes a documentation, issue, but partial drying chambers, there’s there was questions in there about how do you take readings or when one part of the chamber is dry. Now we have to distinguish. Are we talking multiple chambers or different rooms within the same chamber? And it becomes one of these things if you’ve used hydro or you do paper log, it doesn’t really matter. The more chambers you have, the more paperwork you’re gonna generate. And so the goal is, at least in my perspective of the goal is that you’re gonna reduce the number of chambers, and there’s certain things that are gonna help you impact your decision on reducing those chambers. So if we were to look at the office and laundry room, if we were running a job and there’s no natural, corridor between them because it opens up to the rec room, you would treat those as potentially two different chambers. And you would then have to look at, well, what does that mean if you were to make them two different chambers? It means you double your paperwork. So each chamber has to have an affected area reading. You’re gonna be doing calculations for your sizing of your equipment. You’re gonna be monitoring it. And what happens is when we start to look at that, we go, well, why would you run multiple chambers? And there’s probably four times that you would. One, you have different conditions. One chamber requires more heat, more vapor pressure, or a different drying system. That would be a reason why I would break those two rooms out. You have to process too much unaffected air. So that that rec room, which we have a very small corridor, we have to process the entire rec room. It doesn’t make sense to have our equipment set up to do that processing of that unaffected air. So therefore, we’re gonna run two individual chambers. You might have sensitive materials so that it kinda comes back to one, but you have sensitive materials and you’re gonna do two different drying setups or you’re you’re gonna be focusing your drying ability on some more sensitive items that are inside that building. And finally, you have contaminated environment in one area and the other chamber doesn’t have, isn’t affected with those contaminants. And so you might get in a situation where maybe one room is where the dog lives and the other room, the dog’s not allowed. In the room where there is a pet and it touches that ***** matter that’s on the carpet, you’re gonna say, hey. This is a category three, and we’re gonna change it, change the way we handle this specific area. The area where the dog is not allowed, we’re gonna handle that as a category one. And that would be pretty much your your main reasons of why you’re handling it. So when we start to look at it, if we were treating these as separate chambers, our option that we have to move this into one chamber is to simply put up a small containment. And if you put up a small containment barrier, you can now use that entire area and only take one set of readings. Now I would walk around with my thermal hygrometer, and I would go and make sure that both rooms are are equalizing. They should. Sometimes they’re a little bit different, but not enough to warrant doing another set of documentation on there. Where you start to run into when do you start to look at building a second containment is if you have a small area that’s impacted away. Again, we have all this unaffected air, and we need to process it. So we make the choice that we wanna control the drying environment. So we would reduce our environment down to a small area, put our equipment in there, and we could reduce the amount of equipment we need. Plus, we’re also increasing the amount of control or the amount of impact our equipment has on that area. Ken, do you see anything with that other than my simple explanation when you would do it? Is there anything else that you would run into that you’ve you’ve caught? I I agree with everything you said about, the distinction between rooms. Especially if you can tie them together like that, that becomes a single chamber. And I would remind everybody that one of the most common failures I noticed among residential restorative drying mitigation companies is a failure to isolate the HVAC system from your drying chamber. It’s amazing how many people will leave the HVAC system fully functional as if it’s not even there and then put a dehumidifier in their chamber and not recognize that the HVAC system is gonna take your dehumidified air and dilute it throughout the entire area that that HVAC system is servicing. The HVAC system can completely negate your drying strategy. And as part of my file review process, I’m looking. What what did you do with the HVAC system in that room that you sectioned off with some, plastic walls and negative air machines, whatever? What did you do with that HVAC? And it’s amazing how few people or how many people are just forgetting about it and not recognizing what it can do to your drying strategy. And then you also run into the amount of paperwork. So one of the things that we we saw when I was with Encircle is that a lot of the a lot of the readings that were being taken was from every room within the chamber. So they’re taking an affected reading from the office and the laundry room and you only need one reading and then you just verify with your with your meter that they’re all the same and only record it once. You don’t need to record every room. That’s right. If there’s a room that’s an outlier where the atmospheric conditions are different in that room, you might wanna then adjust your your your equipment so that that doesn’t happen. You may wanna document that, but effectively, you should have very similar, psychometrics within your entire chamber. So you only need one reading. And then when you move to a different chamber, take one affected reading, but just sample it, inspect it with your meter. You don’t need to record it if it’s the same. And that’s where we saw a lot of paperwork get built up, a lot of time on the file wasted looking at the wrong readings, and then they fail to do the moisture content in the materials, which is critical that you have that. So Right. So one of the questions I just saw is how do you isolate the HVAC system? I would encourage, if you don’t know how to do that, you should go and get your AMRT course, the Prolyde Microbial Remediation Technician. That’s the mold class where they teach isolate, containment really, really in in-depth. In short, you put plastic over the vents, but now that’s gonna throw your balance of your HVAC system out of whack in the house. And if you’re in a really cold area where it freezes outside and you’ve got no HVAC service, do you think you could cause, those rooms to freeze? And if they froze, could pipes break as a result of your strategy? Yes. Does that mean you have to bring in portable heat? Then the answer is yes. The reverse is also true in Florida or any other hot humid area. If you isolate the HVAC system, is the temperature gonna get super hot and humid? Yes. So do you need to bring in portable cooling systems for that chamber? The answer is yes. And you document it with your, psychometric readings in justifying the use of your portable heating or portable cooling systems. Sounds good. So first question is if there is a cat one loss, but there is a microbial growth, does it change the cat from a one to a three? I’ve I’ve missed the beginning of that. What was that? No problem. If there was a cat one loss, but there is a microbial growth, does it change the cat from a one to a three? When you’re saying microbial growth, let’s be clear. Are we talking mold or bacteria? Answer both answer both ways, Ken. Okay. Alright. So mold. The answer is heck no. The presence of mold, even if the water comes into contact with it, has nothing to do with water category. It just doesn’t. It has nothing to do with it. What changes is the condition of the loss, not category. You have condition one, two, three. Condition one is normal fun normal mold ecology in a home. Condition two is elevated subtle spores, and condition three is active visible mold growth, but it does not affect category. In fact, the standard has a separate section on what to do if you encounter mold. You’ll notice that it’s kind of like that fourth category. It’s not really a category. It just says hazardous materials and mold. When you have those types of conditions, you must do the remediation before you address the, the, mitigation, the, the drying, the the removal of the contaminated water. But you gotta get rid of the mold first. If it was a bacteria amplification, then, yes, that is a factor in changing the water category. Is that the bacteria bacteria thrive in fluid. Mold does not. Mold survives in a humid atmosphere, but bacteria thrives in liquid water. So that’s why we don’t mix the two discussions up. Mold and bacteria are two different discussions. Hopefully, that answered the question. Yeah. It looks like a lot of people were saying mold, so that I think that was the perfect answer. Mold does not change water category. It it’s it’s not even to be it’s not an element of the discussion. And so with visual debris, best practices to justify CAT three when there’s a lack of photo documentation due to homeowner cleaning up the evidence? So, for example, ***** matter. Sure. Yes. Of course, when you have debris that the fluid encounters, that’s going to change its visible physical appearance because it doesn’t come out of the sink looking like that. Right? So that’s not an a a condition that you would say, look at that muddy water. That sure is nice category one water. It it doesn’t. It doesn’t work that way. So, no, I I wouldn’t think that the pres presence of debris in the water should be ignored. I will also say that that is true of fireman’s water. Now we all know that the fireman that throw tens of thousands of gallons into the house, we’ve seen that water. It’s full of char and all kinds of other junk in that water. It’s not category one, is it? If it’s not category one, then it must be something else. And and so the point is if the homeowners cleaned up the visual debris, but they they make mention that that’s what was there before, your notes need to reflect that the reason you made the decision to go category two or three is because the homeowner indicated there was solids there or there was that they had removed previously removed the visual contamination or contaminants that were there, just make a note of it, and that’s the reason why you based your decision. And your chronological notes, whether they’re digital or or manually taken, will reflect why you made the decision you made. It’s really easy to defend you at that point. Right. Let’s go one more, and then let’s get moving. We’re we’re we gotta catch up on some time here. Perfect. So what really is the difference between a cat two and a cat three? Why isn’t contaminated just considered contaminated, and how much E. Coli is too much? That’s a great question. I would suggest that you give that feedback to the s five hundred committee so that they can consider, that nuance. Because believe me, the subject of water category has been a very heated discussion among within that committee for a long, long time. You know, we don’t have thresholds. We don’t know how to distinguish between a two and a three. It just is kind of like, there should theoretically be a, you know, a two and theoretically be a three. Somewhere there is some distinguishing line, but nobody knows what that line looks like. So why don’t we just distinguish it between category one, freshwater, and noncategory one, not freshwater, and, then we approach it that way because category one is defined. It is measured. There are thresholds where they say, if it doesn’t meet this criteria, it’s not worthy of being in the city supply supply line freshwater. It’s not category one. Yeah. And and and and part of the discussion when Ken’s talking about, like, the pools and and the level of chlorine in there and the E. Coli levels there, When you look at swimming water, swimming water has usually an E. Coli count of four hundred or less before they close the beach down, so you can swim in there. It comes down to risk management. The the you’re in a public beach in the outside. There’s no expectation. You can control the environment. There’s no liability for swimming in the water. You choose to enter that water. When you’re in a pool, there’s an expectation someone’s monitoring it. So they’re controlling the environment. That’s why there’s there’s different standards. For us, what’s the standard for the building when you have kids? What’s the standard when you have seniors? What’s the standards of a normal home? There is no no written standard. So how do you determine a category one versus a two, three? And it’s a great question. I I lean more towards Ken these days than I than I do previously. And then the reason why is because there’s a there’s a liability and there’s a risk management that your business takes, and you’re responsible if it goes sideways. So you you would lean more towards making sure that you took care of those contaminants. I’m Alright. Let’s get A lot of comments in the in the the the the feed about, some perhaps new definitions or new thresholds or a new way to approach the subject of water category. I’m excited about seeing these types of comments. These are the types of comments that need to be given to the s five hundred committee for consideration in changing or making the subject of water category something that is easier for the restorer to distinguish on and more conclusive on their our jobs. I think that we’re we struggle with, having some guidance on this subject, and yet it’s such an important part of our mitigation strategies. Yeah. I I completely agree. Yeah. So we when we get into psychometrics, there’s a there’s a way that you can look at it. If you when you it’s really important that you look at the readings and understand exactly what’s happening inside the building, outside the building, and how those those pressures and the conditions are impacting your drawing. Now when we get into this section it’s it’s justifying the additional time. You got to take your readings, you got to interpret readings, you need to set your drawing goals, you need to make sure that the pressures are working for you and and what happened is when we got into looking at reference psychometrics, if you looked at old paperwork and when we talk about you know, how things change, I changed my perspective of reference readings to inside the building and outside the building. So it actually looks a little bit more like this, is that we’ve got reference readings for the exterior and then we’ve got reference readings for the interior. And the unaffected area, you often see not documented very well or or at all. Inside that building, you are responsible not only for the drying chamber but for what happens to the rest of the building. So if your drying chamber, to Ken’s point there, causes secondary damage or you allow a different part of the building to freeze or overheat or the humidity gets too high, that’s on you. That that’s a that’s a restorer’s decision that you need to be responsible for. And so I look at it this way is that the reference areas are the unaffected area. If we had an increase in moisture in the unaffected area, that could justify putting a dehumidifier to stabilize that condition or that in that environment. You could you could justify putting an air conditioner in a hot unaffected part of the area so that you can allow occupants to to work normally in that space or live normally in that space. That’s how you need to start looking at the building and because when we start looking at the pressures, you can have it where you can have moisture impacting from the outside and the unaffected area into your drying chamber. So you have to compensate for that additional moisture that’s trying to get into your your drying chamber. That’s why I like that detailed calculation when we get to it. When we start to look at the exterior, what happens if our drying chamber is sending moisture into the unaffected area and also towards the exterior. It might be driving moisture to our outside walls. And so you have to be aware that the moisture dust doesn’t the water vapor doesn’t just go to the dehumidifier. A lot of times we think it does, but, I’ve got tons of photos where the restorer was trying to dry in a basement and their vapor pressure wasn’t high enough that the water was actually condensating on the cold surface in the wall and then it led to a large mold job after. Those are common things that you’re gonna run into. So you’re trying to understand where are all the forces applying to your your job and where does the moisture wanna go. Your dehumidifier isn’t, necessarily the exact place that your your water vapor is gonna go. It’s gonna leave to the other forces. I’m so glad that you said that, Chris, because I’ve heard all my career, these arguments that the water will go out the same way it went in. That’s just not true. It’s gonna go from areas of high vapor pressure inside the material to areas of less vapor pressure in the route of least resistance. And, usually, that’s the backside of the gypsum wallboard. It goes into the cavity. And if there’s a cold surface anywhere inside that cavity, it’s gonna go there just like it would go inside your dehumidifier to a cold surface. And so what’ll happen is it’ll go to the cold, let’s say, foundation wall or the exterior shaving because it’s cold outside the building. And your moisture meter says, look. My sheet rock is dry, and you think you did a great job when in fact all you did is you moved the water three and a half inches to the other side of the wall out of the the range of detection from your moisture meter. You think you dried it, but you just put it on, you know, three and a half inches away. And so after a while, that water will bounce back into the sheetrock after you’ve removed all your your equipment, and you thought you did a good job, and the building’s wet again. And so the question is, where did this come from? You know? And so this is where our understanding of how water leaves a material is an important understanding. It doesn’t always go to the dehumidifier. It will go to areas of less vapor pressure, and that might be inside the wall cavity, and that can cause problems down the road. So when and when we look at it inside the app, it it’s it’s looking at vapor pressure. I’m gonna pull up this. That unaffected area to your chamber, we can look at our our vapor pressures. We can look that we have forces that are coming in. And the way we do it inside of Encircle or the way the app is built is that those vapor pressures are showing you the higher the number, the higher the pressure is gonna move to an area of low pressure. So if we are chamber is the area of lower vapor pressure, we have the outside trying to get moisture in, we have the unaffected trying to get that in. Is that gonna impact your drying? Well, the outside might. If the house is is well sealed, it might have less effect. If it has a higher vapor pressure differential, you could have more effect. The unaffected area definitely has more ways to to access your drying environment, so the opportunity is greater for that to be impacted, but it could also reverse. Your drying environment, if it’s poorly set up, could be negatively impacting your unaffected area, and you’ve gotta be aware of that. There are a lot of secondary damages that you’ll see inside of a job, especially when it gets illegal. So it’s, like, not your run of the mill jobs. It’s the ones where people are have picked up on the problems, now they’re looking at it. That’s one of the areas you’re like, hey. The unaffected area was was wrong from the beginning, and it got worse. Direct result of the restorer not paying attention to it. Vapor pressure differentials in materials is a major area of opportunity for a restorer to really understand how to dry. When we look at vapor pressures, if you remember the old psych charts, psychometric charts from when you were going through your schools and maybe you’re using them now, we had vapor pressure listed on the side and we zoom in on it. That’s the vapor pressure. It’s a constant. When we start to look at our environment, we look at what material do we have. So we have a material at seventy two degrees, and this is what Ken was talking about. He’s taking the measurements of the materials. If we got a temperature of seventy two degrees at a hundred percent saturation, we can extrapolate. Now this isn’t an exact science and and but we can extrapolate a vapor pressure within that material. And then we look at our drying environment and say, well, we have a ninety degree chamber and we got a vapor pressure of point two. The difference between those two on the vapor pressure scale is the vapor pressure differential that we’re looking for. So point eight to point two, have a differential point six. And what we’re looking at is that creating those vapor pressure differentials between the material and the drying environment. A lot of times and can you I’ll have you quickly talk about this, but a lot of times we’re monitoring the the atmosphere without paying attention to anything that’s going on in the material. You take a moisture reading, but you don’t take the temperature. You don’t have an idea of how effective you’re making that drying environment. I’ll turn it to you. Well, I could spend well, I do typically. No. You you’re not you’re not gonna. You’ll spend one minute on this one. I know. But I spend days on this because this is the true force of drying. This is the measure. Everybody sits there and thinks it’s about grains per pound. Bull. That is that that is a misunderstanding. That is a misuse of GPP. It has nothing to do with drying forces or what the materials will eventually become in moisture content. It is not a game of GPP. It’s a game of vapor pressures. And this is the the true metric that quantifies the force of drying that you created, and none of us are are are documenting this amazing metric that says we started this drying force off with a delta vapor pressure of point six inches h g, and we entered the job with point four inches HG. And throughout our drying plan, this is our drying force throughout the entire, process. And I don’t know of a single restorer on the planet that reports the force of drying they created. Rather, they’re just saying, look at the GPP, and there is nothing about this psychrometry that it that suggests that grains per pound is a qualifier of your drying forces. It doesn’t work that way. The only legitimate use that I know of for GPP is a grain depression calculation from your dehumidifier to establish how much water, the rate at which your dehumidifier is removing moisture from the air. That’s the only legitimate use I know for GPP. Every other attempt to use GPP in our discussions has is is made on fluff that you can easily debate and defeat. GPP does not quantify your drawing forces. It is the wrong measure. Your ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Yeah. Just looking here and make a quick change. There we go. I I would agree, Ken. Here’s what we got is when we look at our vapor pressure, we got this pole here. If I double my drying force, will I cut my drying speed in half? And you’ve got these options in the pole is no. I don’t believe doubling the force will impact speed. Yes. Use the power of the force. It depends. Other factors can impact the drying speed, or I don’t know, but I’m learning. And and all those are fair fair questions. In here, it’s interesting because you get a lot of, discussions about applying massive amounts of heat to a building, running desiccants, which is, you know, the insurance industry because I I think they have a lack of knowledge. They call it specialty equipment. They’re just tools in their toolbox, but they’ve defined them as specialty tools that require special permissions to use them, which makes no sense. But that’s the industry we’re in right now. The polling questions are coming in. It looks like eleven. No. I do not believe doubling the force will impact speed. Yes. Use the power of the force. It depends. Other factors can impact the drying speed, and I don’t know, but I’m learning was eighteen percent. So sixty seven percent say it depends, and we got three and twelve. Twelve percent say no, three say yes, and the majority says it depends. It’s interesting when when we look at the at vapor pressure and and the impact. Let me give you an example here. We take our building, and we put our drying conditions in here. So we look at our material conditions. And inside our materials jeez. You know what, guys? I apologize. I don’t have the vapor pressures on this, but I know that if we take our material conditions and we start monitoring what’s happening with the with the material conditions, what you should see is that the material will have a high vapor pressure. Our drying chamber is gonna have a lower vapor pressure, but the lowest vapor pressure that is in the building is our dehumidifier exhaust. Why? It’s taking the moisture outside the drying chamber. So our dehumidifiers are bringing the chamber air down, and the goal is to get that air really dry in the chamber. Your lowest your driest air should be coming out of your dehumidifier, and the goal is to try to get the chamber and the dehumidifier as close as possible. That’s when you have a a really torque down drying environment. But you’re looking at those building those material conditions. And as Ken said, nobody’s looking at the material conditions of what’s the temperature and what’s the moisture content of that of that material. If you don’t know that, what are you doing? You’re literally just building a drying environment and taking a reading and walking away. And so you have to change your your perspective of if you’re focused on drying the material, no one cares if you dry the air. They care if you dry the material, but you have to dry the air to get the conditions to dry the materials. And that’s what you’re really focused on when you’re when you’re working on a job. Now what factors will impact your ability to dry? And this is what I think is really interesting. Ken, I’ll I’ll I’ll just get you briefly touch on this point because this is a critical pathway that if you’re not focused here, you’re gonna miss a bunch of it down the road of your drying project. Right. I just wanna reemphasize something you said. We are hired to dry the building. It’s not hired to dry the air. And with that in mind, all of this focus on the air is an incomplete consideration when we’re we’re when we’re evaluating our drying strategy. Remember, we we need to inspire the water molecule to leave the material we are drying and becoming a gas. And, I it’s very important that the, that we consider the condition of the material and the condition of the water molecule in there that we’re trying to deliver energy to in order for it to change state from being bonded with the material we’re drawing and becoming a gas. We always look at the air, but that tells us nothing about that molecule in the material we’re drawing. And that is that’s the foundation of most restorers’ documentation failure is that there’s all this focus on the air and then a little bit of focus on the machine and then very little information about the material you’re drawing. If we’re lucky, we can get a meter reading off of that material. And yet that’s the the focus of our objective is to work on that material, and we’re looking at the air. We are completely misguided. And I I would encourage our education programs to be more attentive to the the the need of the the the industry being that we need to focus on the material far more than just the air. The air is only half the equation. What happens with these materials? And when you look at them, it’s consider the material permeability, the ability for the moisture or the water vapor to move through a material. And think of it as a destination where you have an actual area. So if you wanna look at it like dry town, and we’ve used that example where you go from a certain distance. If you travel through a material that allows you to pull a lot of moisture through, you can get there very quickly. But if you’re in a material that takes forever to dry, it’s gonna take you multiple hours to get the same amount of water vapor out of that material. And so when we look at drying, the type of material we’re drying is gonna impact our ability to get the job dry in a matter of time. And so there’s jobs where you might have sat there and went, you know what? I used to get jobs done in three, four, five days, whatever the number is. And now on this job, this seems to take a lot longer. I wasn’t anticipating this job being that hard to dry. And what you’ll find is usually has to do with one, how did you build your drying chamber? And if you did it the same way, then the other factor is your materials. And so when we look at the permeability, you’ve got, this this phenomena where the higher the perms, the faster the moisture will be removed from a material. And so that’s more moisture coming or more water vapor coming out of the material. We start looking at what type of barriers do we have. So we have a vapor impermeable vapor barrier, less than point one perms. That’s poly, sheet metal, rubber membrane, foil face insulation, very hard to move moisture through, almost impossible to move moisture through. Then we come into very, vapor semi impermeable vapor barriers, which is four coats of latex or more. And the more coats you have, the harder it gets. Consider this anything that’s older than buildings older than five or ten years. Normally, after about five or ten years, they get a recoat of paint. Twenty years, you’re almost guaranteed that you’re running into this. But normally five to ten years, there’s a sprucing up of the paint. After your first set of paint and you start adding the second coat, the third coat, the fourth coat, you got a building that’s fifty years old, how many coats are on that wall covering? All of a sudden, you’re walking into multiple different types of of vapor barrier or different a different degree of vapor barrier that gets really hard. Maybe it puts you back into the last category. Then as we start to look at, we got vapor semi permeable vapor barrier. This is your new construction. Your newer homes have three coats or or less of latex paint. You got foam board, asphalt, building paper, OSB, and, and plywood. And so now all of a sudden you’re looking at going, okay. Well, if I got a layer of plywood, I can maybe dry a little bit faster. And then to Ken, what he was talking about before is you got this other layer, which is the really easy stuff to dry. Vapor permeable vapor barriers, unpainted drywall, the backside of a drywall board is easy to dry. So if it has a choice between eight layers of paint or paper, which which side is the water vapor gonna choose to go through? Well, some of it may try to get through this way, but most of the pull is gonna go back into the paper. And that leads to your problems in some of these older homes when you’re creating the drying environment, you create the vapor pressure, and the water has no option but to go into the other cavity on the backside. I like the inject to dry systems for that to be able to circulate the air on the side that’s gonna release moisture the easiest. You got Tyvek. You got insulation. And to put it in perspective, Ken caught this on on a presentation we had done a few years ago, and I I love the the perspective they caught on this. If you look at the speed limits, it looks like this. Vapor impermeable vapor barrier is like one mile per hour. Not fast. You’re not gonna get there. Semi impermeable is ten times faster. Semi permeables is ten times faster than that or a hundred times faster than the vapor and the impermeable vapor barrier. And then you go vapor permeable, the the drywall, the unpainted drywall, it’s a thousand times faster than the poly. Put that in perspective and you go, oh, well, in this house, I was drying a thirty or forty year old home with lots of paint that’s on the wall. That’s why it took me longer to dry. Oh, maybe that’s why we should have opened up the wall cavities because there was all of these barriers in there. I was drying a rubber, carpet pad. Oh, that might impact the way that we dry because it’s now acting more as a as a as an impermeable vapor barrier. All of these are gonna impact your drying situation. This is why drying is so hard is because there’s a whole bunch of factors from the way you set up your job to the temperature of your materials to the type of materials to the permeability of the materials. Ken, you wanna add something on this one? You’re muted, which is the best time. That’s the that’s the way I like you. That’s right. Yeah. I apologize. The only thing I would add to your excellent comments, Chris, is that, I’d invite everybody to envision if the job takes four days to dry with one dehumidifier, couldn’t we dry it in an hour with fifty dehumidifiers? It doesn’t work that way. That’s one thing I want this group to know is that you can’t just keep doubling up on the equipment and think you’re gonna get it done in minutes if you just, you know, exponentially increase the amount of equipment. And the other thing I’d invite everybody to pay attention to is the finish on the wall, everybody. You know, I know that we’ve been taught that a latex paint allows water vapor to go through it much easier than a gloss paint. And while that is true, I would invite you to consider if you’ve got multiple layers of paint, every layer provides some restriction to the passage of vapor through it. And so if you’ve got ten layers of paint, the perm rating is not what the last layer is being latex paint that allows water to go through it freely. It’s the combination of all those layers that will result in possibly an impermeable surface. And if we think that your dehumidifier is doing anything to the process, you’re mistaken. It’s a it’s just it’s physics. The water has to be able to go into the low vapor pressure atmosphere, and it must have, some no barrier or limited barrier in that transfer process. Then we get into dry standards and drying goals, and this is an area that can get really contentious in a legal perspective of what were you trying to do and was it justified. And one of the areas that we see is that you have to understand what a dry standard is. An approximate a reasonable approximation of the moisture level or moisture content of a material prior to the water intrusion, and that’s from the current s five hundred. And when we look at this dry standards, the best way to determine what you’re trying to get to is to grab an unaffected material inside the same structure. That is by far your most accurate method. And the reason why is you’ve got heating and air conditioning systems, that can impact the moisture content of material. You’ve got normal living. Is there multiple people that take showers and lots of cooking that will impact the normal dry standard, the normal condition of that material, which may be different than a single guy who microwaves his food every day. That’s a totally different environment. So you have to you can’t apply it across. But if you if you don’t have access to that and that’s not possible, then you would go with your known geographical area, previous experience, or reference from similar structures. All of those are opinions. The only one that is actually fact driven is the first one. So we get asked or when we got asked a ton at Encircle. Hey. Can you put in just a regill dry standard? I would advise you not to use that because that one is an opinion not based on fact. You may be completely off inside that structure. And so your goal is to grab the most accurate reading, which is the one from that that environment. When we look at drying goals, this is very important that the restorer, not anyone else, the restorer should establish the drying goals that would be expected to return the structure, systems, and contents to an acceptable condition and inhibit microbial growth. And these two statements without any further context are normally taken out of context and said, hey. As long as there’s no microbial growth, you’re good. And that’s inaccurate, and that’s wrong. There are other factors that we put in and other responsibilities of a restorer that has to be taken into consideration. When we start to look at our drawing goals, there’s a whole bunch of reasons why you might wanna do it. Are we discussing the drawing goals with an agreed scope? If the project has limitations or complexities, that may impact what you’re able to do. What’s the composition? What are the expected conditions after the restorative drying? So if we’re installing materials that are moisture sensitive, as the restorer, your job is to ensure that you create the building’s conditions to accept those materials. You can’t just leave it, to the to the next sub trade to figure out. You’ve got prevailing weather conditions. You’ve got building assembly limitations, and you’ve got the USDA Forest Product Laboratories handbook, wood handbook. Now I’m gonna talk about that a little bit here because that came up in a dispute that I was in, and it was misquoted. And I’m gonna explain to you how that applies to our industry because you will see it come up as a discussion. Along with these, above considerations, where applicable, it is recommended the drying goal be within ten percent of the dry standard. Now that’s what the expectation of the restorer. And the reason why is, and Ken can correct me if I’m wrong, but the reason why we have that goal is that if you get within ten percent of the dry standards, so if it’s six, it becomes six point six. If it’s seven, it’s seven point seven, or if it’s ten, it’s eleven percent. The reason why is that tolerance allows almost all materials to be installed in that building without any concern. And the goal is that you’re not you don’t have time to wait for a building to acclimate naturally. You have to get it ready for a quick repair. Ken, is there anything that I missed on that as to why that ten percent has been recommended? Yeah. Because if you go all the way to ten percent, you’re surely going to have overdried some areas, and that’s the concern. You don’t wanna overdry things. You don’t wanna pay for overdrying things. So if you get down to within ten percent, generally speaking, it’s not going to change dimensionally as it goes all the way back to your your target of, let’s say, ten percent. Eleven percent is close enough. It’s not gonna change significantly dimensionally. And I will say that, you know, there’s a a lot of energy from debaters when they say, we only you only need to dry to sixteen percent or fifteen percent, whatever the magic number is they come up with, because it won’t support mold growth. That’s an incomplete consideration of what our objectives are. We are not hired to produce a house that won’t turn moldy as a as an objective. That’s not what we’re hired to do. We’re hired to return the structure to a condition that it was prior to the covered peril. And if you’d stop at fifteen percent and your dry standard is eight, you’re seven percent away from that. And if you’ve got wood products as they dry from fifteen down to eight, it’s gonna continue to shrink. So if you went in there and started painting all the trim work that was dried to sixteen percent thinking that’s good enough, those boards are going to shrink, and you’re gonna have a a a flaw in the painted material. And that’s on the contractor because he dried it to a damp condition, not an acceptably dry condition. And that’s the difference. And that’s why I fully reject recommendations to stop your drying at fifteen or sixteen percent. That is not in the standard of care. That is not compliant with our contracts agreement, and it’s not part of our objectives. It’s just to create a condition that won’t support mold growth. So if you guys are using Encircle, we built that into the app. So you’ll see that there’s the moisture content. The moisture content in your dry standard, that’s what your meter had had pulled off the material. In this case, it’s drywall. And then the dry standard variance is ten percent. So we leave that as a default. And so it automatically puts you at your drying goal of fifty five points in this case. That effectively is setting you up. Now I had this case and I put this in here because this got referenced is that the wood forest handbook or the wood handbook, wood as an engineering material, that restoration project should be following this because it was referred to in the standard as an area where you could refer to you could you could cite and and use as part of your guidance. And it’s true. You could do that if you have new construction, if your building’s gonna be vacant for a number of months and you know that the conditions are gonna be there, you might consider using that. But as a general rule, that does not apply to you as a restorer. That applies to new construction, and that’s the the goals that they have. When we look at restoration, we’re following the standard, guys. So although there’s other things that could influence your decision making, the standard does apply to you, and that’s what you’re gonna be held accountable to. So if you create a situation where secondary damage happens because you didn’t dry to a proper, number, maybe ten percent. But if you determined it was more, that’s fine, but you’re also the one controlling the environment. What you have to look at is these are the two conditions that would be there. In the handbook, it says new construction normally within five percentage points, not when we say ten in restoration, we’re talking ten percent of our dry standard. There, they’re talking a full five percentage points. So if wood is eight percent is where you’re trying to get to, you can install it at thirteen and let it naturally acclimate over thirty or sixty days while the building’s being buttoned down and then there’s the mechanical processes that are being applied. It’s got time. In restoration, the the the goal of insurance is to get you back as quick as possible. You don’t have that time. So we follow the the five hundred and that if you ever hear it referred to, that’s the only consideration that you might be like, hey. This building’s gonna be vacant for a year. Okay. You could probably not horse down on your drying. You can get it into five because you know the parameters of the building would allow for that. But in the normal course of most restoration, very few jobs are gonna follow that format. And so that’s how I would look at it if I was if I was you. And your goal is to get as close as normal, get the get it as close to normal as possible to the normal condition that’s inside that building. That’s your goal. And if you follow that, your projects are gonna go really well. And now you’re starting to combine that. You combine vapor pressure, material permeance to the the drying goal. All of a sudden, you’re starting to build a plan, aren’t you? You know what you need to do to get your your temperature and humidity set up. You know what you’re dealing with on material, and you know what your drying goal is. That sounds like a plan coming together. Alright. We’ve got a short period of time for a few questions. Perfect. So what if you have multiple affected areas, but they’re separated by walls and require separate chambers on the same laws? If they’re separated by walls. So if you were talking like a hotel room where the rooms you get two separate rooms that have are separate chambers and you the common hallway can’t be used, yeah, you just run them as two separate, drying environments. It means more paperwork. So you’d have to talk to your customer and and this is just communication guys. Like, as a a as a former adjuster that wasn’t an adjuster long enough to to be good at it, you you wanna let the insurance company know, hey. There’s this complexity on the job site that’s gonna result in more time for us to document the job because we are drawing these two rooms separately. It would be easier if we could shut the hallway down, but we can’t. So we’re we’re we’re gonna have to do a little bit more paperwork. That’s just that’s just the way it is. Or let them participate in. Let’s close the hallway down and make people go a different direction. That’s also an option where we put the dehumidifier in the hallway, and we feed the air into both both rooms. It it it just means you got more paperwork if I understood the correction or the the question right. Alright, guys. Questions around moisture mapping and moisture points. When you start to look at this, this is documenting the evidence in a visual context that allows you to understand what’s happening on the job site. It’s like a map. Right? We call it moisture mapping, which gives you the ability to reference different positions within the building of how you’re doing it. And when you look at your loss, it helps somebody who’s never been on-site and and years ago we used to have adjusters come to site, they look at it go, yeah, I get an idea for it. Now they sit in a room and they may have never been to a job site or don’t have the experience of the previous adjuster. And so now what you’re looking at is being able to provide a visual story of what happened. Why is the toy room impacted here? How come you’re dealing with the kitchen? All of that could be told through a moisture map. Moisture maps may be drawn on on a schematic. They might be done in a more rudimentary way. They could be even hand bombed. And what you’re doing is you’re basically just trying to provide context. Now the better technology has come along, the easier this is, the faster it is to create. So your your quality of your file can go way up. Encircle has, Encircle floor plan, that allows you to do a large floor plan in six minutes so that you can get this information and put it into your your moisture map. But regardless of how you do it, you’re gonna wanna document your job site. Now the old way we used to do it would just be put tape on the wall so we know exactly where we are. Now I still use this system because there’s a combination of digital documentation and the real world. And in the real world, I want my technician to be able to walk around and see what moisture point one in this room is because that’s important for making sure that we’re doing the readings in the same area. Now it’s a little different. If we’re doing drywall here, we take our drywall reading. If I’m doing baseboard or sill plate, I’m taking it under that reading or in that general vicinity. If I’m gonna do the the subfloor, I come down off of one and I go to the subfloor. I only put these moisture points here and and work my way through that moisture point through the different materials we’re reading. There is the other way that you have where you could come in and you could put dots. And so different dot systems exist. You could use multicolor dot systems. I don’t like multicolor because it gives a a bad indication that this was wet and then this is, like, less wet. And then now you’re we’re yellow and then green is good. I don’t like the multicolor but people do it because you get them at Staples cheap. I like the blue stickers. If you put the blue sticker on, you can put in when you took your readings. You can get two inch blue stickers that you can put on. It just shows where you’re taking your different readings. But Ken and I would agree, a lot of your your readings, it doesn’t dry straight down. It’ll dry in in in weird patterns at times. So what are we actually measuring? Are we actually taking a reading? Are you averaging it out? Are you showing us just the wettest reading till you get to the do you only take the bottom and just show it’s a hundred percent, hundred percent, hundred percent forty zero. How are you taking your readings? And, Ken, you wanna comment on that? Actually, I I don’t have much good to say about that. But, yeah, boy, do I ever see a lot of that on the reports. On day one, it’s one hundred on a scale of a hundred. Day two, it’s ninety. Day three, it’s eighty. Day four, it’s seventy. And then day five, thirty, and then eight. It things don’t dry that way. It just doesn’t work that way, and it it’s very frustrating and discouraging to see because you know that those numbers are probably made up because mature moisture doesn’t move in the way that they described. But what am I supposed to say? Call them a liar? You know? It it’s kinda one of those things that you you you know that it’s wrong. You know it’s fraudulent, but to say it is not really a professional thing to do. And in private, I could question them, but it’s not gonna change anything. I just I don’t like seeing fraudulent paperwork. It just really discourages me because I can’t have an intelligent conversation with an individual with numbers that are that have exposed their, insincerity. But now in in all fairness, this comes back to the biased documentation to get paid versus being an honest broker. So the industry, both the care insurance industry has things like, hey. We wanna see it a certain way. We wanna see progress, and so you’re interpreting your readings. Now if you were to come in here and take your moisture point, you might say at twenty four inches, it’s this reading. At six inches, it’s this reading, and you would just be managing two points within the same wall for the same material. You’d measure the top dot, the bottom dot. Oh, top dot’s dry, so we showed we made progress, and then we’re waiting for the bottom dot to dry. It it’s it’s not perfect, and there’s no good ways. Like, I’ve seen moisture readings where you say it’s it’s a distance from the the floor, and then you pick a point, and you’re saying we’re measuring these different distances. It’s time. How much time do you have? How many moisture points are you doing on the wall? There’s a whole bunch of factors that the residential restoration environment has created from a business perspective of, like, well, we only take one reading on one wall. We average it out. We put it in our documentation. Can’t validate it, but that’s a a a way we we operate. Then for someone reviewing your file after, you you you have no way of validating data. And then one of the other ways that we see data being collected is where they put in these these cards. And so more in health care or some industrial applications where there’s a third party reviewer that’s on-site. So it could be could be the infection control officer at a hospital. It could be, you know, one of the the laboratory scientists that’s reviewing it. They wanna see what’s happening in the wall. So you see these stickers. This is uncommon for residential, but more common in, in industrial and health care. And then what we look at is we’re looking at how do you document those moisture, points and where are you taking those moisture points. And so as we start to look through this, we we are documenting it in a room. And to Ken’s point, well, what if it’s four feet like, what if we’re dry here, but four feet away we’re not? Well, do you start a new moisture point to indicate that, hey. We’re dry in, eight spots, but we found a new one that’s wet. So we redocumented. I like that that position now that digital is starting to come into play. When you find that all your points are dry, but you have one that’s wet, you add a new one and indicate that it’s the remaining area that’s still hard to dry. So, yes, we made success in in eight of eight, but we still found an area that that that’s wet. They’re not ideal, but it’s it’s a better way. And as paper moves to digital, as digital improves, you’re gonna see that I think this is gonna become easier for the restorer, not harder because the tools are gonna be more adaptive to what you’re doing in the field. Alright. Let’s jump into this poll. What percentage of cat two three jobs do you stabilize before drying the job? We don’t stabilize jobs. That’s a fair answer. No one knows if you put that in there, by the way. Zero to twenty five percent, twenty five to fifty, fifty to seventy five, or seventy five to a hundred percent of your jobs that are cat two are stabilized before you dry. And the results are coming in. I appreciate guys, I always appreciate your honesty when you guys do this. I know, I sometimes get emails after being like, I didn’t wanna give you the answer, but I did anyway. Really appreciate when you guys do this. It’s, it makes the conversation, a little bit more real and enjoyable. Alright. I’m just seeing a poll on what you what people or what the audience believes the definition or the objective of stabilization is. You’re you’re gonna get a chance to to to explain what it is. Okay. Alright. That’s good. So so seven percent said we don’t stabilize. Zero to twenty five said that, nineteen percent of the sorry. Nineteen percent of respondents stabilized zero to twenty five. The majority no. It’s not even the majority. Majority of people aren’t doing it seventy five to a hundred percent of the time. We got forty one percent doing seventy five to a hundred percent of the time. Here’s I’ll I’ll let Ken tell you what the answer is. What? On the this the seventy five to a hundred, forty one percent of you stabilize on your losses. So that that means that that the rest of us are are, at times, not doing it correctly. These jobs require stabilization more times than not. There’s very few situations you would not stabilize a two or three. I agree. You should be doing it almost on I I can’t hardly think of an example when you wouldn’t have a stabilization strategy on a contaminated loss. And in fact, the standard even has a component in the blue pages that speaks of stabilizing category two, three losses. So if you’re not stabilizing on those losses, you’re you’re skipping an element of standard practice. So so here’s the only time that I would I would say that you could skip stabilization and dry in a contaminated environment, and that would be in a case of, like, a fire where you have a building that is contaminated, but you wanna get it dry and you wanna remove the moisture from there. You could dry a fire contaminated building again, All like, it’s one of these rare situations where you know that you’re you’re gonna spread contaminants throughout the building, but that’s not a concern of yours because you have to do other work. And so you’re you’re choosing to dry a contaminated building, and then you’ll deal with the contaminants. Honestly, though, your your gear is gonna take a a a major **** kicking, so you’re gonna have to have gear dedicated to doing that. And I don’t know if I would do that. Right? Or you’re bringing in desiccant air and putting it in and and firing out the other side. I don’t think I would do that to my gear. That is one there’s only been two jobs that I’ve seen where that would have been the path I would have chose because the fallout or the cost of not doing it was substantially higher, but I you couldn’t blame the restore for not making that decision because it’s not taught in our industry. So to Ken’s point, seventy five to a hundred percent of the time is the right answer. Now creating conditions for stabilization and drying, the problem that we run into is that a lot of the adjusters see the same equipment on the job and don’t understand the difference of it. A lot of restorers aren’t necessarily trained when you’re going through your your your lessons through the, through your training. You’re not necessarily getting a very clear picture of how to apply this to a job site. And so when we start looking at creating the conditions for stabilization versus drying, we have to look at what is the objective of stabilization. And the objective is to prevent secondary damages to unaffected materials. You are not doing anything to the affected material. If a material is wet and you need to stabilize to deal with other conditions, you need to deal with some of the business stuff that that’s coming in, that you’re you are gonna get amplified microbial growth on the wet materials. Your goal is to keep it off the unaffected materials. So I broke this down. And this and and when we looked at this, I said, well, why would you why would you stabilize a job? Well, the insuring needs to make coverage decisions. The tenants are in the way. So those are things that you can’t control that is a reason why you would limit the amount of cost. You’re like, hey. You know, I’ll sacrifice my equipment. I’ll put it in, try to secure the job, but I can’t do anything. You might have, where payment is in question. And so if you’re not sure if you’re gonna get paid, I could throw a piece of equipment in to try to secure the job, but I need to find out who’s paying. It needs cat two or three remediation. Your biohazards, hazardous regulated materials you have to deal with in advance, or you need to mobilize resources. So in a cat situation, there’s nothing wrong with you stabilizing a job to reduce the severity in order for you to get resources. And you might have arrogant people to come back and say, while you’re restore, you should do it. Well, that’s not the reality of our business. If you have to mobilize resources, you might have someone say, well, they shouldn’t have taken the job if they didn’t have the resources ready to go. We’re in the business of restoration. Not everybody has resources. You take the job. You move your resources in place. That’s the business. And so from a business decision, these are the reasons why you would consider stabilizing instead of going straight into drying. Now a lot of people will go straight into drying on these situations, and that’s what we saw in the survey. And so you don’t wanna be doing that. Now what is the stabilization conditions? Somewhere between sixty and eighty Fahrenheit, relative humidity between thirty five and fifty five. If you’re in those conditions, you’re just controlling the environment. You’re you’re not allowing. Now, Ken, you had said that is it that the relative humidity has gone up in in some cases, or are there or or would these be the the numbers you’d be using? So, thank you, Chris. Here’s what I would say about stabilization. You were correct when you said the objective of stabilization is to prevent secondary damage in unaffected materials. Has nothing to do with the materials that are wet. Has everything to do with everything else that is unaffected. Now we do know that from our WRT IICRC courses that, you never want to exceed a certain relative humidity for fear that you can start causing damage in unaffected materials. Now historically, Chris, we used the IICRC had set sixty percent relative humidity. It’s the maximum humidity you would ever want to have in your, structure at any given point. Now recently, I’ll just change, I’ll tell you what a recent change in the last two years from the IICRC is. They’ve changed that number from sixty percent relative humidity to seventy percent. Don’t know why it came out of nowhere. It hit me as a surprise, but that’s the new not to exceed threshold. Now that is what the objective of stabilization is, to prevent the atmosphere from exceeding the sixty percent or seventy percent relative humidity threshold that we were taught never to exceed because that can cause damage in unaffected materials. Now if that’s the objective, it has nothing to do with the dehumidifier formula that is in the standard, has you never reference it for stabilization. Your stable stabilization strategy is keep it temperate, something that people can live in, sixty to eighty Fahrenheit, because that’s what normal looks like in most people’s homes, and between thirty five to fifty five percent relative humidity, because that’s what normal people live in is thirty five to fifty five percent, but it is not an industrial drying condition. So when I see contractors saying, we executed a stabilization strategy, and we got it down to twenty grains per pound. My head explodes. That’s a drying strategy, not a stabilization strategy. They are completely different, and you document in your paperwork what you’re trying to achieve and maintain in order to keep the unaffected materials from becoming affected. Now will the materials that are wet go nasty? The answer is yep. Sure will. But you’re not addressing the nasty stuff that you’re gonna be cutting out. It’s all about protecting the unaffected materials. That is its sole objective. And quit confusing the two. Keep them separate. Two completely separate discussions, separate objectives, and that way you can control the critics that want to challenge your stabilization or drying strategy and your use of equipment. So in here, if you guys wanna look in the standard, there’s humidity control and contaminated structures, controlling humidity and stabilization initial humidity control category one, and then you’ll find this in mitigation phase one and two. Now what’s what’s interesting here is that in stabilization, and Ken’s touched on this before, you’re not gonna find air movers are part of your stabilization. And the reason why is we’re not transferring energy to the wall materials. We there’s an argument that you say maybe you don’t even take a a a reading of the materials. I think you do. I think you take an initial reading to validate the materials were wet when you got there. Wet materials are wet. We’re now stabilizing. I would expect that those wet materials are gonna be sacrificed later on. And so I like that documentation. I know there’s some guys that say when we’re stabilizing, we don’t do the inspection, but I I I I think that’s a flawed method of not inspecting the job site and documenting the current conditions. I got a counter view. I got a counter view. The standard says you’re supposed to do daily documentation of the drying process. There is no such language on stabilization. But I so so I say the initial. I I think you and I are probably in the same Initial is good. You gotta be able to document that things were wet and what was wet, but you don’t need to do daily documentation on the stabilization strategy. Because there’s no expectation that those materials are gonna dry. And so They’re not trying to dry them. They’re gonna be They’re say they’re wet, and they’re gonna be and and now when we go to start drying, we’re gonna do another inspection at the drying phase. And we will now document what condition those materials are in. And then you’ll remove the material. So you might be like, hey. Drywall was at a hundred percent wet for twenty four inches, and we cut it out. K. It’s now been removed from the from the your reading log, but you validated it was wet. You validated it was category three, and you removed it. And so all of that tells a story that when you get into a legal process, a file review, a dispute resolution, or you’re gonna go to trial, It’s all non biased data. It just says, this is what happened. Here’s what it was, and we removed it. And it’s easy for guys like Ken and I to come and understand the interpretation of your data. Good. Drying objectives. A little bit different here. Ken knows a thing or two about drying objectives. When we get in here, we’re creating the conditions to remove water molecules from affected materials to reach your desired goals, and and you’ll hear in here vapor pressure differential, and you’re trying to drive that vapor pressure differential normally between point three and point five depending on it’s probably reverse it. You wanna start with a higher vapor pressure differential to a lower one, so point five to point three. But the the reality is if you can get point six or point seven, if your conditions allow for it, you’re gonna be putting that pressure or applying that vapor pressure to the materials. You kind of gonna be in this range on on more cases than not though. This this point five to point three, you probably start point five, point seven, and you’ll end up at point three, point four, point five, something like that. But when you start looking and and speaking about vapor pressure differential between materials and the and the, drying chamber, you’re now starting to tell a story about what you’re trying to do. You’re not just placing equipment and walking away. You actually are saying here’s what the intended purpose is, and so your drying conditions have to be set up for the for that parameter. Now we have drying, or equipment calculations, and this is something that you run into where the insurance industry, because it directly relates to a price, has latched on to certain parts of the standard and misinterpreted certain parts of the standard, intentionally or unintentionally over time. And what we see is that these calculations are they apply a lot of the time. The air mover calculations are part of the standard. So they’re inside the the standard of care. They’re not in the appendix. Ken will disagree that they belong there because there’s reasons that you can validate or move around that this is a prescribed drying method that doesn’t necessarily have any science behind it. But you get one per room, one for every fifty to seventy square feet of wet floor, one for every hundred to a hundred and fifty square feet of wet wall over two feet in ceilings. If you have an obstruction like a a a an island, you get one for that and you can determine it. Is it a long island? Maybe you need two air movers for that or or a different type of obstruction. Every inset or offset over eighteen inches, you get an air mover so that you can ensure the airflow is moving across it. Now what’s interesting is that that’s part of the standard of care. And then it goes in and talks about water that is less than two feet away from the wall in another room, and we go back to sort of an old formula that was back from the old, standards that says you get one air mover for every fourteen feet of this, floor and and, wall that are impacted. Now the problem is is that those are not considering what type of air movers you’re using. You could be using a little mini air mover. You could you Ken’s got these little fans that you could have, the little handhelds. It doesn’t say that you’re moving high velocity, low velocity. So inside the standard, there’s also discussion about what type of velocity you have and what type of constant or what what type of velocity you’re gonna have when you have a constant rate phase and when you’re in the falling rate phase. And those velocities are like this. Constant rate phase is six hundred feet per minute, and the falling rate phase is approximately a hundred and fifty. So we’re gonna start off with high airflow, and then we’re gonna reduce it. Ken, you wanna add anything to this? Yeah. Very quickly. So just so everybody understands what we’re speaking of when we speak of the constant rate drying phase and falling rate. When there’s a puddle of water and you have airflow going over it and you’ve it’s in a, a consistent environment, there’s gonna be a rate of water molecules leaving that puddle of water that is constant until the puddle of water is gone. It’s gonna be the same rate of water molecules leaving until it’s all gone. Now when you have water trapped in the material, the as you probably have experienced, at the beginning of that drying effort, the rate of evaporation is quite quick. But as you get closer and closer to your dry standard, the rate of evaporation slows down. That’s called the falling rate drying phase. So if there’s liquid on the surface, you’re in constant rate. If there’s no liquid on the surface, you’re in the falling rate drying phase. So that’s what the difference is. Now the standard does say it speaks of the constant rate phase, you should have six hundred feet per minute. That’s about eight miles an hour. That’s a significant winds wind speed. It’s about this the velocity of air that comes out of your air mover when you’re about a dozen feet away. That’s about ten eight to ten miles an hour. Now right in front of the air mover, it’s between eighteen and twenty four miles an hour. Twelve feet away, about eight to ten. The falling rate phase of being one hundred and fifty feet per minute is about two point two miles an hour. That’s the wind velocity. I’ve got a a magazine or a book. You know, when you wave it in front of your face, you get a little bit of a breeze. That’s about two miles an hour. So when you are trying to dry out sheetrock or plywood or plaster or concrete or hardwood or any other material that has water molecules inside it, you want no more than this little breeze. If you put more wind velocity, you can actually slow the drying process down because you’re making a skin of dry material trapping the moisture inside it. It’s called case hardening. It’s a real thing. And so what you do is you slow the rate of wind velocity down. That way this there you don’t make that skin on the surface. It remains a little bit moist so that water can transfer through the material about two miles an hour. Now we have to change the way we think about the deployment of our air movers so that we select the right style of air mover that can accomplish the two, two and a half miles an hour wind velocity over all the surfaces that we would encounter in that chamber. Because if it’s too fast, you can slow the process down. If you don’t have enough, then the process goes even, can also slow down. So you have to have just the right amount of velocity. How do you measure it? Chris had a picture of that anemometer. Anemometer is that, device that you see on that screen, and it reports it records and measures wind velocity at the surface of the material you are drying. Photograph that, and now you can prove to the debater that you had the correct wind velocity for a competent drying of a falling rate drying mitigation. Yeah. I love what you called it the debater. Yeah. I I don’t wanna say the person arguing. I I had to come up with a better expression because I don’t want them to be our enemy. They’re just they wanna debate. So fine. Let’s debate. But we’ll go to the debate with facts and evidence. They’ll have their opinions. We got the evidence. Who will prevail? It’ll be the one with the evidence. So so when we get into dehumidification, we’re talking about, we’re gonna quote the the standard here. When a closure combination system is planned and mechanical dehumidification is not already in use, restore should determine an initial dehumidification capacity to establish humidity control for the targeted condition of the drying plan. And so we’re getting into this drying plan discussion. What’s the plan that you’re trying to do? Are you communicating what your plan is? And when we go forward a little bit further, dehumidification capacity may be modified at any point after setup based on psychrometric readings to achieve or maintain the targeted conditions in the drying plan. And what a lot of people misunderstand, and this comes from an insurance carrier standpoint, is that when we look at the simple calculation versus the detailed. And when I was with Encircle, we were getting asked tons and tons of questions about why are you using the wrong calculation? Simple dehumidification calculation should be used. Why are you using detailed? It’s the wrong one. It’s not part of the standard of care. These calculations are only the examples, and I want to explain to you why we chose the detailed dehumidification calculation because I like it for a starting point. So I’ll explain the difference to you guys here. You have the two choices. You could take the length, width, height, and come up with cubic feet and divide it by the dehumidifier style and the class factor. So in here, we could say, you know what? We’re gonna go and take fifty by twenty by ten feet. So a fifty foot long, twenty wide, ten high, ten thousand CFM. We’re gonna use an LGR and the class is four. So we’re gonna get our factor of forty. And that’ll tell you that you get two hundred and fifty pints. And what I did is I took the easiest, the class one and the class four, and then I ran it through the different scenarios. Now when you get into a detailed calculation, the reason I like this is that there’s a bunch of things that get considered. You look at your cubic foot and you start off with a base pint, which is a base factor of seventy, and you get a build out density. So based on how the the building is set up, whether it’s a doctor’s office with lots of rooms or a warehouse. You’re gonna be sitting with a different type of factor for build out density. We then looked at building construction. Are these materials easier to dry or harder to dry? We look at the class of water. What’s the class impact on the amount of dehumidification we get? Is the HVAC helping or hurting us, or is it not there? And for a lot of you, you’re not measuring it. A lot of times when at Encircle, it was like, hey. We don’t use HVAC. Can you take it out? Well, it’s a factor in whether it’s helping or hurting you, and you should be considering that it might be hurting you, and you need to actually consider that for, your calculation. Then we look at the weather impact. Is it is the building tight, moderate, or loose? So is an older building, newer building? Are doors being opened in a lot? And is the outside environment favorable, neutral, or unfavorable? And it gives you a multiplier. Now these multipliers go anywhere from, if we put our ten thousand cubic foot environment in here, we basically get a multiplier factor one point two to point six. And I’m gonna nerd out on this because I think this is important for you guys to understand. Building construction, harder to dry materials, you get another one and a half. And then we as we go through this, the different factors, if we take the the best to the worst, we basically are sitting here with a multiplier factor of six eight point six one. So eight point six one times the starting point or point four eight. That’s a massive range. And to give you an idea of how big of a range this is, this is what you could end up with on the same project depending on the factors that are in there. Sixty nine pints or twelve hundred and thirty one pints. If you use the simple calculation and you only looked at the simple calculation, you would only end up in this range, hundred to two hundred fifty. And so the reason why we use the detail is because it gives you more accuracy for your starting point. Now when we look at the starting point, if I have a detailed and this is where my range is on my detailed calculation, I can get to the exact same starting point as my simple calculation if the factors allow me to get there. But if I use the simple calculation, I can’t get to where the detailed calculation starts you. And I look at this only as a starting position to get you close. There’s a lot of flaws in this, but but I like this better than anything else I’ve seen. In here, when we start to look at what happens if you have a job, the the factors of the building, the weather, the materials, the type of building come in and say, hey. You know what? You need to start around seven hundred pints to get this this figured out. If that’s where you’re starting or that’s where your starting point could be, then I wanna look at it as a simple calculation comparison and say, well, what would happen? Now Ken and I, we debated this, earlier this morning because there’s a little bit of a a business side that I look at it from this perspective. So I’m gonna have Ken clear up the technical side after. But from a business side, if I started with a simple calculation, I started behind the eight ball already. I needed to start at seven hundred pints. I put my equipment in based on what the simple calculation said and I’m behind. From a business standpoint, I’m behind for three days. From a technical standpoint, I was behind the minute I decided to use the simple calculation. But in here, I might, after a few days, deal with the humidity and get myself in alignment. I’m gonna start to be in the right spot at some point down the road potentially. The problem is if you get paid for three days, if you’re on a program, you lost money on your first three days by not sizing your job right. Never mind you didn’t do the right thing for the building. You’re not even getting paid what you should have got paid in the first three days. If you’re only paid for three days or four days of drying equipment without further justification or you you can’t get it, you already got underpaid if you’re doing this. So when we roll out the detailed calculation, what happens is your first twenty four hours, you’re supposed to manage the spike. And, actually, I would suggest you you manage the spike before you leave the job. If your goal is to be under sixty percent relative humidity, if your goal is to get the conditions between seventy and ninety degrees Fahrenheit and under fifty percent relative humidity, you have to do that before you walk off the site. You don’t know if your equipment’s gonna overload the site with humidity or your dehumidifiers are working to remove it. So in your first twenty four hours, you might not do that, but you should. The next forty eight, you’ve set the job up for success. You’re doing technically the right thing for drying. You’re right for seventy two hours, and you’re right, you know, four, five, six days out. Now here’s the thing. From a business perspective, this will lead you to the most prop, profitability in your business because you’re getting paid for those three days where you’ve got the highest equipment inventory in the job. And then later on, you’re adjusting your equipment. You’re starting to reduce your the amount of equipment that’s on the job site. So that’s the little bit of a difference that Ken and I have whereas and, Ken, correct me if I’m wrong, but Ken’s like, technically, you’re screwed, when you use the simple calculation out of the gate. Well, I okay. Actually, this this whole subject, you explained that so well, Chris, and kudos on having a a good component like this in your presentation. Here’s my message to the students. First of all, it the dehumidifier formula is not a component of the standard of care. It’s not in the blue pages. They even took it out of the white pages. It’s not even in the in the guideline. That dehumidifier formula is so made up that they relegated it to an appendix because it’s not an element of the standard of care to be followed. So don’t let anybody shove it down your throat saying this is how much equipment you were supposed to have. I will also remind everybody that there’s not a single passage anywhere in the entire standard that says that the dehumidifier formula dries anything. It is not a drying time. It is not a component of a drying plan. It is not there’s no claim that it dries anything. The purpose of the dehumidifier formula that is relegated to the appendix has one sole purpose, and that is to manage the spike in humidity that is anticipated to happen the minute you turn on the air movers and cause some evaporation. You don’t wanna go over sixty percent, and that’s what that formula claims to accomplish. It’s a friendly bit of recommendation so that you don’t exceed sixty percent RH the minute you turn on the air movers. And once you’ve managed that anticipated spike in humidity, it is never to be looked at or spoken about again. Nothing. Seventy percent if you wish to use that number. So you don’t go over seventy. Now with that in mind, these people who want to argue, oh, you you didn’t have the right amount of dehumidification in there, and they’re referencing that formula, please remind them that that is not part of any drying plan. And you are not supposed to stick to that formula throughout the drying process because it’s not it has no claim to dry anything. It’s not to be used in that fashion, and that’s all my answer would be on that. Here here’s what Ken’s referring to. Appendix b is the example dehumidification formula. So in the standard, this is where you’ll find it at the far end of the book. The following formulas are provided as examples. They are not represented as a component of the preceding standard, meaning they don’t apply. As with any method for approximating minimum dehumidification capacity, verification of and adjustment through the use of appropriate instruments will be necessary. After the initial installation, appropriate adjustments, increasedecrease, reposition, and dehumidification capacity should be made based on the psychrometric readings in order to achieve or maintain the targeted conditions set in the drying plan. And in hydro, if you guys are using hydro, we set it as a temperature range, a relative humidity range, and a dew point differential. That seventy percent RH, you will be screwed if you go to figure out how the dew point differential is. It will trigger condensation alerts on all your walls. I have not found very many environments that you need to be over fifty. And when you get into colder environments, fifty percent relative humidity would be the lowest I would go because at night, when the walls cool off in the cooler temperatures of the evening when you’re not there, you’re getting very close to dew point differential or you’re very close to creating dew point. And and if you’re in that in Encircle so in Encircle, dew point differential is basically if you’re inside there, you don’t have the forces to create a good drying environment on that material. You’re not you’re not creating the forces to dry. So that dew point differential, one, prevents you from condensating, and two, it’s an alert that you your wall is not set up in a good condition. So that so the person that asked about the alerts, we set the alerts that you change whatever you want. If you said this environment needs eighty, you put it at eighty. If it’s ninety, great. If it’s too hot, we trigger it, and we tell you it’s too high, it’s too low, the RH is too high, or it’s too low. That’s what those alerts are there for. So that’s how you use it, and we use the alerts to keep you on track. We don’t use the calculation. Once you set your gear, you’re now in those drying tolerances. And Mike will go through that when you guys come here if you come on October for for the the hydro walkthrough, but that’s how it’s being used. And that’s just how it relates to the standard. Everything that you’re doing is about creating a great drying environment and managing that great drying environment. None of it has to do with taking a calculation and disagreeing. So if you got a reviewer that says you didn’t follow this, cool. That has nothing to do with your drying plan. That was a starting point and a starting point only. Here’s what I’d love to everybody to see on that slide if you don’t mind. No. Go back there, if you don’t mind. I can. Alright. Everybody take a look at the last two lines on the bottom of that quote, the yellow lines. Psychrometric readings in order to achieve or maintain the targeted conditions set in the, what, a drying plan? Have you ever seen a single file with a written drying plan ever? I haven’t seen it. And yet that expression drying plan appears a half dozen times in this current standard, and nobody has ever seen one. I just think that’s a real missing element in our industry. We talked about placing equipment, and that the goal is to get our velocity set up right for our air movers. When we start looking for reasons for placing dehumidifiers, it’s vapor pressure differentials and controlling the temperature and relative humidity goals, and they’re all connected. So we’re creating the the conditions for that. What we get into is these other things that the industry has deemed a specialty equipment. Lot of restores don’t have it in their inventory, but heaters. The reason you’re placing your heaters is you wanna reach a desired condition. So you wanna increase the BTUs. You wanna increase the drying energy inside of there, is increasing the temperature. And you’re trying to get it to that desired temperature, but you might also be controlling, the heat primary drying system if you’re if you’re running, an open drying system where you have the fortunate, opportunity of using dry air and bringing it in, and that’s the system you choose. We talk about air conditioners. There’s not a lot of manufacturers making these portable air conditioners. Phoenix used to make them. They don’t know. I think DryEase had them at one point, but they’re not really well used. But where would you put them? Well, you wanna decrease BTUs. You wanna decrease the temperature. And then what we’re doing is we might place a portable air conditioner in an unaffected area so we can keep those conditions in a normal environment. There’s we had a job where we cooked an old lady out. She her living environment was eighty five degrees or eighty six degrees, and she complained that it too hot for her when we took the measurements. Yeah. It was too hot. It was dangerously too hot for her. She didn’t have a system that could her body couldn’t handle the heat. We had to get her out of the building, and and we got her out immediately. But you run risks when you’re not managing those unaffected areas. And we our techs weren’t managing it. They didn’t even think about it. Now if you wanna decrease the desired temperature range, let’s say you have a bunch of equipment and you’re in Florida and your equipment’s starting to get you too high, you wanna decrease the temperature of your drying chamber. You would use an a portable air conditioner to to offset the BTUs being generated by your equipment. Hey, Chris. Really quickly, I was involved as an expert just last year on a job that was perf it was a small job. It was an apartment, where the the apartment had two windows, no sliding door, and no thermostat inside the apartment. It was a section eight housing, and the whole building was kept at one temperature for the occupants. They had no control over the temperature. Contractor went in there, small little water damage loss, put in their equipment. The occupant was sixty three years old, three hundred pounds, had a heart condition, and diabetes. And the job started on Wednesday, and on Saturday, she was found deceased on her bed. The contractor was sued for wrongful death, and it went on his insurance policy. And sure enough, the next of kin got money for the death of their mother, as a result. And it on the coroner’s report, it said, hyper hyperthermia, not hypothermia. That’s cold. Hyperthermia, she died due to heat. And, that’s the I felt bad for the contractor. You know? It could happen to any one of us. But this, subject of temperature, we need to pay attention to that because people can and do die from elevated temperature. Yeah. And that that job we had, it was an overlook. We were busy, and they just overlooked it. Didn’t even think twice. Didn’t do a proper risk assessment. You know, we got we got shoddy on our paperwork. We tightened up our paperwork after. Yeah. It happens, but you have to be aware of it. And that’s what you know, coming to these sessions is let’s let’s just talk about it, make sure we’re all aware. Particle count or sorry. Reason for using air scrubbers. You’re reducing the particulate in the air. There’s a lot of argument about why you would have an air scrubber on a category one loss. So you don’t need air scrubbers. Take your particle counter. Start taking a particle counter reading and and and identify what was the particle count when you got there. What is the particle count when you turned on your equipment, and how are you gonna mitigate that count? I guarantee you’re gonna see a spike in the particle count. And your goal, if you’re doing your your health and safety assessment, is to get a safe environment for workers and occupants. Hundred percent justified, but you need data. Having an opinion of I put four of these in because it needed it doesn’t fly these days. I put four of them in to reduce the particle level from here to here, absolutely justifiable. Chris, I will say that contractors must take humidity and temperature readings out of every LGR that they have on the job. And they need to do that to prove that the device was working. For those of us who are struggling getting the insurance company to pay for the use of your air filtration devices saying it wasn’t necessary, prove that it was with a laser particle counter. We do it as by practice with dehumidifiers. Let’s start doing that with air filtration devices. And here’s what I will tell everybody in this audience. If you think that your air filtration device is delivering the performance of HEPA, you might be blown away at how disappointed you’re gonna be when you use a laser particle counter and measure the quality of the air leaving your air filtration devices and checking to see if it actually does deliver HEPA rated performance. I think you might be very disappointed in what you see coming out of your machines. The point being, I think that we can validate payment for or the value of our air filtration devices on our losses by doing laser particle count readings, recording that, and using that in defense of our use of air filtration devices just like we do with dehumidifiers. Absolutely. Yeah. This is this is something that we absolutely need to be focused on as an industry. But what happened is I I got into this discussion, and it was probably about six years ago. I was working on a couple of cases where a couple files, sorry, where we had discussions about restorers not placing dehumidification equipment into a project, and insurance carrier was trying to hold them liable. And it led to a lot of discussion about how when do we not put our equipment into jobs, and when do you decide not to? And the number one area that’s not discussed a lot is the business decision that we we’re not obligated to restore anybody’s property. We don’t have to go in. Now that might change a little bit if you’re on a preferred program, but even on a preferred program, your reaction to a specific job may prevent you from actually doing the work. But this probably more applies to the independence that you make a business decision that you’re not gonna take the job. If you took all of an insurance company’s work, you probably made the business decision that you’re gonna take some jobs that you lose money on. As an independent operator, in a program, you are fully capable of making the decision whether you wanna do the job. The other reason you might not place equipment is it might be a technical reason. There might be a missing roof on there. There might be something that’s that’s holding you back. Someone could place a limitation onto you so that you’re you’re not able to perform in that capacity. And then there might be a health and safety issue of why you’re not doing it. Now if we were actually looking at these reasons and you start to look at those categories, you could break it down and say, well, if coverage is not confirmed, then I’m making a business decision whether I choose to put stuff on the job because if I don’t think the client is gonna pay, I’m not gonna take the risk, and that’s a fair decision. There’s nothing in the standard says you’re obligated to help everybody and anybody who called you. The contract’s not signed. Payment’s not assured. That’s a business decision. You are not obligated to help them. The insurance company may have an obligation to indemnify them, but that’s not your, as Ken said, you’re not tied into that that tripod, where you have to perform. They can call somebody else who’s willing to take that risk. When you get into a regulated material being present, that’s a health and safety concern. That’s also a technical concern. So you may not put your equipment in for there. Contamination, health and safety and technical. Lack of access. You might be placed on a limitation that someone will not give you access to the building. That’s a good reason to not put your equipment in. Stabilizing, that’s a technical reason is is there’s a contaminant, and, technically, you’re not gonna go in and perform a drying until you stabilize the environment. And then you have no chamber, no roofs, no windows. Technically, you’re gonna be doing nothing, so that’s a technical reason for us not to follow through. Dehumidifier readings. Dehumidifiers are starting to get smarter and smarter. I have no idea how to read this, guys. I will be honest. I was trained by Americans. I Ken does it. He’s a former Canadian. He knows how to convert it. Twenty one Celsius and twenty nine Celsius means nothing to me as a restorer. I, I learned the imperial system. I think it’s for drying, it’s easier. For my Canadian and Australian friends, some of you may or may not use a metric. It’s hard. I can’t do it. But these pieces of equipment have their onboard reading. So it’s it’s providing you some information that you can then start to use as part of your drawing. One of the things I would focus on though when you’re taking your readings is you’re not just relying on their system to give you a reading. You use your independent meter to validate what the system is telling you. Their their unit tells you it’s one thing. You put your your, thermal hygrometer, capture your own readings, record it. And one of the biggest things that you do when you’re taking this is to make sure you record the hours on the dehumidifier. This is kind of like looking at like an odometer on a car. Right? You’re almost all dehumidifiers today are gonna have a total hours meter on the unit, and they’re gonna have, like, a trip o meter of, the total hours for the job. If I’m you, I’m setting that that trip o meter on every job when we start and recording how long how many hours it is between readings. You have you get in these liability situations where the homeowners turn off the hottest piece of equipment and when they turn off your dehumidifier, your air movers loading moisture into the room or into the chamber and if it’s been if the dehumidifier if the dehumidifier has been turned off, that water vapor is going uncontrolled into the environment and you’re not having a mechanism to pull it out. If there’s secondary damages, you need to document that your hour meter didn’t line up between your inspection times. Ken, you got anything on that one? I I I know you’ve you’ve you’ve come across it. Yeah. So these dehumidifiers that are equipped with thermal hydrometers, here’s what my problem or challenge is with that is that each dehumidifier has a has, at least well, probably two thermal hygrometers inside them. Each of them has their own calibration. Each of them cannot be checked for calibration, although you can use on the modern dehumidifiers, you can use your thermal hygrometer and adjust the thermal hygrometer, on the, dehumidifier to match the performance of your thermal hygrometer. I’m just not a big fan of it because I’ll end up having multiple thermal hygrometers in a single chamber, and they can be not well, they’re not. They’re not calibrated to each other. And so, what I do is I will definitely reference them on the I take note of it. When I walk in and see the dehumidifiers, I look at the grain depression calculation and go like, oh, cool. That one’s putting out seventeen grain depression. But I use my handheld Visalia, is the brand that I choose to use, v as in Victor, a I, s as in Sam, a l a. Visala is the gold standard by which, we we we compare our thermal hygrometers against each other. It really is the gold standard. So that’s the thermal hygrometer I use, and that’s what I rely on when I’m doing my testing. I do wanna just quickly say that the the six channel laser particle counter for use in checking your, air filtration devices, The way I use that is you find out what’s in the center of the room. That way you know what’s going into the machine. You get your six channel laser particle counts, and then you compare it to what comes out of the filtered side of your air filtration device. And, technically, you’re supposed to have ninety nine point nine seven percent reduction in the particulate down to zero point three microns. That is HEPA rating. What we find is that frequently, even though you’re DOP tested, even if you’re DOP tested, that machine gets bumped around as it gets placed on the job and bumped around as it goes back to the shop. And that filter moves, and the seal that binds the the filter to the machine is it it goes out of whack, and stuff gets past it. So DOP testing might be good for that moment, but the minute you move it and torque the machine or twist it or anything, that seat between the filter and the machine can become compromised, and your performance might not be what you expect it to be. I find laser particle counters to be incredibly compelling. And, especially, I use it because we are not a regulated industry like asbestos, where you must have DOP tested filtration performance on your air filtration devices. We don’t need DOP in our industry. It’s not regulated. Laser particle counters, in my, opinion, are sufficient to determine or to establish that the machine is filtering sufficiently. So so we get we get into the, the five grains or less discussion or we don’t pay. And and Ken and I, over the years, have have have run into this and and have come up with this. Now I I didn’t blitz you through the math because I think it’s important to understand exactly what we’re talking about. Ken calls them grain counters. And if you give a a piece of equipment that’s you know, let’s say this dehumidifier is running three hundred CFM, and we’re pulling up four grains. And someone says, at under five grains, I’m not paying for it. What are they saying? And so what we’re looking at is that for every every pound of dry air, there’s seven thousand grains. And those grains weigh weigh really, really miniscule amounts, sixty four point seven nine milligrams. Now when we look at that, out of that seven thousand, we’re only pulling four grains. And so for someone to say, well, it’s it’s a small number. We don’t need to worry about it. Well, what are they talking about? We’re talking about four grains for every approximately fourteen cubic feet of dry air. So we’ve got fourteen cubic feet. Imagine fourteen one cubic foot boxes stacked in front of you. We run it through the machine and we pull out four little grains of water. Doesn’t seem like a lot. As we work through here and we get into it, we go, well, we took four grains per pound of dry air or four grains for every fourteen CFM. Our machine processes three hundred CFM. So our we’re pulling four grains at three hundred CFM. That’s eighty six grains per per minute, fifty one hundred grains per hour, and five hundred and twenty three grains per, per day. When you start to move that calculation from that little grain of four over the pints, it adds up. And every day we’re pulling sixteen point nine five pints, a really hard to get moisture that’s trapped inside the building materials or in the environment out of the air and into our, our collection. That looks like this. That’s a fair amount of water to be removing on a microscopic level. What happens if you ramp it up? Because if we’re only looking at grains, then someone’s forgot some very critical parts of the formula, which is how many CFM are we moving? And so if all of a sudden we’d ramp that up to ten thousand CFM, now we’re pulling out five hundred and sixty three pints out of the air every day. Five hundred and sixty three pints doesn’t look like this. It looks like this. So someone that comes in and says, well, that four grains isn’t isn’t working. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Now there is times when when we when we get into where you would consider maybe making an adjustment. And I’m gonna bring up Ken’s slide here where Ken’s take is is from a reviewer standpoint or a consultant standpoint on on on the discussion. And here, Ken, I’ll throw your points up is at five grains or less, the dehumidifier is not providing value and we’re not paying. Let me show you and what will happen, and you’re responsible for what happens. And I’ll document the limitation that you placed on me per the standard. And Ken also had these two other, quotes. If there’s more than one dehumidifier and you’re getting, five grains or less, you might consider removing the dehumidifier. Before we pull the dehumidifier, we’re gonna collect a mold sample and document all the conditions at the time that the equipment was pulled. Ken, can I get you explain those two to us? Yeah. Sure. So if you’ve got a room with three dehumidifiers in it and, let’s say one has got a four grain depression, the other one has seven grains, and the other one has ten grains. I would remove the dehumidifier with the four grain depression because it is removing the least amount of moisture. And I’d leave the other two behind because they can keep up with the rate of evaporation. I’m quite confident. The that’s that’s the the logic I have with the five grain depression, but I do want to say this. If you’ve got a chamber with only one dehumidifier in it and the dehumidifier is producing some really dry air, you’re down to the, you know, let’s say, maybe, well, I don’t know, thirty grains per pound in the room. It’s you know, you’re down to where the limits are for refrigerant technology. If you’re down to about thirty grains per pound, you might only have one grain depression, which means that for every fourteen cubic feet per, of air that goes through that machine, about the size of a four drawer filing cabinet, for every fourteen cubic feet that goes through your dehumidifier, it’s hanging on to one seven thousandth of a pound of water. Holy smokes. That’s not a lot of water, is it? That’s about the equivalent of one point three drips of water. That’s what one grain of water looks like, one point three drips from an eyedropper. That’s not a lot of water. So you’re gonna have a critic say, that’s not removing much water. You didn’t need to do that. Your job is now dry. The problem with that logic is if the materials are still wet and you took that dehumidifier out of the room that was only giving you one grain per pound depression, what’s gonna happen to the humidity in the room? Well, it’s gonna bounce back up to something elevated, something much more humid than what that dehumidifier produced. Right? And if that happens, what happens to the rate of evaporation from the material that you are drying? Well, it slows down or possibly even stops. And that’s the result of removing a dehumidifier before the materials are dry. We are not hired to dry air. We’re hired to produce an industrial drying chamber. And when we do that, then we are doing our job. So when somebody stands in the room and says, you’re I don’t want you to do it the right way. I want you to take that machine out because it’s not putting water in a bucket. You argue back, but I’m using it in order to produce an industrial drying condition that will be compromised if you make me take it out and the materials will not dry as planned. And that’s the argument back. Let’s go to the, the last one there. We talk about collecting a mold sample at the time it’s being pulled. This is that preemptive test. What I’ve seen contractors do is when they they’re forced to take that machine out, they will then, that day, go in there and pull some air samples. Pull some air samples inside, out, whatever. Prove the microbial condition that it is of that day. You then take that cassette, that air cassette, put it in the Ziploc baggie with the name of the customer, and you take that baggie and throw it in the corner of the office. If there’s ever, ever a complaint down the road, you got the samples that you can then send to the lab and say, analyze these. I gotta prove that at the time I was forced to take the equipment out of my this job, we had no environmental condition, no fungal condition that we needed to be worried about. And now that they took the equipment out, now I’ve got a mold condition, and I can produce prove that it wasn’t my activities that caused it. And that’s that’s why you would pull that sample. And it ties into the to the last section here, guys, which is inspecting or monitoring to to completion. The IICRC goes into this, and and this is why Ken uses the term inspections instead of monitoring as his his nomenclature is once the project has been controlled and the correction of down of the damage has begun, the restorer should continue gathering information through ongoing inspections and monitoring. Monitoring process can include, but is not limited, recording temperature, relative humidity readings, and other calculated psychometric values, checking the moisture levels and the moisture content materials, and updating the reports. Restore should record and monitor relevant moisture measurements daily preferably at the same time until drying goals have been achieved and documented. And the first of these inspections to monitor and make adjustments should be performed no later than the day following the the initiation of restorative drying. The frequency of subsequent monitoring should be daily until drying goals have been met, but may be adjusted by the agreed scope of work potential secondary damage job site accessibility or by agreement between the material interested parties. Such adjustments should be documented. This is key, guys. When when you start looking at the responsibility of the restorer, a lot of time programs will come in and say, well, we you you only inspect the beginning and and the last day, and it’s like, well, then how do we make adjustments? They’re talking about when you’re getting paid. They’re not necessarily talking about how you need to do the job. It gets mixed in when we talk pricing and the delivery of the standard. They’re not reading the standard to know what it is. For the most part, program rules and the standard don’t generally jive across the line. There’s misinterpretations that you see, and that can result in you picking up liability or the insurance company picking up liability on, unknown liability. They’re not predicting that that’s the liability they get. When we look at this, the information gathered during ongoing inspections and monitoring can lead the restorer to adjust the placement of equipment and modify the drying capacity. Where progress is not acceptable, the restorer should take corrective action. And when we start to look at this, when you produce a narrative report of the events that led up to your decisions, you basically are looking at section ten point nine, which is telling you that your documentation should tell a story of your job. Now you’re being held to this standard Whether you’re new, whether you’ve been doing this, whether you got two courses under your belt, or you’ve taken the entire, course load and continue to to update it, a carrier or a TPA telling you not to do something is not a defense. You will get slayed in court. You will get slayed in dispute resolution process if your answer is the adjuster told me or the TPA told me, and that’s why I did it. You’re the one that’s responsible to follow the standard. It’s your obligation to follow it. When you follow the standards, you also know how to follow a deviation in the standard, how to notify the homeowner or the property owner, and the deviation you’re gonna do, what the potential side effect of that deviation is, and why you’re doing it. Generally, just cost alone is not a good enough reason to deviate, but cost may factor in. So you may need to do something different to protect yourself or your business, and don’t fake your data. Alright. Question and answer time, Kristen. Hopefully, we wrapped that all up for you. You did. Thanks, Chris. You did it better than I would have done. I wouldn’t go that far. Okay. So let’s go through some of these questions. Is there a rule of thumb with temp, and humidity that you would say is the most likely to increase in cat faster, or is it exponential by temperature where higher is technically better? I I’m so sorry. Could you I I there was a word that didn’t sound right to me. Could you please repeat that question? This is an important one. It sounds like it’s a good question. Yeah. So is there a rule of thumb with temp and humidity that you would say is the most likely to increase in cap faster, or is it exponential by temperature where higher is better? Increase Encap faster. Is that what you said? Encap. Encaps. Oh, catastrophes. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay. I got it now. Okay. Is there a temperature range that’s ideal for catastrophe zones? Is that the question in short? Frozen. Yeah. So gosh. I don’t know if there is any ideal window for catastrophe, drying chambers. I I would suggest that you’d want to keep it temperate. You know? Keep it between, you know, reasonable living conditions, seventy to eighty five degrees maximum. That’s where my head is. Seventy to eighty five for drying strategies. And then, of course, you’re gonna wanna, manage the humidity levels and the wind velocity. And and, of course, your objective is to try and make sure that the materials remain warm. If you’ve got materials that are somehow becoming cold, that is your enemy. That is your enemy is cold materials. So if you live in a cold region of this planet and you’ve got wintertime work, man, I would I wouldn’t go anywhere without that laser thermometer because I’d be checking the temperature of the materials. If you’ve got a structure that’s not well insulated and it’s cold outside, your sheetrock might be remaining cold, and that will, possess a low vapor pressure within it. So I don’t care how dry you make the air. It’s going to probably be similar to the vapor pressure in that cold material, and drying doesn’t happen. So cold materials is an enemy to all drying strategies. So you should be aware of that. And and start paying less attention to the temperatures of the air and start paying more attention to the temperatures of the materials. The only time the temperature of the air becomes a, an element of focus is when I’m looking at the performance of my dehumidifiers. LGRs, they tend to lose performance when you start getting into really hot temperatures in the triple digits Fahrenheit. That’s when they start to diminish in their performance. And when you start to approach digital, triple digits with a desiccant, that’s when it starts to lose performance. It doesn’t stop its performance in either case, but it starts to slow it down. And then, of course, in really cold conditions, the challenge is if you’ve got cold conditions with a dehumidifier, your materials are probably cold. So if I can have hot materials and cold air, my gosh, I’m gonna be a drying god. But it’s very difficult to produce that condition. Just remember, it’s the temperature of materials and the dryness of the air. Stop focusing on just the air. Yeah. I misinterpreted. I thought it was what would be the ideal, temperature to to deal with a cat? And if it’s all frozen, you’ve got a lot of time to work with it. But that’s a Canadian deal. Yeah. It’s gonna stay frozen until spring. Keep it frozen. Yep. The next question, would there ever be an instance where you would not seal a heat vent into a Cat one dry chamber for supplemental heat? For instance, during a Michigan winter, returns were covered. Yeah. When you get into so this is a problem in Canada that we see a lot of it’s the same as Michigan. When you start doing a category one and you start blocking vents because you’re raising just particulate into the air, where’s your supplemental heat? Because you’re cutting off your heating vents. So that’s where when we look at the heaters and it’s been deemed them a specialty equipment, no. It’s a required piece of equipment for dealing with us isolating the HVAC system. It’s it’s not specialty. It’s just a piece of gear. Yeah. You you need to add supplemental heat in those situations. And when you get to category two, three, now you’re you’re running your chamber under negative pressure. You’re gonna have to ramp up your heat of that environment as well if you’re venting to the outside. So it’s a great question, but it it’s standard. It should be standard operating procedure that if you need to supplement heat in a cold environment, you have it available. What I love so much about these two questions is you’re talking more about the strategy of drying and less about the brainless dehumidifier formula and air mover formula that we’ve been taught through some education programs. That is not an engineer that is not an engineered drying plan. And I I love the fact that you’re starting to look that this audience is starting to look at the structure’s needs more than just these arbitrary formulas that people blindly follow. We’re starting to think about the needs of the structure, and I think that’s a really important transition to finding competent restoration. Yeah. I agree. These questions coming in have been fantastic. Maybe we’ll do one more since we are at time. So this question this individual does a lot of dryouts in Florida with mold already present. How would you deal with that in the state of Florida where you must have a mold inspection and testing done before you can remove the mold? The longer it sits wet, the more chances of mold spreading. Oh, man. Okay. Yeah. So, what do I say about Florida? They’ve got rules that you find that aren’t really applicable anywhere else on on the planet, and it is difficult. So if you’ve got a a structure in, let’s say, South Florida that has been hit with some hurricanes in the last two years and then encountered insurance carriers who almost as practice denied claims, thus putting it into a waiting game. Well, what do you think happens on these houses when they put get them put in into a waiting game? They go moldy. So when they finally get it approved, it’s a moldy nightmare, the insurance carrier says, we got a three thousand dollar cap on mold. Here’s your three grand. You now see how that as a consumer, your head would explode going, the mold is the result of the insurance company’s delay. So here we are today with all of these structures of which there are thousands in Florida right now because they were denied for a variety of reasons, and the homeowners have all these moldy houses going, what do we do now? Because we have to get it fixed. I got no good answer on where the money comes from. That’s the short answer. And so I I don’t have any advice for you other than be careful because even with they say that the what are they that’s that lion go and say the best intentions is a road leading to something disappointment or something like that. The point is that you might wanna try and help them and be a nice guy. I’m speaking from experience. Every time you try and do that for somebody that’s got a problem, you become the crutch that has to pay for every problem related to that job from that day forward. And so you’re just trying to help them. Come on. I’ll do something, you know, for a discount or whatever, and then they get a health consequence. My son, Billy, has an eye infection, and I think it’s because you’d of you the mold work you did. And you say, yeah. But I did it for only ten percent of what the I should have charged. Yep. But now you gotta guarantee the work. Oh, for crying out loud. So I don’t have a good answer for that scenario, but it is a plague in Florida right now. Tons of structures, not restored, and money is promised from nowhere. And these consumers in Florida are well, frankly, they’re leaving the state. They’re just, they’re giving the house back to the bank is what I’m hearing, and they’re leaving the state, which means that there’s these banks that have houses that they don’t want, you know, know what to do with. So I’m kind of looking, trying to find these distressed sales, and I will get them, fix it up, and flip them. You know? That’s kinda where we are. What a crazy question, man. I’m sorry. That was a very local regional condition that we’re faced with here, and, that’s not that’s not industry wide. It’s just a Floridian problem. I think that’s why they asked it, Ken, just specifically for you. Yeah. Well, I hope to meet you all one day. If you’re if you’re in the Florida area, you know, you got my phone number. You got my email right there on the screen. Send me an email, and we’ll get in touch, and we’ll see how we can collaborate. So, I think since it’s four zero four, if anyone does need to sign off, you’re more than welcome to. We wanna thank you so much for joining us. Chris and Ken have graciously agreed to stay just a few minutes longer to answer a few more questions, so you’re more than welcome to stay on with us as well. But, yeah, thank you so much. Have a great day, and, I guess we’ll chat soon. Thank you everyone for being here. Yeah. Thank you, guys. Alright, Crystal. What do got for us? Alright. Let’s get into the meat and potatoes here. So why do hammer probes register a higher moisture content than a protometer pin? And maybe I’m mispronouncing that. I apologize. No. We need more clarity on that. The is that the the hammer probe connected to the protimeter, you’re saying that that will give you a different reading in the same holes that you would use the two pins. So you take the hammer probe out, put the pins in there, and you got two different readings? No. Let’s assume that’s what they’re saying. Okay? If that’s the case That seems that seems weird. Let’s assume that’s not what they’re saying. Well, if that’s what they’re saying, it shouldn’t do that. I’m just saying that shouldn’t do that. So, because it’s the same circuit board and same connection inside the meter. So I would suggest there is something weird going on. So if if you answer it that way, then then there may be a fault with the meter. If you put a hammer probe into the wood and you go deeper than the the pins, you may have less moisture at the surface than you do in the core of the wood. That is two different ways of answering, Ken. So I I would agree with the answer. Chris. I know what’s going on. So the two pins on the hammer probe have an insulated area on the sides of the shaft of the pins. Only the tips of the pins are exposed metal. So when you use the hammer probe going into the wood, you’re only getting the reading from the center of the wood. Now on your two pins on the outside of the meter, it does not have that insulation. So when you put the pins into the wood, it’s going to find the the the connection that has got the least resistance. It’s gonna report a higher, typically a higher moisture content value than your hammer probe would be. It’s because of the insulation on the side of the pins on the hammer probe, and only the tips are exposed. I think that is the answer. That’s what’s going on. Next question. Would you would the use of a thermal camera help with documenting the drying process and validating the progress? I have a thought. You go, Chris. I like it. I like the visual. If you can use it to help provide the visual but not use it as the only means of of walking the site, absolutely. I think it it it provides context. The one problem with it or or the one challenge that can be is that depending on your settings or your familiarity with it, you may have troubles properly showing the water. If you don’t use it properly, it will look dry. It will look you won’t see the thermal, differences. And so you start documenting it. That’s the only downside is that when you get further into the into the project, it may not be as accurate visually as your as your moisture meters are picking up. But as a as a general tool, I like it when you do commercial. I like walking the site and looking for areas, to potentially investigate with a moisture meter. Yeah. And that’s how that technology should be used. Now that being said, I wanna remind everybody with our thermal imaging cameras. If you’re using the thermal imaging cameras on a daily basis to observe visually the the data that is being reported back with your thermal imaging camera, I want everybody to understand what I’m about to say. If it what you are seeing with your thermal imaging camera is the result of evaporative cooling, that when there’s an evaporating surface, the surface shall be cooler than the surrounding area, and that’s what your thermal imaging camera shows. So I have gotten into some pretty intense discussions with people who want to argue. Look at my thermal imaging camera. Look at all the cold materials. This is horrible. Your job is lousy. I’m going, no. I am seeing the effects of evaporative cooling. I am thrilled with these cold surfaces. It proves that I am evaporating water from that material. It is the best message of the day. I am just ecstatic that I got cold surfaces all over the place here because drying is happening. If everything was the same temperature, no evaporation is happening. No drying is happening. So remember, the cold surfaces are the clue that it’s drying, and you should be happy with that, not that everything is the same temperature. And that that’s an important understanding with thermal imaging technology. Awesome. Thanks, Ken. So we did have a couple questions come in about, roof leak water and the categorization. So if water passed through the building material, the insulation, the drywall, the framing, and it’s sitting wet for more than seventy two hours, what would we categorize that as? Welcome to our webinar today. We’ll start over. Okay. Well, so here’s the deal. Seventy two hours is meaningless. Okay? It is not a threshold that’s published in the standard. We’ve abandoned it. It’s not in any exam. It is gone. Stop thinking about forty eight hours or seventy two hours. I don’t care. Get your focus off of time and start focusing on the temperature of materials. Start thinking like an incubator rather than a stopwatch. Okay? And that is that’s the main point. The next thing I want you to say I wanna say is this. There is another bizarre I guess it’s an idea that if the water flows through a building ex assembly, it instantly changes category. That is a ridiculous idea, and it has no merit whatsoever. There is nothing about the passage of water through a building material that makes it magically change category. And so that it has nothing to do with the criteria with that we use in competently establishing the category of water. Stop thinking about it going through building materials. It’s silly. And, Ken Ken, I think that comes from that that comes from the the I think it it comes from the camp of would you drink it? And that’s that’s not part of the definition of the standard, but that’s the that’s the social media version of is it drinkable water? Would you drink it? If you wouldn’t drink it, then it’s not category one. It’s not the same as the source, and that’s that’s the wrong perspective of looking at it. This has nothing to do with its potability. It’s not about being potable or not. It’s about it meeting the criteria of being category one, which is defined. And it that’s what needs to be truly measured. As far as the other six criteria or five criteria that are listed in the standard, not one of those criteria has anything to do with to do with the subject of having passed through a building assembly. If it comes into contact with a known contaminant, then, yes, that is the the measure, but not because of the style or the of the assembly in the building. It has nothing to do with the subject. I think maybe we’ll do one more question. K. Okay. So this is a bit of a a long one, so bear with me. So dew point differential is super useful, but we’ve had a lot of specific success with evaporative potential, which uses a calculation from the vapor pressure and the dew point. How would you recommend using vapor differential versus vapor pressure or dew point differential, and would you be willing to include an evaporative potential specific tracker in the moisture point reading section? Okay. So I’m I’m assuming this is an Encircle specific question. So, we went with the dew point differential from a from the perspective of we could figure out the dew point of the environment, and we could allow you to adjust it. So in in southern climates, maybe ten degrees Fahrenheit is a is a satisfactory dew point differential. In colder climates, you might be fifteen or twenty, because of the radical change that you could get in your temperature in the evening or the temperature the external temperature that could impact your in interior. Other evaporation potential. So when you start getting into people’s proprietary knowledge at Encircle, we didn’t take a position of incorporating that unless someone unless there was one momentum where a lot of people were using it. And two, you know, we were approached. So in in this case, we didn’t have anything else that we put into the system. That’s sort of an encircle position on on how we went about designing the software. There would be nothing that would stop you from putting it in. Encircle could put it in if the demand was there or the model, you know, there was there was the right turn on that we wanna use this type of feature. It just the time, Encircle Hydro never got developed to that point. So that would be the reason why it’s not there. Don’t know if that answer that specific question, but it’s, it’d be the same as any of the other proprietary thoughts out there. I’m gonna make a comment about this dew point differential. They use that expression. And just so the audience understands what we’re talking about here, dew point differential is the material’s proximity to the dew point temperature. So we know that if the sheetrock is colder than the dew point temperature of the air, the sheetrock’s gonna start condensing water. And so there’s been certain individuals in our industry that has tried to say, look. The farther away your material temperatures are from the dew point temperature of the air, the better and more stronger your drying chamber is. I will tell you that we don’t have time to to prove this right now, but it’s very easy to prove when you look at the drying chart or sorry, the psychometric chart, is that proximity to dew point has nothing to do with drawing forces. All it is is a management of risk. And to be honest with you, that measure comes from a known industry. The the industry is called the National Association of Corrosion Engineers. Nace is the name of the organization, and they have they use delta dew point or dew point differentials or proximity to dew point temperature a lot on the subject of flash rust or corrosion. If you’ve got a factory and you want, to prevent flash rust from forming on all the iron machines that are in the warehouse, then what you do here’s your objective. Keep make sure that the the the big machines, the temperature of the metal is more than ten degrees Fahrenheit away from the dew point temperature of the air in which it sits. You wanna make sure that you’re at least ten degrees away from the the temperature at which the metal will start to condense water. Flash rust will happen even though there’s no condensation forming on the surf on the surface of the machine. You just have to exceed here’s a magic number that they publish, sixty percent relative humidity. If your chamber is is temperate, let’s say, seventy degrees, and, you’ve got sixty percent relative humidity, you’re in the zone that can that can produce flash rust. Just because the machine exists in a chamber that exceeds sixty percent RH, it’ll start to rust. And, that’s one of the measures that we use when we’re doing industrial work. Yeah. And to Ken’s point, our dew point differential so there are some instructors that were teaching it. We weren’t using it as a drawing metric. We were using it as a limit as a a risk limitation or risk management tool within Encircle that we knew that condensation well, when you hit condensation, you’re not drying. We wanted to be further away from that condensation zone. And when you not using it to the Ken’s point where the further away you get from dew point, the better your drying environment. It was that once you exceeded fifteen degrees, you were back into what we considered a safer environment. And what we had found is that technicians were drying, and they were really close to dew point on their surface temperatures, which meant that they were having really difficult projects getting getting those those materials dry. So we put it in as an alert that would allow you to make changes to the chamber. It would justify the changes to the chamber so that you could get the drying forces aligned, but it was a it was a risk management tool when we put it in. And I we unfortunately, I think when we when we did it, we called it dew point differential, and it was only after it was put in that that the realization was that some other instructors were teaching dew point differential as a drying metric. We didn’t use it for that purpose. Good question, though. Yeah. That’s great. So I just I wanna thank you, Chris and Ken, for joining us today and sharing your knowledge with us. We really appreciate it, But we we wish you all well, and and thank you so much again for joining us. Thanks for sticking around till the end, guys. It was a pleasure. Take care, everyone.