- Welcome to "Science Pub," a monthly series exploring the exciting, dynamic scientific world around us.

And we are very glad that you are with us tonight.

We are live, in person, in Ithaca, New York, and we are glad that you are joining us from all around the country and the world.

So thank you for tuning in.

We are very excited for this to be the first time we've actually gathered since March of 2020 as "Science Pub."

And we have some really special guests to help us celebrate this milestone and kicking off our season.

And so today we're sitting down with the creators of the PBS show "Home Diagnosis," Grace and Corbett Lunsford.

Welcome.

- [Grace] Thank you.

- [Corbett] Thank you.

- [Grace] Thanks for having us.

- So you are the creators and the co-hosts of this national TV program, "Home Diagnosis."

And the show takes a deep dive into the physics and chemistry and microbiology of homes.

And we're gonna dive deep into that this evening.

So as life partners, you pivoted from your very successful home performance consulting business in Chicago, and you built a high performance tiny home, which you brought here in Ithaca, and that was in 2016, correct?

- Yeah.

- And you had a new baby?

- Yeah.

- [Nancy] And you had two cats?

- Yes.

- [Nancy] And it was all in the tiny home?

- Right.

200 square feet, two adults, two cats, a litter box and a composting toilet.

And a baby.

- And how did it smell for those of you who came?

- Yeah.

Some of the people in here actually went through it.

Do you remember it smell?

No.

Exactly.

That was the point.

It actually smelled really good.

- It should've smelled terrible based on the description.

- But performance helped.

- [Nancy] And while that might not be everyone's dream, it was your dream.

- Right.

- And you went to 34 cities across the country.

So that was a really big thing to do.

What made you decide to pack up in Chicago and think that this was gonna be the next best thing?

- Well, actually, so living in a tiny house on wheels was not our dream, particularly.

No offense to anybody who's really in love with the tiny house movement.

Obviously, we've lived in one for five years.

You can do it wrong.

So look at the one that's outside that Cornell Extension School brought.

But we wanted to tell a story, just like we do with the show.

And if we could get people to understand building science in a little tiny 200 square foot place that has four walls, one ceiling, and one floor, and one bathroom, then we thought we could send you home to understand your home in a more deep way about the physics, chemistry and microbiology.

So that was kind of the intent.

- Right.

And in 2016 also, tiny homes were still unicorns.

Literally, as we were driving down the road, people would wave and be like, pull over.

I wanna go in your house.

So it was a great vehicle to feed people the broccoli that is home science.

- So did you ever pull over?

- We never... no.

You don't do that.

- What could go wrong?

- Yeah, right.

Yeah.

- Oh, but I will say that we had to install a deadbolt on our door, and keep it locked while we were inside because we learned that year that people would just let themselves into your tiny house whenever they want because they think that it's like...

This is for me, right?

A museum exhibit to show me.

- Yeah.

- And we had it happen at all times.

It's amazing.

- But that's our tiny house on the side, it's 200 square feet.

And the other is our home that we just finished building and filming season two around.

- In Atlanta.

- Did you have a welcome mat by the door?

Maybe that was the problem.

- That was probably it.

- We actually had a sign on the door that said visiting hours, and people still missed it.

- [Nancy] Well, "Home Diagnosis" does air on WSKG, usually on Sundays at 3:00 p.m.

But if you are not familiar with the show, we do have a little bit of a trailer that we are going to air.

- [Grace] They say home is where the heart is.

- [Corbett] And we certainly put our heart into building our first house, so how hard could it be to build another one?

- [Grace] I'm Grace.

- [Corbett] And I'm Corbett.

- [Grace] In our tiny lab, we helped homeowners gain control of their homes through scientific testing.

Now, as we build our forever home, we're testing ourselves.

- [Corbett] Even though we know a few things about the invisible dynamics of homes, we're teaming up with scientists and building experts to design and build a perfectly tuned home for our family.

- [Grace] The physics, chemistry, and microbiology of a home might seem mysterious, but it doesn't need to be.

- [Corbett] While this is a personal story, full of twists and turns.

- [Grace] It's also the story of the science of homes.

- [Corbett] Join us to unlock the mysterious science of your home too.

- And so you have done two seasons.

- Yes.

We have done two seasons so far.

The first season we did film basically from the tiny house when we were on the road.

In fact, one of the episodes is in Rochester, so not very far.

With Jeff Flaherty, right over there.

- Who you met out front.

Who brought the testing tool, so thank you, Jeff.

- Yeah.

And then season two, we were halfway through filming that when the pandemic hit.

So we kind of had to pivot, and thankfully our home build was always meant to be the through line of season two.

And one of the things we heard back from a lot of people who had watched season one is they wanted to know more.

It was great, but 26 minutes wasn't enough.

Can we dive deeper?

So what we did is we took season two, reconfigured it a bit, and it's practically like a college course in the science of homes, and it follows our build.

- The chronology of the build.

And one of the things that you won't see a lot of in season two, unfortunately, is contractors like Jeff, because one of the purposes of this show, especially being on PBS, is to highlight all the people around the country, and around the world, but mostly around the country, you'd be amazed at how little of this happens in other countries too, who can do this kind of thing for people.

Like, there are literally people in your backyard, right, who you met one of, who can do this tuning of the science of the inside of your home.

And nobody really is thinking about it.

No other TV shows are talking about it.

When you see home shows, they're mostly how things look.

We have this idea of maybe doing like an HGTV, following the homes that got finished on those flip shows, and testing them, just to be a little devious, but just like, you know.

- Maybe season four, I don't know.

- I vote yes.

I'll come along with you.

- Yeah.

- And so season three, which we're working on now, which we're kind of gonna make the linchpin of tonight's talk is called "Accidents Happen."

It's all about disasters in homes.

'Cause it was made clear to us.

Somebody mentioned like, people don't wear seat belts now just because of all the PSAs.

They said, "You should do it.

It's really good."

They do it also because we read all about what happens when you don't.

In the newspaper every Sunday, right?

All the horrible things that happen.

So they said, "Hey, maybe let's talk about what happens when you don't pay attention to the science of homes."

So we wanted to do a deep dive into both natural disasters and human made disasters, where you do things in homes where you don't realize the side effects that are gonna happen until they're too late.

So that's essentially what we're working on right now.

- And we are gonna dive deeper into that.

But one of the things that I think really resonates when you're talking about a home, when you are walking through a house and looking at purchasing a home, the first things that you look at is how big the kitchen is, how homey it is.

I'm gonna look at the closet space.

And those are the things, how many bathrooms does it have, that are top of mind for most people, right?

But they shouldn't necessarily be top of mind.

- Yeah.

It's almost like we need to have a bit of a cultural shift because, and this is one of the reasons why the title of the show is "Home Diagnosis," because you understand what a diagnosis is, right?

And you guys probably all secretly know, like, we asked earlier, does anybody think you've got a problem in your home?

And there were several hands that shot up.

So you have this feeling that something's wrong, but I don't know who to call.

And if you call a window expert, guess what they're gonna tell you?

Exactly.

So "Home Diagnosis" is about understanding that prescriptive approach, that you can understand the blood pressure of your own body.

Well, your home has a blood pressure too.

And you would never buy a car without knowing the safety standards or the miles per gallon, but you'll spend a hundred times more on a house that you don't know the safety standards or the miles per gallon on.

- And so we all need to, as... - Educated people.

- Civilians.

As home dwellers, whether you or not you own your home, you need to understand more.

So that's why we built this, which there are free handouts.

This is not an advertisement for any product.

We don't particularly care what size air conditioner or what kind of insulation you have in your house.

In fact, every insulation can do a good job.

Every product can do a good job if it's installed in the right way and in the right application, right?

So that's what this is all about.

And also, can you imagine if you went on an open house tour of a home that you were thinking about buying, and you took with you something like a carbon dioxide monitor to see, there's like, you know, 10 people in the house wandering around.

What is the ventilation like in this house?

Is this house gonna be healthy for my family to live in?

That's $250.

There's things like pressure sensors right here.

This is a very high quality.

This is what we use.

$550.

Like, a normal homeowner could do this.

Obviously hiring a professional is always better, but if you can't, if you're in the moment and you gotta just get some infrared pictures, $550.

Can you imagine how freaky everybody would get if we started having normal people walking around with the diagnostic tools, like a stethoscope.

- At open houses.

- Yeah.

If I came into your hospital room and I said, "Here, take this pill."

Hopefully you say, "No."

Like, "Who are you?

Get out of my room."

And if I'm wearing a lab coat, and I have a stethoscope around my neck, and I say, "Take this pill," you're probably gonna, right?

So that is what these things are.

This is what you look for when you're hiring somebody to work on your house, who is gonna be doing surgery on your house.

You wanna do the testing first, the vitals checks at least, to make sure that they're testing the blood pressure and your pulse rate and all that stuff, asking you what your diet is, what are your behaviors in this home, before they just start saying, "Oh, here's what your problem is."

'Cause everybody's got opinions about what's wrong with homes and what to do about it.

- And things go wrong.

- So when you have a home inspection, when you're first purchasing a home, are they using these tools and looking at some of those things in those home inspections, or what are they actually looking at?

- Let's ask local experts.

Jeff, is that happening when somebody gets a home inspection in Ithaca?

- [Jeff] It is not happening.

- Bob?

No?

Okay.

- Any realtors in the area who are seeing blower door tests, any of those numbers?

- So here's the main thing to understand.

Inspectors, whether it's the building department or a home inspector, somebody you get before you purchase, are all about static state.

They have checklists of things that they need to look at, and they're looking at the static state of the building.

What it looks like, what the structure's made out of, what machines are there.

- And those details are important.

- Not disagreeing.

- Yeah.

- But what's also happening is what happens when the machine turns on?

And what dynamics happen invisibly in the home to do with the physics, chemistry and microbiology.

And a lot of those things nowadays can be tested.

We got into this in 2008, and the test tools have... it's light years different now.

We got Bluetooth, which honestly, it sounds weird, but it's like, that's made a big difference.

I work alone.

I'm a one person team when I go into test a house, and it takes me five hours.

But it's amazing what you can do by yourself with some tools.

- Yeah.

- So season three is about disasters.

And as everybody in this room who had raised your hand on owning a home, you know it's not all just daises and bluebirds, there's a lot of challenges in owning a home.

There's upkeep, and there is maintenance that you have to do to your house to keep it working the way that you need to.

So one of the things that you started talking about and filming was a flooding issue.

And being in the Northeast, we have flooding here.

We have flash flooding, we also have where the rivers come up, and we have aerial flooding that does a lot of damages to homes.

But the flooding that you ran into was a little bit of a different disaster.

- Yes.

So interestingly enough, here we are in Death Valley.

Dry as a bone, right?

Dry as a bone.

Thank goodness, actually, because right after we took our tiny house to Death Valley, we went to Phoenix, where it was also pretty dry.

But unfortunately, the water bag in our tiny house leaked.

So 50 gallons of water that leaked into our watertight, airtight house.

Yeah.

So floods aren't just, you know, from the sky, sometimes they come from inside as well.

- And I think what we're, you know, you can see floods, not just on home networks, home improvement shows and things like that, but also on the news.

- Every day.

- You can see it on TV.

We're not really interested in talking about that.

What we'd like to do is peel back the other layers of the onion that exist underneath that, which is what happens to the physics, chemistry and microbiology in a home when it's flooded and after it's flooded.

And after you do the fixes that are recommended by your insurance agency, or by you, or whoever, that are then going to potentially make everything all better.

Like, what are the side effects?

'Cause there's two sides to the equation, right?

And researchers who are studying plant ecology, this is like a perfect environment for talking about this because you do something like introduce a monoculture, like, this is the perfect seed, it's perfect in every way.

And then there are these things that happen.

And, you know, there's all kinds of controversy about the genetic engineering and blah, blah, blah.

So all we're trying to say is there's side effects to anything that you do in a home.

And so you just wanna kind of get out in front of that and do as much modeling as possible.

- And in that modeling, how can you build in resiliency?

So when it came to building our big house, we were down in Georgia.

And does anybody know the perfect time of year to start building a house in Atlanta, Georgia?

Or anywhere?

There is no perfect time.

- But if you asked everybody, they would give you a very specific start- - This is when you start.

You should just start here.

- It just rains kind of all the time.

So this is what it looked like.

That's the hole that our house was supposed to be built inside.

And for a whole bunch of reasons that you see in season two of the show, it was much more complicated just from the get go.

Day one, we went a month behind and about $10,000 over budget, if not more.

- [Grace] Right.

- And so it's the moral of this story is we're all kind of like making this big deal about all these perfect dynamics of air pressures, and, you know, we got heat bleed, air flow and pressure, moisture and contaminants.

And if we can control all these things, then our family will be perfectly healthy and it'll be a haven and all this stuff.

But then you're a builder, and that is what your life is like.

- Yeah.

- Those guys do not care about what we're talking about because, like, can you imagine?

Their life is really hard.

So what we have to do is try and press through all that noise and stress that they're dealing with, and try and work with them and not against them.

We need everybody to be on this train together, which we all are, unfortunately, but most of us don't realize it.

- So as you're building out your foundation and your crawlspace, maybe it's not an eight foot crawlspace anymore.

Maybe it's a four foot crawl space.

- Yeah.

But no matter what, drainage is really important.

So if you can take care of drainage with things, like a French drain, a drain tile, whatever you wanna call it, it's a little slotted pipe that water can find its way up into.

It doesn't go down through the holes on the top.

So by the way, if you're installing one of these, the holes don't go on the top, the holes go on the bottom.

And so the water comes up and then it goes away.

And so getting this water away.

There's this really interesting moment in season two, episode 12, actually, where we're talking with a permaculture expert who says, you know, this thing of like, get the water away, is essentially treating water like it's a nuisance, which is not the answer because we're gonna have a water shortage very soon.

And so there's this, again, we come back to the systems thinking.

Even when you're talking about a house within some kind of flood plane, you gotta come in harmony and you gotta tune the two things together.

So that's really what we're trying to focus on.

It's not necessarily as "Shark Week" as you could get on buildings, but we find it much more beautiful.

- And that is a very difficult balance to strike because you have homes that are destroyed.

You have to come back in and rebuild.

So now that I'm rebuilding, I wanna look at materials that would stand up to water and are gonna be more resistant to that.

So you have composite flooring that can be popped up before it floods or popped up to dry things.

- Yeah.

And when you start bringing in these resilient items too, it's also very important to think about what chemicals are being made of.

Sorry to load one more thing on, but it's true.

There are a lot of plasticized, very flexible, wonderful things, but they also create a lot of phthalates, and those are endocrine disruptors.

And as Corbett likes to say, the majority of us, we're all dead anyway, we're already moved on.

But our babies, we're still trying to focus on the health of our babies and they're little developing endocrine systems.

- And they're on the floor almost all the time.

So flooring is really important.

Oh, by the way, if you go online searching for healthy flooring, what you'll find, and this is scary how usual this is, is these websites that are like healthyflooring.org.

And if you go into the about, and go into the about, and the about, and the about, and you like really hunt, it's a bunch of companies that make vinyl flooring that have created this website, and they're all trying to tell you that this is healthy.

So as usual, you can't believe what you read on the internet all the time.

And that's why we put our show on PBS because it has a much higher credibility rating.

We wanted to make sure that we were getting actual information into people's heads because you could find anything.

- And the science out there is growing every day.

And so you get to learn along with us as we're reaching out to experts through the show.

- So let's talk about then, we'll move off of the floor and into the walls.

So is the drywall, the purple drywall that's supposed to be mold resistant.

Is that something that's good for me to put in my house after I've had some flooding issues?

- Can I ask for a show of hands?

How many people have had a house that has been flooded, or a home of any kind?

Okay, great.

That's like, not just a smattering, I'd say that's a significant amount.

You know, you think about the two sides of the equation.

So there's chemicals, there's particles, and there's microbes, when we're talking about home chemistry.

Which is one of the kind of subtopics of the show.

And so you can't avoid having chemicals.

Everything is chemicals.

We can talk about that more later.

There's no such thing as chemical-free.

So chemicals can be good, can be bad.

You wanna control what kind are there, and how they're brought in and all that stuff.

Particles, always bad.

You wanna avoid them in the air all the time.

So we have things like, you know, kitchen exhausts, and bathroom exhausts and things like that.

And then microbes, can be good, can be bad also.

So you don't wanna genocide them with chemicals because then the chemicals that are being used, now we have a bunch of chemicals in the house and not very many microbes.

And now we're just moving the problem around from one issue to another.

And so if you have the option, we definitely recommend you do not use something that is impregnated with chemicals that's gonna stop microbial growth.

So antimicrobial stuff, in general, doesn't work.

Number one, it's gonna introduce a bunch of chemicals that might create problems for you and your family's health, 'cause they're not tested.

Did you know that?

Well, we have, actually, a scientist who's gonna say in season three, I have it on a recording, I've been waiting for a moment to use this, we are all guinea pigs in the gigantic experiment that is playing out in every moment right now.

We need all these products, 'cause we need life to be easy and convenient, and I'm not disagreeing.

But the other thing is, as soon as a layer of dust covers an antimicrobial surface, things can live on the dust because they're not touching that antimicrobial surface anymore, they're sitting on the dust.

So unless you're polishing and cleaning every night, like they do in schools, then you're gonna have issues with the things in the dust that are on top of the antimicrobial whatever it is you've got.

- But yeah, water is a spooky thing.

It's a spooky thing.

And black mold, they actually discovered that that's in drywall.

It's one of those naturally occurring fungus that's just waiting so peacefully for its day to rise up.

- And so the idea is, let's not worry too much about what life forms they're gonna be.

We have mold in our house, and you see it in the show.

- We have mold on our skin.

- Mold comes from the lumber yard, on the lumber that you're gonna install in a brand new house.

And then you enclose this house and you don't let the sunshine in anymore, and it's gonna stay wetter than it would be otherwise.

So the idea is don't feed it.

Don't encourage it.

You can let it stay there, like, you don't have to get bleach and scrub everything out.

But just don't let it then build an entire civilization that's gonna outrun you.

And that is possible to have happen.

We have houses like that in season three too.

- I have to go home and clean now.

- I am so sorry.

We'll talk about that too.

- We'll talk about cleaning in a sec.

- You won't be able to clean soon either.

- Yeah.

- So moving from water issues, there are other hidden issues, like gases.

And I know that we started to dive into that with things that are gases.

But especially in the Northeast, we have a lot of radon.

We have shale as our bedrock in much of the area, and radon seeps up through the shale, into your crawl spaces or your basements, into your homes.

And that's something that you dive into and talk about in this season as well.

- Yeah, yeah.

Radon we have in Georgia as well.

One of the reasons why we didn't have an eight foot crawlspace is there's actually two giant granite swales, like the size of a whale under our house.

So, you know, from a biblical perspective we have built our house on a rock, which is great.

But also, from a radon perspective, we need a radon mitigation system.

So we came at that thinking about our house, again, as a system.

So when you buy a home that's already built, often a radon test is required.

Not everywhere in the nation, but often, especially when it's a known entity they come in.

Does anybody know how long that test takes?

- [Audience Member] It can vary.

- It can vary.

You're right.

The longer, the better, is the answer.

The normal is one day, a pinpoint inspection.

- And Bob's saying two days.

- [Bob] 48 hours.

- 48 hours.

48 hours.

So sometimes our house looks like this, lots of activity, doors opening and closing, people coming and going, right?

But then sometimes we're gone for three weeks, often filming, and our house is fairly shut up.

So what is happening to the dynamics?

How is it breathing?

And so that's an important thing to keep in mind.

So we have done the testing on our home, and we know how our home breathes.

And even with the ventilation rates, we still have a radon mitigation system.

- [Corbett] Yeah.

And the testing tools are a major hero of the show because that is the difference.

I'm not an engineer.

I have a music degree.

What do you have a degree in?

- [Grace] I have a degree in musical theater.

- [Corbett] And a degree, you know, to us, our degrees are not, we don't use them very often.

But all that's important is that you test stuff.

I've got clients who are homeowners, who buy a $3,000 blower door, just so that they can use it on their own home to know that they're pursuing the right thing to do.

That's an extreme example.

You don't have to do that.

- Right.

- But you find people who have- - You find a professional who does.

- But the idea is that if you test, then you don't have to guess anymore.

And so when you're thinking about this stuff, you also want to think about the theory that you're being fed on the internet.

If you go online and you search radon, you will find this.

Does anybody know where this is from?

- [Audience Member] EPA?

- [Corbett] EPA.

Thank you.

This is a radon danger map, across the country.

Red, bad.

Yellow, not so bad, right?

Anybody know how old this is?

- [Audience Member] 20 years?

- [Corbett] 20 years?

That's a good guess.

30 years.

The reason that this map is completely useless is that homes today are completely different than homes 30 years ago.

Even if your home is older, has anybody spray foamed a house before?

- [Grace] A couple hands.

- [Corbett] Like your home?

What kind of a home did you have spray foam put into?

- [Audience Member] Oh, they spray foamed the sill plates in the basement and the crawl space and the addition.

- So it's an old home?

- [Audience Member] Yeah.

Built the '50s, probably.

- Okay, great.

That is no longer acting like a home that's built in the 1950s, and not doing what they intended for it to do back in the 1950s.

So now we're doing all these things, whether it's adding insulation or adding HVAC systems or adding whatever it is.

Air tightness, which is what we're talking about here, that's transforming how the homes are acting.

So if you have an older home that's had that kind of thing, replacing windows even, done to it, or a new home that's built, it's more air tight, significantly more air tight than it was in 1993.

So this map is useless.

Don't look at this map.

It's dumb.

Nobody should.

And so what we can do instead is use the right approaches, which is in that booklet that you've got.

And by the way, if you're streaming in and you want to download that booklet, there's a link that our team will put into the chat for you.

But we went so far as to even test how hard the fan that we installed on that radon system would have to suck, meaning also how much energy it would have to pull, in order to do its job.

Once you start thinking about testing things, there's almost nothing that can't be tested.

It's beautiful.

- Yeah.

In addition to our TV show, where we do get to talk about radon for at least maybe three minutes, we do dive way deeper into it our YouTube channel, which is called Home Performance.

You can totally nerd out with us there and actually see the full install.

See what happens.

Take a full 45 minutes to really understand the systems.

So that's kind of a lovely thing as a story and content creator is that we can have both audiences of a general knowledge PBS audience, and then if anybody wants to really geek out or you're building, you're thinking about putting one of these things in yourself, you can learn from us that that little device that Corbett is pointing to right there, you can buy at TruTech Tools.

I think it's on Amazon probably.

- [Corbett] And it's basically $200.

- [Grace] And it's a long-term radon monitor.

- [Corbett] And people are constantly coming up to me at trade shows when they see us and they're like, "Hey, here's my radon reading.

This is wrong, right?"

Because it's going up, and it's going down, and it's going up and down and up and down.

And it's like, "Nope.

That's right."

- That's right.

- That's why a two-day test or a seven-day test or whatever, nope, sorry.

It's just not very good because it's dynamic.

That's what's so beautiful.

Trying to turn something that's dynamic, that's really breathy, turning it into a static picture is a mistake because that's not how it is.

It's really this changing, breathing thing.

- But you can access this technology yourself, and just start answering some questions for yourself, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing now, with technology.

- So how do you actually monitor the radon in your house?

- That thing is a previous generation.

That's called Corentium.

The one that we have now is a $200 device called a Wave Pro, or Wave Plus or something like that.

$200.

Like it's really, really, really available.

And you just have to know what you're looking for.

- And it's just connected to the system and it kicks the system on, right?

- No, I'm sorry.

They're not connected.

This is the problem right now is that we don't have automatic systems, really, that interact with each other very well.

That's starting.

And we're actually releasing a video in a couple weeks about a new ventilation control technology that's gonna do that.

But really what we need, unfortunately, is to have a whole bunch of very savvy homeowners and property owners who are renting to people, because we don't have enough of the kind of person that Jeff is.

There's one contractor per major metro area at this point, unfortunately, who can do this kind of thing.

And we need more.

- And a lot of people may have a radon mitigation system in their home, but how many of you guys actually know that it's working?

And this little device is how you keep an eye on it.

And it's, again, not difficult to get.

Yeah.

- And a lot of people have the mitigation systems, but aren't running them.

- Ooh.

Yeah.

How many people have a radon mitigation system?

How many people are sure that it's working?

Okay, good.

Awesome.

Then you guys don't have to do anything.

Anybody who is like, "Maybe I should put my hand down," go ahead and just get the thing.

You won't be sorry.

I have so many testing devices.

I'm always checking them.

Like I'm literally monitoring the ventilation in this room right now.

Which, by the way, sorry, BTI, but we're at over 1,000 on carbon dioxide.

Probably part of it is that it's so close to me and I'm breathing heavy on it.

- You guys are all breathing this way.

- But I love looking at my data.

Like, the best thing, ultimately, I'm sorry to be real nerdy about this, but if you can walk into your house and see some device that is flashing green at you, just letting you know everything is fine, wouldn't that be great?

That's what I love is I walk in, and I wave at my little wave thing, and it goes green.

And I'm like (sighs).

It gives me literally a dopamine hit.

There is never anything wrong with our house because it works the way that I've designed it.

That's not true.

You could watch our YouTube channel to see the fine points on that.

But testing and finding out that nothing is wrong is so worth the money.

I sometimes get hired by realtors just to test their house to say, "Is there anything?"

And I'm like, "Nope, it's great."

And they're like, "Great, here's your check."

So don't feel like, "Oh, I should only get this if I think I'm gonna find something wrong."

Test it just to be like, "Yeah, I know for a fact that I'm not poisoning my children."

And now I can say that in front of a bunch of people, and they all go, "What?

That's so rude."

But, you know, that's the kind of thing that this, it just gets you really high to know that, wow, I am aware of invisible things around me.

It's really cool.

- Yeah.

- So speaking of invisible things, and you were just talking about the CO2 monitor that's at your feet, and I think it's high because you're the one who's been talking the most.

- Yeah.

- We're gonna go with that theory.

Talk about the ventilation in your home, and the air quality, because we are sealing our homes tighter than we ever have before.

- Right.

- And that is good and bad.

- That is good.

- Yeah.

Let's be clear on that.

You cannot seal a house too tight.

The thing you can do is not ventilate it correctly.

So the phrase is, seal tight, ventilate right.

You know, let's teach all of our three-year-olds seal tight, ventilate right, so that when they grow up they're buying a house and remembering that phrase.

- One of the byproducts, by the way, of having an airtight house, and our house is extraordinarily airtight.

We normally don't coach people to build as tight as we do.

We have a crawlspace that you'll see in a couple slides, and I have no bugs in our crawl space.

There are no bugs in our house, unless they come in on us while we walk in.

Would anybody like that?

Just that.

If that was the only benefit that you got, would you be like, "Yeah, I'm in for that."

- Yeah.

- It's quieter.

We live next to Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, the busiest airport in the world, and our house is extraordinarily quiet.

- It's so quiet, we built a recording studio in it.

- Wow.

- Because we have degrees in music and that's our pastime.

- So air quality becomes a big deal.

And obviously COVID has made all of us a lot more aware of this, but the thing to do is not get focused on something like the COVID virus and thinking about like, oh, does my mask work or does it not for a virus floating in the air?

Of course... Maybe not of course, people still are a little confused about this.

But viruses don't fly around by themselves in the air.

What they do is they glom onto other things, little particles.

And sometimes particles are even made of gas-phase molecules, so it's just a bunch of chemicals that are bound together, and then a virus will ride around on those.

And so they always travel in packs.

So there's this microbe chemical interaction with the particles, and that's all kind of swimming around us all the time.

- But a silver lining for COVID, definitely, is we're thinking much more about our indoor air quality, and that's a good thing.

That's a great thing.

This is probably...

These are carbon monoxide detectors.

Every single one of these things in front of us is carbon monoxide detecting devices, and then a bottle of carbon monoxide.

So we actually test these devices in the show.

But right there, you see us pulling out all the information because one of the things that a lot of people don't realize is that these devices are not meant to keep you healthy.

They're meant to protect you from dying.

But even then- - [Corbett] Even then it's only for a very specific kind of person.

If you have, and feel free to just raise your hand in your heart, if you have any kind of preexisting condition, if you are young, like, you know, a child, if you are old, if you have any kind of respiratory issues or cardiac issues.

- If you are making a tiny human.

- You need something better.

And it says it in the instructions.

Like, go buy one, for 50 bucks even, and open it up and read.

And it'll say multiple times, this is not for these people.

If you're one of those people, you need something better than this.

And that's what UL listing does.

UL listing normally, very good thing.

In a lot of cases though, it's very sneaky, and it does things that you don't realize.

- And we know there's these invisible things in the air that can make us sick.

And does anybody know the symptoms of prolonged carbon monoxide exposure?

Just even little sips of it every day will start to make you feel bad.

I mean, you'll start to have flu-like symptoms.

When are you often using your combustion materials the most?

- Combustion appliances.

- Combustion appliances, yeah.

In the winter.

- When does flu spike?

- When is flu season?

- Interesting.

- So there's these interesting parallels that, you know, again, we've slowly learned that we need to be advocates for our own selves, even in a hospital setting.

And so maybe when you're going in and if you aren't checking your carbon monoxide, maybe they should check your blood for it, because maybe that's what's actually happening.

- And just so that people aren't getting really worried, we're always focused on solutions, because there's always a right answer for stuff.

We just wanna make sure to point out, like, this is crazy, what is happening right now.

So the short answer is there are things called low-level carbon monoxide monitors.

They don't count for code.

Code will not count that as a carbon monoxide monitor 'cause it's too sensitive.

So they don't like that.

So you have to have the one that's really dumb.

Like you have to hit it over the head with carbon monoxide.

But you can also have this low-level carbon monoxide monitor.

Guess how much it costs.

It's the magic number, $200.

Everything is $200.

That's lucky.

12 years ago it was $250, so we're actually getting better.

- The prices, I think, are definitely gonna come down on these things, especially as more people start to understand and the demand can grow.

And again, it's just a way to be an advocate for yourself because it doesn't have to be all "Shark Week," you know?

- And you know what's insane?

Just to expand on this for one second, because we're about to kind of get into more chemistry stuff.

There's something that blew our minds when we learned it, which is that the fastest chemical reaction, which is chemistry, is chemical reactions, new chemicals being born.

Fastest one is like a rocket taking off, or a bolt of lightning.

Slowest one is the air around our face.

This air that we are breathing right now in this room is literally on fire.

Not a metaphor.

It is the same chemical process.

It's called redox, reduction oxidation.

And it's happening around us right now.

It's just very slow.

And it's room temperature, so we can't really see the flames, but it is happening.

And we just find that like, it's just so, it's honestly fueled our interest in this whole topic, a lot more than the physics.

Physics is cool and everything, but it's pretty dry.

The chemistry is a lot more interesting.

- Chemistry is really interesting.

And so one of the things that you're talking about, you had mentioned earlier about particles in homes, and how those can be detrimental.

So when you're talking about cooking, and many of us have propane or natural gas that we're cooking on in our homes.

Depending on what we're making, right, as those fumes come up and those particles come up and are suspended in the air, those can be problematic.

- [Grace] Absolutely.

And I'm one of those people who love to cook with gas because I kind of like the smell, and it's exciting and a little bit scary and you get the super high heat.

We now actually cook with an induction.

But again, the induction is still creating the chemistry and heat, which is causing those reactions.

- And the particles.

- And the particles.

Most importantly, the particles.

And so every single time we cook, we turn on our vent hood.

And it's just that simple.

But it's not, actually.

- How many people have an exhaust hood over their cooktop?

- Excellent.

- Nancy, what do you have?

- A window.

- Okay.

How many people have a window over the cooktop?

Okay, cool.

Like, that's real.

That's a thing.

- Crack it open.

- Okay, so the people who have an exhaust hood, how many people are sure that it goes outside?

Okay, great.

And do you use it every single time you use your cooktop or your oven?

One person.

Why don't we use it otherwise?

- [Audience Member] Noisy.

- Noisy?

- Noisy.

- Does everybody agree?

Noisy?

Okay.

The one that we have in our house, which is not that one.

That one is a terrible one.

Grace will explain it in a second.

But ours is so quiet that we actually don't realize that it's on sometimes.

We have left it on all night long, in some cases, because we didn't realize that it was on.

So it is completely unnecessary to have a noisy...

I've had one that sounded like a jet engine, and I was like, "There's something terribly wrong with it."

She's like, "Aren't they all supposed to sound like that?"

And I thought, what is wrong with this?

Hey, this is crazy.

- [Nancy] You're getting your money's worth though.

- Right, right.

Yeah.

- Covers the sound of your cooking, - Right.

It covers the sound of your cooking, covers the sound of your bathroom.

Your bathroom exhaust hood should not sound like a jet taking off either, but often the ducts are going in different ways.

They're stressing out the fans, and this is where the noise starts to come from.

- So this one's called a recirculating, and it doesn't jet outside.

It goes back inside.

- Actually, when you watch our show, you will see it go up that lovely chimney, hit the cornice, and then come into the room.

Like, what?

Let's call it recirculating.

- [Corbett] So if you're gonna do one thing for the health of your home, it's have a good one of these.

That's it.

If you did that, we would have a much better control over the health of homes in this country.

- And they have filters.

They should have little filters on them that you can occasionally take off, put into the dishwasher and clean.

That is what you want.

Absolutely.

- [Audience Member] That doesn't meet your $200 rule.

- It may not.

- That is true.

- It may not be $200.

- The one that we installed in the tiny house actually was $300.

We have videos on how to select and install these things on the channel.

So one of the things that happens, though, when you suck on a house that's newer, whether it's an older home that's been improved or a house that's newly built, these days, is that when you pull on it with a fan like this, you're gonna de depressurize it.

The pressure effect of any suction now has a much different effect on it.

So we have all kinds of extra machinery underneath our house in our crawl space, which looks like this.

That's my bugless zone.

Isn't that a great little crawler and everything?

That's one of my favorite rooms in the entire house.

My daughters are always being like, "Can we go down into the basement?"

- [Grace] "And roll around on the chairs?"

- [Corbett] And so we have something called a makeup air system.

MUAS, that's the nerdy abbreviation for it.

But it's a pressure relief system, so that when we're bringing air out of the house, this thing senses that and automatically kicks on to equalize the pressures in the house.

So our four elements that we're always looking at, our heat bleed, airflow and pressure, moisture and contaminants.

And that airflow and pressure is one of the most misunderstood things.

It causes way more problems in homes than you would realize.

We have actually a mold house in season three that was created only by depressurization.

There was never any water leak in that house.

Never a flood.

And it is infested by mold so bad that this friend of ours is suing one of the biggest builders in the entire country, and he's going to win.

- The real tragedy is also that their animals have died, and his wife will probably be wheelchair bound.

- So it's not a happy ending.

But they are going to win, which is just at least one for the good team.

- But cleaning your house, back to that too.

This is our childrens' room.

And you should feel good about being able to put your face into the exhaust air of your vacuum because your vacuum has a good, strong HEPA filter on it.

If your vacuum does not have a filter- - [Corbett] A HEPA filter.

- [Grace] Yeah.

You don't have a good vacuum, I'm sorry.

And I'll say that 10 times a day.

Also, if you take your bagless vacuum that you've just cleaned all the stuff from the ground, and then you whack it on the side of your trash can to get all the junk out, you have, you know, put it back in the air.

- So yeah, what we've done is now taken this dust that was perfectly happy and perfectly safe for us and for our family on the ground, and now we've re-suspended it in the air where we can breathe it, and it become part of our body.

And all the chemicals that are embedded on it are now, you know, going into our bloodstream.

And anyway, all kinds of weird things are happening.

And that's why it's like, you know, kids today are different than they ever were.

Is it the vaccines?

It must be the vaccines.

And it's like, I'm sure everything is a little bit important.

- It's a system.

- Look at all the crazy stuff that we're doing to our families.

We spend 90% of our lives indoors now.

We all think that we're outdoorsy.

We're not.

It's okay.

- And of that 90%, how much is that the percentage at home typically?

- So about 50 years of your life, you're gonna spend in your home, whether that's one home or multiple homes or whatever.

But most of what's happening to us in our bodies is probably happening in our homes.

And it actually turns out the breathing stuff is really a major transport mechanism.

But also our skin.

We absorb chemicals through our skin and into our bloodstream.

Isn't that amazing?

So nobody knows really what that means and what it's doing, because we're just starting to study this.

So we're actually learning this as we make this show and sharing it with all of you.

- Yeah.

So filters, filters, filters.

Get good filters.

- [Corbett] Before you go out and you buy a bunch of air cleaning things that are gonna do bipolar ionization or spray hydroxyl radicals into your air.

- [Grace] Or heaven forbid, create ozone.

Bad.

- [Corbett] Ozone generators.

Anybody heard of an ozone generator?

Anybody own one?

Okay.

All right, good.

If you know anybody who has one, please ask them to get rid of it.

You can buy 350 ozone generators on Amazon right now.

And they are all bad news.

You should never use one in a home, for any reason.

Professionals can use them for very specific purposes, but they have side effects too, and that's one of the things we're exploring in season three.

And so what you want to do is capture and release.

There's actually a video that I'm doing.

I found a filterless anti... what is it?

It's like a virus killer, but it's filterless.

Filterless air cleaner.

And I was like, "Tell me more, please."

Because how are you doing this?

But what it does is like killing.

It's like a little oven, and you cook the air that's going through it to 400 degrees, and yeah, it'll kill everything.

But now we're letting all these little corpses float around.

- It cools it and disperses the air.

- Which is dust that's rotting, and now we have dust mites.

And dust mites are way better at causing respiratory problems in humans than mold is.

So if we're worried about something, really we should be worried about that.

So that's why, again, the capture and release filters, good.

Any other air cleaning device that is electronic in any way, please avoid.

Just take that, and that's a broad generalization that the scientists normally hate it when we make, but that they're like, "Yep, you can make that one.

That's okay."

- So we do have a question from our streaming audience.

What would you improve upon in your new home to make it healthier and safer?

Is there anything that has come up at this point?

- Sure, yeah.

I mean, we were actually having this conversation as we were driving over here this morning.

- I don't want to bore everyone.

When you get to the level of what I worry about in my spaceship of a home, it's very nerd level five, which is what our YouTube channel is all about.

So if you really want an answer to that question, whoever asked it, please subscribe to our YouTube channel, and wait for about three weeks for me to make a video about our ERV, which stands for energy recovery ventilator.

That's our balanced ventilation device that brings fresh air into the house.

Fresh outdoor air into the house.

Whether that's fresh or not we can talk about another day.

Wildfires.

And take stale air from the house to outside in equal measure.

And so there are a bunch of problems with the one that we've got in there now that are very nerdy and I will not bore you with them.

- Right.

But we would probably adjust that first.

- Well, it's such a big component of everything that we've been talking about.

- Also, incidentally, it's such a system where our radon system is sucking on the ground under the slab, the gravel bed, which is sucking on the drain tile, which is sucking on the other drain tile, which is sucking on the gravel bed outside of that drain tile, which is outside the house, which is sucking all the way up the wall.

And so we had this pathway that was from outside our house, down through, and out through the radon fan, which means we had to run our radon fan a lot harder than we would've had to if we had a pressure contained box, which is really what you want.

But this is where staging and getting the contractors to have this conversation with us, because we cannot possibly understand this stuff.

I now understand because I built an entire house with my mom and dad, and we went through all this stuff and tested it, and we're like, "What is this?"

So that's how you kind of figure it out is you have to go through this two-year building process with your family.

You shouldn't have to do that.

- You can watch "Home Diagnosis" season two - And talk to open-minded building professionals about this who might be open to talking about invisible dynamics and being like, "Okay, well, you know, if that happened, then this."

So all this kind of sequence and consequence, it's like music for buildings, basically.

- I like how you transitioned that back to the music.

- Oh, good.

- So for someone who has some minor mold issues in a bathroom, and they're about to paint the space, is there anything that you would recommend to them?

- Go, go.

- Okay, good.

More talking from that guy.

So you want to fix the cause of the problem.

If you have cracking paint in your ceiling all the time, every year you have to repaint the bathroom ceiling, please stop repainting the bathroom ceiling.

You need to figure out what is happening.

And it's probably either the insulation is not there, or that you've got too much ventilation, or not enough ventilation, or that something is going wrong with the dynamics of the building.

So if you have mold in the house, please don't scrub it out.

First, figure out why it's there.

- What's feeding it.

And again, this is where testing, working with a testing professional can help you understand your air, and the path of it, and the moisture in your home.

- And that doesn't mean hiring a mold inspector, because those guys just want to scrub the mold.

They're mold remediation experts.

And I don't wanna say job security, but there are incentives to, you know...

There are mixed incentives within the building industry.

I'll just say that.

So you just wanna make sure that you're trying to figure out why it's happening in the first place, physically, and then try and solve that problem.

And then you can get rid of it.

But there's all these tricks that we could do.

And frankly, this is a three-hour presentation, if we were gonna do it right.

But we have limited time and we don't want to put everybody to sleep.

- So what can we do?

- So you test your bath fan.

I'm sorry.

You take it.

- I mean, back to that question, again, it would be testing the bath fan.

But what can you do even on a larger level is really start with a plan, and find your plan.

So again, information is just gold.

It is gold.

Get your information so that you know where you can start making your choices, so that you can stage A before you do B, otherwise you're gonna have to do B again and again and again, because you never took care of A.

- So practically speaking for a plan, where is the best place to put a bath exhaust fan?

- Oh, anybody?

I will give you the answer.

Over the shower.

It's not a fart fan, like all the contractors want you to believe, it's actually there to remove moisture because you don't want that mold build up.

You don't want that cracking paint.

You want to keep that space dry.

- We always laugh because every hotel we stay at, which, like, the hotels are built by hugely rich corporations.

And they hire these very successful engineers to design the buildings.

And they've got these bathrooms, and all the bathrooms are the same.

The exhaust fan.

Next time you're in one, please look at this for me.

Where is the exhaust fan in a hotel bathroom?

- [Audience Member] Near the mirror.

- It's near the mirror, right?

Does the mirror fog up every single time you take a shower in a hotel bathroom?

Everyone says yes.

That's dumb.

I was a professional musician.

Grace was a professional actor.

We've never built a house before.

We've never designed a house before.

Our bathroom mirrors never fog up in our house, and we take hot showers.

Like, we're normal people.

We take hot showers that last 15 minutes.

- And if you wanna go even deeper, we don't have bath fans.

What?

I know.

Again, go nerd out on our channel.

We have a balance system.

- But there's always things you can do that are very simple, like where you put things.

- Where you put things is important.

- It sounds really dumb to say, but it works.

- So speaking of where to put things.

- Yes.

Oh, this is one of my favorite spaces in my house.

Your square footage.

When you are dreaming about your home, when you are renovating your home, you should not only be thinking about the square footage of your bedrooms and bathrooms, but the square footage for the systems of your home.

This is the spinal cord of our house, okay?

How important is your spinal cord?

So important, right?

So this is the central chase that runs right up through our house, which allows us to access it whenever we need to, first of all.

There's a ladder that goes up the whole way.

But it's also where we run our fresh air, we run our conditioned air, we have our electricity lines going through there.

- [Corbett] Drain lines, plumbing.

All the things that you need to run a house.

And if you insist on those things being hidden, it means that they're very difficult to find sometimes, and to access and then change.

And also if you have a leak, whatever happens, right?

So we wanted this to be a part of the plan.

And just to get out in front of it, if anybody's thinking about planning a house or building one later, please start thinking about these dynamics as you are planning the layout.

We consult for people all over the country, and they'll design their house and they'll come up with everything, and then they'll send us the plans and be like, "Okay, let's build some science into this thing."

And I'm like, "Okay, let's do it."

It's kind of hard once you've got everything, 'cause really it would be better if we could just move things a little bit around, and maybe think about it more.

Where the kitchen is.

Why does the stove have to be on the kitchen island?

That's an easy one.

That's just not gonna work very well.

So all these things are kind of part of the design of everything.

And so if you could just think about these dynamics as you're thinking about your wife's happiness, like how many windows you're gonna have in the house.

You know, I designed a big room that has no windows in it.

Thank you.

But if you want women to live with you, then you need to have it be a nice looking space too.

And so this marrying of the aesthetics and the invisible stuff that nobody but me cares about is a really delicate dance and you need to play it well.

- Right.

But it's also not too difficult.

- Not rocket science.

- Right.

If you wanna go on the next.

This is our daughter Emmanuel, and she's adorable, and she can say temperature, humidity and pressure.

And if she can say these things, we can too.

And we can just start to arm ourselves with this knowledge because the physics and the chemistry and the microbiology of a home really do not need to be so intimidating.

They are attainable.

- Yeah.

And so they all relate to each other, the physics, chemistry and microbiology.

And so just not being scared of it, knowing that there are microbes, there are millions of creatures living in your house right now while you're here, and they're doing things.

They're working, they're breathing, they're having relationships, they're making babies, and they don't even know you exist.

- [Grace] They've lived so much longer than we have.

- [Corbett] And the chemicals are transforming while you're gone.

It's happening.

This dance is beautiful.

And the physics is changing.

Air is flowing and circulating and doing all this weird stuff.

And so we just need to make sure that we're aware of that as we move through it, because it's a lot better to be aware, to make informed choices.

- So we do have a question about water quality in a home.

So the potable water that's in your home, how does that affect the house's chemistry?

- Well, it's huge.

If your water does not work, hmm.

Which, you know, we've got boil water notices happening in Mississippi right now.

And it's not the first place in this nation, right?

We have some pipes in the oldest places of our nation that are wooden, still, which is incredible, right?

So your water filtration is huge.

You need your water to be healthy.

- When we talk about the four elements, contaminants is the most important one.

And that goes for all the fluids that we're dealing with.

Air is the big fluid, and then water is the other one.

And it turns out that when we take a shower, we absorb, like we said, through our skin.

So you are absorbing whatever's in the water.

And also then that goes for your washing machine, you're dishwasher.

There are all kinds of things.

- When you're cooking, you're releasing that stuff.

- Absolutely.

So the amount of... By the way, if you're gonna use a ultrasonic humidifier, first of all, probably not a good idea.

But if you have to, please use distilled water if you're gonna fill that thing up.

Don't use those little chemical tabs that are gonna bleach it, 'cause then that's also gonna evaporate into the air and now you're sucking in bleach instead.

So yeah, water quality and air quality are really married, and we explored that in season two a bit.

We're exploring it more in season three, 'cause it turns out that what happens to the water system when you have something like a wildfire or a hurricane is they're, like, very married.

It's very interesting.

- Yeah, we have huge issues.

Huge issues with the water.

So some recommendations as people are starting to embark on these adventures with their homes.

- Yeah.

Spoiler alert.

At the end of season three, that bump becomes a tiny little boy.

And you gotta be patient.

Oh, my gosh, it's been six years of an adventure for us, and building a home, it takes a lot of patience.

- [Corbett] And that's important.

It's an incredibly important ingredient.

It's critical.

- [Grace] Don't rush it.

- [Corbett] Don't rush.

And do not let your contractors rush.

Let them know that you are giving them the time to think.

The AC guy shows up at your house to service your AC, is his shirt tucked in?

- Probably not.

- Anybody notice?

Their shirts are not tucked in, generally, and it's because they don't have time during the course of their day.

When it became untucked, they just don't have time after that to tuck it in.

So those guys are not allowed to stop and breathe and think for a minute about what they're about to do before they do it.

They are very stressed out by a lot of stuff.

So we wanna try and create a new culture in the building industry.

We need to start this conversation and be like, "Hey, how much time is this gonna take you?"

And I want you to be able to think, how much does it cost for me to get the plans for this?

Like, you're gonna come out and measure, I want you to do a good job.

What does that cost?

'Cause it's not free, I'll tell you that.

If it is free, something is happening on the back end for that to happen.

- And then while we built the house ourselves, there were a lot of people that helped us.

So definitely being thankful is a huge, huge thing that will help you along the line of patience too.

- [Corbett] And it does take a village.

- [Grace] This is Corbett's mother and father above.

Those are some of our neighbors.

Those are some of our students.

That's our architects, who are our friends who helped us.

There was a lot of help.

While we built the house ourselves, we certainly did not build it ourselves.

- [Corbett] And YouTube has made it really easy to get in touch.

Like, I found a guy who does drains in Florida, and he has this thing where he does video consulting.

So I was like, "Great.

I wanna talk to that guy.

I trust him 'cause I've watched a ton of his videos."

So I just called him and scheduled the thing.

Like, you can do that now.

And so please do either meet the people locally who can get you the information that you need to help you make decisions, or find somebody online.

And it's not hard to find these people.

It's amazing.

- Yeah.

And then, oh yeah, make sure you're enjoying it, right?

There was a joke somebody said to us.

"Make sure you give yourselves two years to build your house and three years to be in marriage counseling."

And I am happy to say we have not needed to go into marriage counseling, but I think, again, taking our time, trying to be patient with each other, and grateful, and remembering to savor the moments all along the way.

Honestly, the pandemic was a little bit helpful in that.

We had to stop.

We had to slow down and just build our house and be with our babies.

And that was lovely.

- And speaking of being grateful, we'd like to show our sponsors.

These are the companies that put their money where their mouth is.

And our show is brandless.

You will not see brand logos in our show.

These companies give us money to teach America how this stuff works.

And the world, through our YouTube channel.

One of them is in the room right here.

Bob, will you please stand up?

So "Healthy Indoors" magazine.

Jeff was in season one.

Thank you again, Jeff.

- And I know some of them are streaming.

- Yeah, some of our sponsors are on the live stream, Eric Bernal.

- Elite Water Systems.

These companies are people who care enough about it to give us money for us not to put their logo on the show.

That's kind of a big deal.

So please do show them love if you need anything that looks like what you're seeing on screen.

Check them out.

- So you are living in Georgia, you've come up to New York to help us kick off our fall season of "Science Pub."

- Thank you for having us.

- Thank you.

But this isn't your end stop.

- No.

- You are going onto Toronto.

- Yeah, yeah.

So on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, we will be filming in Toronto with seven different scientists who are specializing in the ecology of dust in homes, after wildfires.

I mean, just the most fascinating stuff, and it's all brand new science too.

So we're super excited to be able to bring their research and their experience to the small screen.

- That way you don't have to read all the white papers in the world.

You can kind of come to one place where we introduce you to a whole bunch of new concepts and then you can be like, "Ooh, I wanna learn more about that person's work."

And then you can kind of run with it.

- Well, we have a teaser of season three that we're gonna take a quick look at.

- Now that we've deeply explored building a house from the ground up to do exactly what you want, we're going to turn the lens on what happens when we ignore this science and disaster strikes.

- What happens when your home is flooded?

- How do hurricanes, smoke damage and other disasters affect a home's physics, chemistry and microbiology, and that of the people living inside of it?

- As the world continues to change, so do the needs of homes, and "Home Diagnosis" will continue to explore this changing science, and seek out answers for viewers like you.

- Exciting.

So if I wanna find out more information, where can I go?

- You could binge watch everything at homediagnosis.tv.

Our YouTube channel is called Home Performance.

So if you just search Home Performance on YouTube, that's what you come up with.

- Yeah.

But also definitely check out your local listings.

This show does air nationally on PBS stations.

One of the big reasons we're here with WSKG is because we air on the station.

And so do support your local PBS stations, they help us carry this story nationwide and that's a big deal.

- Well, thank you.

And you can watch that on WSKG, typically on Sundays at 3:00 p.m.

I want to thank both of you for being here tonight.

This was a really great way to kick off our fall season of "Science Pub," so thank you.

- It was our pleasure.

- Thank you.

- You can watch past "Science Pubs" on the WSKG app.

We have a YouTube channel that you can watch those past seasons as well.

Be sure to like our Facebook page, and you can catch the upcoming information on our next "Science Pub," which is going to be all about how spiders catch their dinner.

So tune in for that.

I want to thank BTI Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County for being here tonight with their tiny home.

I would like to thank our WSKG team and our chat moderator, Christine Keysor.

Support for "Science Pub" is by the Robert Schuman Foundation, and from viewers like you.

Thank you so much for tuning in.