re: Indoor mold issues in home

quote:

---

There is an entire subdivision in League City, TX dealing with this exact problem.

---

Can you post the name of the subdivision ?? (One of my sons and his family live in League City.)

High likelihood of the HVAC issue. Another thing to check, especially if you are in a frame house, is the pressure relief valve on the water heater. If leaking, water can pool under the house (if it drains there). Other plumbing leaks can cause this as well.

This belongs on the Indoor Board.




Sorry I dont have any real contribution to this thread.

Amen. My old house had a mold problem and it was caused by too much moisture in the air. I can't remember what your home's average air moisture content % needs to be UNDER in order to prevent mold growth, but there is a minimum.

OP, I realize this is "a long AF" reply, and I realize you'll probably, maybe, be the only person who reads it (and I don't blame anybody for not reading it), but mold ain't no joke and I ain't speaking up to waste my time or yours. It's ESPECIALLY serious with youngins on the way. It can kill you and, God forbid, kill a child with the quickness, and it'll definitely kill your bank account and your home's value. I am not a mold abatement expert, but I battled that crap for years and talked to many experts on it and looked up lots of information, and I was in the same shoes as you regarding children. Although I didn't have any at the time, the mold issue was a huge factor as to why we chose not to. I now have one on the way myself. I smell what you're stepping in, sort of, and I managed to get rid of mold in my former house with little outside costs other than consulting and my own time being spent doing the work both in research and applications.

"On paper," the concept of how mold moves in is actually fairly simple. Here's the problem, maybe:

If you had mold before the remodel, cleaning, etc., then all it takes is one mold spore + high moisture content (or adequate conditions for growth) to equal ongoing mold problems; because the surviving mold is now once again growing due to a suitable (suitable at best, ideal at worst) environment.

Sometimes, like in my case in my former home, it grows in a certain area and "flakes" off and travels to the rest of the home; surving but maybe not thriving or growing slowly due to suitable-only conditions.

I doubt you have a leaking pipe if they were just done, relatively speaking. Like others have said before, it probably has to do with your HVAC system, but it DEFINITELY, probably, has something to do with the overall gist of what HVAC falls under and what causes mold in the 1st place: the plumbing of air inside your home, and moisture causing a suitable or ideal environment for surviving spores to grow. You're probably "watering" the garden, for lack of a better phrase, in some way.

Find where/how the moisture is getting into the home and air, eliminate it, and then kill the remaining mold to get it gone and then monitor air moisture to see if you killed the culprit.

I know that's not groundbreaking advice, but once you make the environment unsuitable for mold growth, odds are that even if your home was still covered in mold, at least it wouldn't propagate, but you want the mold gone. How to find the source of moisture and then what to do is the hard part, but, IMO, remember: eliminate air moisture and THEN eliminate the existing mold.


Once I fixed my sources causing high moisture content, I washed all clothes, walls, etc.; put air movers in the crawlspaces temporarily and vented the crawlspace; put more venting in the ceilings and the attic so air was encouraged to go from the crawlspace to the attic and OUT; put in dehumidifiers; installed gutters to get the water out and away from the foundation/crawlspace and *improved drainage* on my site to carry as much sheet water AROUND the house, etc.

After fixing the moisture source, I sterilized the home of existing mold and I used those things like gutters and dehumidifiers to mitigate inevitable sources of moisture because some mold will probably remain and it'll be ready to grow if conditions get right. Everybody has some mold. I bought a plugin moisture reader that sat on the window ledge above the sink to monitor the air. In a larger home you'll probably need several.

End of my "advice" on what I did and my opinion.

BUT, as an aside, here's an idea for you of what wound up being my sources of moisture/ mold:

The main culprit was that whoever built my old house poured the carport slab, and then built a heated/cooled room over part of that slab- that room was connected to the rest of the home's interior. That's a big no-no, building code-wise, for the very reason of why we are talking. That little room freaking PUMPED moisture into my home, especially during high temperature/humidity differences between the outside and inside (which is often in the south).

All that moisture overwhelmed my little home's hvac systems and polluted the air with massive amounts of moisture.

(If you watch a concrete slab inside of a lightly-insulated shop- let alone a heavily insulated home- whereby the same slab runs outside to, say, a covered porch, and watch it during high humidity or rain events where the exterior slab wicks up the moisture or has a high temp/humidity gradient, you'll see what I mean when I say my former home had moisture literally "pumped" into it.)

At first I put in a raised floor in that lower room with a heavy vapor barrier and improved air circulation, but even that didnt work, and so I walled that room off from the rest of the home permanently.

Meanwhile, the crawlspace under the home was sealed really well- too well, with no venting- and during extremely heavy rain events water inevitably got under the home due to no gutters and lackluster drainage, and, heck even during high humidity, moisture got in had no way to get out. The crawlspace would sweat just like the slab. That moisture would creep UP and get in through walls, outlets, plumbing, etc., and get in my home and linger because it had very little incentive to move up and OUT. It also was a point source of where the mold spores came from. It, like many crawlspaces, are mold heaven.

The crawlspace was the mold source, along with some moisture, and the porch slab was the irrigation and where the spores really propagated and spread from.

To fix that, I made the air move through the house, vented the heck out of the crawlspace; improved drainage by putting in gutters and small terraces above-grade of the home, put in a French drain, and more.

After all of that, the problem was solved, but I never did like living there afterwards.

Again, I know that was long AF, but, again, mold ain't nothing to play with. It's detrimental to the health of you and yours and your wallet and your home as an asset. The concept, like many other subjects, is simple, but real world applications are a different ballgame. But maybe after reading a SYNOPSIS of the hell that I went through and what I did, maybe you can help to mitigate some of the hourly costs of consulting and save some money while having peace of mind about you and your family and your home's value.

So good luck!

I'd definitely see what the pro says.

Item #67143 , a digital moisture reader for $14 at harbor freight was one of the things that helped me put the puzzle together and pass that information along to the people I was paying to consult with me.

Water up against the house is obvious, but excessive water in the joists may not be so obvious.

The "pinless" meter at lowes is around $40 and that worked well too. It's a general tools brand and is lowes item # 562134. It might be better for your applications because you don't have to make actual contact with the surface, but the moisture must be within 3/4" of the material being measured. It's good for detecting moisture behind 1/2" drywall and other finished surfaces.

Even if you bought both, that's under $100 and they may help you, and thereby help your hired people, to put the puzzle together. I'm sure there are others and ones with varying capabilities, but those 2 I have experience with.

One thing I may not have stressed in my dissertation is that, in my informed experience, it doesn't always stem from a single source where you can say, "Ah-ah!" but it can come from systemic problems like, for instance, poor drainage adding insult to injury, etc.

A pro told me that a lot of times you don't have it so lucky to where the problem is obvious and singular. It's often a "big picture" kind of thing and sometimes it can be eliminated via due diligence from the homeowner. So there's that grain of salt.

It'll work out, one way or the other!

Do you have custom built showers or premade?

I had a shower leaking due to faulty pan and only knew because of the shoes. You could put in louvrred doors to get more circulation.

first step should be grabbing a few humidity monitors and running them around different rooms in your house. get a feel for what you humidity is running at. also if you have a smart thermostat you can look at a log of how much your AC unit is running and for how long.

what is insulation like in your attic? what type of ventilation do you have in the attic?

I ran this same exact setup for two years and it made a difference. My 5 ton unit died last winter so it had to be replaced and based on recommendation from HVAC the new unit being multi stage I put in a whole house dehumidifier. My entire house has been so much more comfortable and electric bills have been half of what they were.

Maybe exhaust fans to keep the air circulating. Mold needs moisture to survive.

\ General Tools MMD7NP Moisture Meter, Pinless, Digital LCD with Tricolor Bar Graph