Video: Combating Mold in Your Home

SANTA ROSA — Host, Sarah Rutan: If you have a mold problem in your home, it’s important to know the proper way to deal with it, as well as common mistakes to avoid. Today we’re in Santa Rosa with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Dave Keith of NorthBay Environmental to learn more.

Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Dave Keith: So you’ve got mold on your wall? What should you do? What I recommend is to put plastic on it. You can take a plastic garbage bag, or you can take just Visqueen, a piece of plastic, cut out the square, and then put duct tape around and seal all the edges. That’s what you should do – cover it up so it doesn’t spread.

What shouldn’t you do? Don’t put a fan on mold. The problem with putting a fan on mold – you may have good intentions that you want to dry out, maybe the wall is wet, or the floor is wet, and you’re going to dry it out – but you’re actually causing a lot of harm, because think of a mold spore as a dandelion in your lawn, and you’re blowing those spores all over your house, creating a much bigger problem potentially. So, I never recommend putting a fan on mold. The best way to dry out anything that’s wet that has mold is with a dehumidifier.

One of the most common things I’m asked about is bleach – should I put bleach on mold? And the answer is, you can. But I want you to be careful about bleach, because the byproduct of bleaches actually can be more harmful than mold. So, the proper way to put bleach on mold is to dilute it to a 10 percent bleach to water solution, spray the bleach on the mold, and let it sit for at least 10 minutes. However, if you have mold on drywall, you put bleach on it, you can wipe it off, but that’s like pulling weeds in your lawn. You got the weed, but you may not have gotten the roots – and that is why many times, the mold continues to grow back.

In the county that we live in, humidity levels can be more than 60 percent, which is great for mold. So you can pull those weeds, you can get the surface of it, but the roots are still there in the drywall, and the mold can continue to grow, even without a normal water source that may have been there, but with just humidity in the air.

Another question I’m commonly asked is, should I test for mold? I want to know what kind of mold I have. And the answer is, maybe. I don’t always recommend testing for mold because, from a remediation standpoint, I don’t care what kind of mold it is. It could be Stachybotrys; it could be Penicillium – but from a remedial standpoint, treating it is exactly the same. And so, I don’t always recommend testing ahead of time, because you might just be wasting your money. If you could see mold, it’s probably mold, so you need to fix it.

There are a lot of test kits that are out there, and you send it off to a lab, and you spend money and get it back and say, yep – it’s mold. I could save you a lot of money by just saying it’s probably mold. Let’s get it taken care of, and figure out the right way to do it.

Host, Sarah Rutan: To learn more from local top rated companies, visit our Diamond Certified Expert Reports at experts.diamondcertified.org.