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How Do You Remediate Mold?

How Do You Remediate Mold?When we’re called in to deal with a mold problem, one of the first questions the homeowner often asks is, “What does it mean to ‘remediate’ mold? Why not say you’re removing it?”

Unfortunately, neither we nor anyone else can completely remove mold from a house. Mold spores are everywhere, in every room of your house or apartment and practically everywhere outside, so there’s only so much that any service can do. As such, we can only “remediate” mold, or bring it down to a moderate and mostly harmless level.

As for the process, while every case is unique, there are a few basic steps which a remediation service goes through every time:

1. Identify the water source. Mold and other invaders need water in order to survive, which means there has to be something like a leaky pipe, a crack in the wall, or else simply too much humidity without enough of a dehumidifier.
2. Fix the leak. As much as remediation is about the mold, there’s no sense in getting rid of it before you first get rid of the cause.
3. Isolate the area. The single biggest problem with mold is the damage it can do to your lungs, and as such it’s important to make sure the contaminated area is completely airtight so that mold particles and spores don’t infest the rest of the building or any of its inhabitants.
4. Clean and decontaminate. Once preparations are complete, it’s time to actually start removing the mold. This involves misting the air so no dust will escape the process, removing and either cleaning or destroying porous materials like fabric and carpet, and then scraping and scrubbing all the solid and wooden surfaces until all visible mold is gone and all the spore tests give a passing grade. After that, the cleaning materials themselves need to be removed as well.
5. Dry and replace. Just a little moisture that lingers for too long could potentially start the whole thing over again, so it’s important to dry the area as rapidly as possible. Once that’s done, it’s time to put in new carpet, replace whatever couldn’t be salvaged, and otherwise bring the area back to where it was before.

If you’ve got a mold problem and your house is in Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, DC, or Virginia, then you should contact AA Action Waterproofing for a free estimate. We’ve been at this for over 27 years now, and we’ve never seen a mold problem we couldn’t tackle.

This entry was posted in Mold & Mildew, Mold Remediation on November, 17, 2015