Is your home or commercial space fully secure from mold infestation? An understanding of the following causes should help you prevent indoor mold.
Whether it’s the slick orange film on your kitchen drain or the fuzzy white patches on the basement floor, household mold is not easy to remove. If not effectively removed, mold can soon become a health hazard, especially for those with pre-existing health conditions such as asthma and allergies. Even if you’re not allergic to mold, it can cause irritation in your eyes, nose, skin, throat, and lungs.
To be able to prevent mold infestation, it’s critical to understand what causes mold growth.
In this guide, we’ll take you through some of the most common causes of mold:
A Damp Basement
Since basements are below the ground level, they’re more vulnerable to moisture intrusions than any other area of your home. Water leaks from your home and pools of water around you’re foundation often cause moisture to seep into space.
On top of that, due to insufficient air circulation, they’re typically subject to high humidity levels. This combination of humidity and dampness makes mold infestation inevitable.
Keeping your basement well maintained, fixing any cracks in the foundation, and ensuring proper ventilation should help you avoid basement mold.
Condensation
Did you know that 80 to 85% of mold problems are linked to man-made dampness or condensation?
While condensation normally occurs in homes from October to April of next year, it can occur any time with the right conditions. The air inside your home contains water vapor. The higher the temperature in your home, the more moisture in the air. Condensation occurs when the moist air comes into contact with a cold surface or colder air, releasing water on surfaces such as concrete, brick walls, tiles, metal pipes, and so on.
If you fail to do anything about it, the condensation pockets will become breeding grounds for mold.
Laundry
Suppose you did your laundry, took out the clothes from the washing machine, but left them at a corner to attend a phone call. Afterward, you forgot to hang them for drying. If the wet clothes are allowed to sit there for more than two days, they can easily be infested by mold. This is because unaddressed moisture can translate into mold within 48 hours.
To avoid this, be sure to properly dry your clothes are doing laundry.
Food Sources
Mold needs food to survive and reproduce, and your home could be full of mold food. In a closet corner or bathroom, it will feed on the organic materials on the wallboard or in wood panels. It also consumes the tiny dirt and dust particles that exist around it.
In other areas, mold will feed on the surfaces of your luggage and clothes and loves newspapers and damp cardboard. It will not even spare the insulation in your walls or attic.
If you think about it, you can’t do much to reduce the food sources of mold, so it’s best to control other elements such as moisture, spillage, leaks, and so on.
An understanding of the above-discussed causes should help you prevent mold growth. However, if mold has already invaded your indoor space, you’ll need professional mold remediation services to address the problem.
For emergency mold inspection and removal, reach out to STOP today!
