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September 30, 2009
Who do I call to check for mold?
Help! We're in a Victorian in Ditmas with a semi-finished basement. Carpet is bone dry but the smell of mildew is overwhelming. I want to get someone in to figure out where it's coming from. Any ideas who I would call? Thanks!!
Comments
A carpet in a basement is always going to start to smell at some point. Rip it out and wash it down with a bleach solution.
Posted by: daveinbedstuy at September 30, 2009 1:12 PM
carpet is new so I don't think that's it.
Posted by: brooklyny at September 30, 2009 1:15 PM
Tape a clear piece of plastic onto a small area of the basement wall where you suspect there is mold, tape up all edges well. If there is mold behind the walls, the plastic will fog up.
Posted by: jre at September 30, 2009 1:33 PM
Vinegar kills mold.
Posted by: IMBY at September 30, 2009 1:44 PM
clorox is better, imby, but in either case you need to find it first.
Posted by: denton at September 30, 2009 1:48 PM
This could have been my post: just two weeks ago, we confronted the same thing with our Ditmas victorian. In short, we learned never, ever to put carpet in a basement. We carpeted it last year and then found that the one time water went into the basement (we've since fixed the leak), it corroded the carpet. So out the carpet went...as well as the lower part of most of the basement walls. Some were as a precaution, but it seemed prudent. We cleaned the whole thing with vinegar since I read it works better AND doesn't small as bad a clorox. New walls go up next week and a tile floor to follow.
It was a bummer to take out the new carpeting but ultimately it didn't seem wise to keep it in there--the mold risk for the future is too great with a carpeted basement. I wish I had know that before I spent $ to carpet the darn basement only a year ago.
Our contractor did the whole thing for us since there wasn't a lot of active mold to clean up once the carpets were out and walls off. Just be careful of expensive mold remediation companies...their scare tactics can be really effective. Most of this stuff you can do yourself.
Good luck.
Posted by: lah at September 30, 2009 2:00 PM
You should take up the carpet first, see if that solves the problem.
If you decide you want a real inspection, hire a certified industrial hygienist (not just some company with a mold inspection license). I have been very happy with Microecologies in Manhattan. However, these kinds of inspections are not cheap.
You could also try poking around with a dampness meter.
If you have one of those old-fashioned originally unfinished basements with a stone wall and dirt floor, they were not made to be water tight and never will be. It is a very poor idea to install anything in them on which mold can grow, such as carpet or drywall.
Then again, an excess of water could be getting into the basement through a leak, badly graded or cracked cement outside, or some other problem, and that is fixable. A structural engineer would be your best bet there.
Posted by: mopar at September 30, 2009 3:44 PM
Thank you all for your input. Amazingly and lucky for us, the problem is solved and the source of the mildew smell was found by our new cleaning person....! Our previous cleaning person had left a damp mop in a bucket in the back hallway where it sat for a few weeks getting mildewier and mildewier. Crisis averted. The smell was strongest right where the bucket had been left. It never dawned on me to consider the mop as the culprit. So. Finally a problem that won't cost 5 figures to remediate!!
Posted by: brooklyny at September 30, 2009 4:14 PM
there are few things that smell worse than a sour mop.
Posted by: IMBY at September 30, 2009 4:50 PM
thanks goodness, to Mrs. D's chagrin, we have never hired a cleaning person.
Posted by: denton at September 30, 2009 5:39 PM
Well, that is a lucky surprise!
Posted by: mopar at October 1, 2009 7:54 PM
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