How to clean black mold
- Risty
- Sep 7, 2017
- 5 min read
Things your need to know before cleaning mold.
There are things I wish my husband and I had learned about cleaning mold before digging into that process. We did it incorrectly and as a result we contaminated everything we owned. We were not able to keep anything. Not even our wedding photos. We left our house as though we had gone to Walmart and never came home.
I want to share what we learned throughout that experience in hopes that it will help someone else to not make the same mistakes that we made.
The USDA compares the movement of mold spores to dandelion seeds. Mold spores spread very easily. A gust of air or even waving your hand close to the mold, is enough to send the spores airborne. Think of a white dandelion and how easily those seeds come loose and float in the air. Mold spores do the same thing. The spores are microscopic, meaning you can’t see individual spores with the naked eye. A small disturbance would send thousands of spores into the air.
Once in the air, these spores make their way into your body through your airways or absorption into your skin, setting up a permanent residence inside your body. They can also enter your body through your eye membranes. More on that later. Mold needs a dark and damp location to thrive, making the inside of your body the perfect host for a growing colony.
It is very important not to disturb the mold as you attempt to remove it. If the mold is disturbed, the spores will go airborne, landing on all of the items in your house like a fine invisible dust. Once that occurs, it is impossible to clean up. As you wipe the spores, the movement continues to swipe them back into the air, resettling them back onto your things.
Some people will tell you to clean mold with bleach. This information is inaccurate and not helpful. Bleach does not kill mold, ammonia does.
Make sure not to mix the two, as they will give off a deadly gas.
A dead mold spore is just as allergic as a live mold spore. This means if you are reacting to the mold, it will not matter if you kill the spores or not. You will still be just as sick.
My husband and I did not know this. We were told by a “mold expert” that we could just scrub it with bleach, so my husband did. He scrubbed every inch of mold he found in our house with bleach. This was the wrong thing to do. The spores went airborne, sailing all over our house, settling in our clothes, furniture, books, infecting every single item we owned. We could not keep anything.
The only way to remove mold safely is to remove the infected material completely without disturbing the mold.
Treat the mold as a biohazard.
First you should remove every item from the room you will be working in. Tape off the rest of the house well with plastic, wear a heavy duty air respirator and turn off your air conditioner or heater so as not to spread the spores.
If we were to clean our home again, I would take every single item out of our house before starting. Once it is contaminated, you can not keep it. More on that later.
If you are really allergic, the air respirator does not filter enough of the spores out to keep you from being sick. If you are reacting and are sick, I would recommend you are not the one that does the cleaning.
My husband wore this respirator as he cleaned our house. This was not enough to keep him safe. He felt much sicker and had many more symptoms after scrubbing the mold. The spores most likely entered his body through his exposed skin.
For more on how exactly what my husband did, read Fuzzy's Testimony.
If there is a spot of mold on your sheetrock. You should spray it with ammonia first, this will wet the spores and help them to stay put instead of releasing into the air. Cut out a large section of drywall around the mold infected spot and remove the entire piece very carefully. If a shower door has mold on it, remove the entire door and throw it away.
It is not worth your health to try and clean it.
I would recommend throwing away the clothing you wear. Throw it away outside, do not walk back into the house with those clothes on. If you missed killing a spore and it landed on your clothes, it can fall off of your clothes in your house, resulting in a new mold colony growth somewhere else.
This also happened to us. We were staying with my in-laws as my husband cleaned our house. Mold spores transferred from my husbands clothing to his pickup as he drove from our house to theirs and a new colony of black mold began growing in his pickup. We had to get a new vehicle.
The bible addresses how to clean mold in Leviticus 14:33-45. The biblical solution: remove everything from the house, remove all contaminated stones, scrape the remainder of the walls and re-plaster. If the mold is an active spreading colony….tear the house down.
Update: We found mold in our second house. Read what we did differently on the post "If I could do it again."
Read for yourself Leviticus 14:33-45:
33 The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, 34 “When you enter the land of Canaan, which I am giving you as your possession, and I put a spreading mold in a house in that land, 35 the owner of the house must go and tell the priest, ‘I have seen something that looks like a defiling mold in my house.’ 36 The priest is to order the house to be emptied before he goes in to examine the mold, so that nothing in the house will be pronounced unclean. After this the priest is to go in and inspect the house. 37 He is to examine the mold on the walls, and if it has greenish or reddish depressions that appear to be deeper than the surface of the wall, 38 the priest shall go out the doorway of the house and close it up for seven days. 39 On the seventh day the priest shall return to inspect the house. If the mold has spread on the walls, 40 he is to order that the contaminated stones be torn out and thrown into an unclean place outside the town. 41 He must have all the inside walls of the house scraped and the material that is scraped off dumped into an unclean place outside the town. 42 Then they are to take other stones to replace these and take new clay and plaster the house. 44 the priest is to go and examine it and, if the mold has spread in the house, it is a persistent defiling mold; the house is unclean. 45 It must be torn down—its stones, timbers and all the plaster and taken out of the town to an unclean place. Leviticus 14:33-45 New International Version.
Editors Note: See Disclaimer
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