Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with cleaning and mold

Help! My shower is growing things!

bluloo — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:23:55 -0800

How do I a) get rid of this mold in my shower and b) prevent it from coming back? I'm a college student, and this is the first apartment I've lived in on my own, and thus have no idea what the best course of action is. I should preface this question by saying that we are pretty bad about keeping up with the cleaning throughout the apartment, but especially the bathroom... although until now mold hasn't been an issue in our bathroom.

I share a bathroom with one of my roommates, and I subleased my room to someone for the summer. When I got back last week, I found a lovely ring of mold around our shower. The shower is one of those cheap vinyl shower/tub combos, and the mold has sprouted in a line where the shower wall meets the tub, along the caulking. I know that my other roommate (who has her own bathroom in the master suite) has had a lot of problems with mold. The landlord has come by twice or so in the year that we've lived here and recaulked with supposedly anti-mold caulking. (And, if it matters, we are the first people to live in this newly constructed house). I just finished cleaning the shower with Tilex Mold Root remover, but all I succeeded in doing was stripping the caulk down a layer in a few spots. What should I do/what products should I use to eradicate the mold? What preventative steps should we take to keep it at bay?

How to kill bugs and mold?

b_thinky — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:34:43 -0800

How can I eliminate and prevent mold and mosquitoes from my apartment? The lowdown: I recently relocated to Macau, which is hot, muggy and prone to mold. Mold grows on the walls and floors, on clothes in the closets, and on food, sometimes almost instantly.

I seem to be allergic to the mold. Sometimes my athsma is so bad I can't sleep, even if I use aaaaaaallllll my medicines at once. A few nights ago I woke up and my cheek was numb and pulsating. I went to the mirror and noticed a gigantic bug bite lookin' thing on my face. I was afraid I'd been bitten by something weird, but the bump went down a few hours later. I went to a doctor the next day, who said the bump had some kind of medical name and was related to skin allergy, and that they appear on the body more often than the face. A couple days later I had one on my shoulder, and then on my chest.

Recently there appear to be more flies and mosquitoes in the house, which was never a problem until just the other day. I have no idea what caused the outbreak. My body is covered in marks, but I can't tell if they are bites or skin allergy thingies.

I know mold and mosquitoes love warm, damp, humid environments. We try to leave all the ACs on (only wall ACs, we don't have central air) and vent the apartment as best as possible. I got some dehumidifiers and an air purifier. But there are problems with the setup of this house.

The kitchen is tiny and doubles as the laundry room. There is no AC in there and any time you do anything in the kitchen it gets really hot. Opening the windows in the kitchen just lets bugs and humidity in. Closing windows and opening the door to the rest of the house just exposes the rest of the house to the heat/humidity - the layout doesn't allow the kitchen to properly vent.

The bathrooms are also pretty small and have no climate control. It obviously gets hot and humid whenever you take a shower, and it's pretty damp when you're done. Do I open the doors and expose the rest of the house to this heat and humidity? Or do I seal it off and let the bathrooms fester?

I think the situation is controllable, but being a rookie in these environs I let it get out of control. We're now trying to get a handle on the situation...

Drippy, icky bathroom fun!

fillsthepews — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:31:26 -0800

Mold and bleach? How much to kill it, but not me? (And I guess not my roommate, too.) I've got some seriously moldy bathroom walls. This is a rental home, and I'm looking quite forward to moving out of it in the fall.

I'm looking for an easy, inexpensive solution to getting the mold off. Past askmetafilter questions say to wash the walls with bleach (straight?) or a bleach solution. Well... color me ignorant, but is it safe to simply spray the walls w/ bleach? If I need to make a solution, is there a standard bleach/water recipe?

Basically, this bathroom hardly ever dries. So, if the wall hardly ever dries, I have concerns about the walls being bleach and stinky the next time I take a shower after I clean it - possibly to an unhealthy, annoying level. Not to mention brushing against the wall with fabric and ruining it.

Am I being paranoid? I feel like a total cleaning n00b.

Help for killing a mildew odor that I can't smell myself

The Giant Squid — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 21:14:14 -0800

How do I kill a mildew smell -behind- a sink? My wife can apparently smell mildew coming from the vicinity of our kitchen sink. I can't, so I chock this up to the her pregnancy-induced super-sense-of-smell. We have this sort of bizarre set up, where I ask her if she can smell it, and where she can smell it.

Anyways, the kitchen sink apparently -did- have a leak underneath it, some time ago, although that has been fixed (months and months ago).

There remains a small possibility of some leakage within the wall behind it, but there are no telltale signs, aside from my wife smelling the mildew.

So, assuming there is no further leakage (which would mean ripping the cabinets out of the wall), what can I do to kill the mildew smell?

Why does our kitchen sponge smell like mildew after less than a week?

ezrainch — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 21:10:38 -0800

Our kitchen sponge starts to smell like mildew after less than a week of normal use. We use a standard "scrubby" sponge that has an abrasive side and an absorbent sponge side. Has anybody else experienced this problem, and if so, what did you do about it, or do you have any general advice about keeping sponges from mildewing quickly? Both my wife and I make a point of always wringing the extra water out after each use, and store the sponge on the edge of our stainless steel sink. We never had this problem before we moved to our current home; sponges would generally take a month or more to get nasty in all our previous residences. We can't figure out what could be causing this premature bacteria growth! Our water (chlorinated municipal water supply!)? Mold spores floating through our house? (We do live in the Pacific Northwest, but keep our house well heated and don't otherwise have a mold problem.)

We've considered keeping the sponge in a dish of dilute bleach water between uses, but would prefer to not have a ubiquitous bleach presence in the kitchen. We've also tried several different brands of sponge, and only use the sponge for washing dishes and wiping the counters down.

Mold in Microwave

Anonymous — Wed, 02 May 2007 22:06:17 -0800

I just found some mold growing in the corner of my microwave. I'm not a very dirty person so I was quite surprised to see some dark-dark-grey mold growing inside my microwave after I heated up a snack. I'm a little grossed out by it, too, but I quickly cleaned it up as best I could.

My questions:

1. I cleaned it out with 409 because I wasn't sure if bleach was safe for a microwave's interior. Now that I think about it, I wonder if using any chemical inside a microwave is a bad idea. I re-wiped everything with a water-soaked towel, but should I be worrying about fumes or residue that I missed? I'm leaving the door open for now but I don't know how long I really need to do that. I usually just wipe my microwave down with a damp towel...when I clean it, that is. It's obviously been a while since I last cleaned it, and I'm a little embarassed that I only NOW just noticed the mold. :(

2. The mold looked like it had been there for a while (ugh), but I've been microwaving food quite often and eating it and I seem to be fine. So far. But I'm curious now...how hazardous is it to microwave food in an oven that has mold in it? Does microwaving the mold make it grow an extra eye or otherwise mutate into something dangerous? Could the spores have flown around and settled on my food while it cooked? (Or could the microwaves have actually killed the mold? I don't really know much about mold's resilience...)

3. I still see some dark stuff in the crevice where two of the microwave's walls meet. I don't think I'll be able to clean it out. If there is still a trace of mold left in there, and if my concerns in question 2 are legit, do I need to worry about this small bit re-growing? I will replace the microwave in a heartbeat if this mold situation poses a threat to my health, but money is tight right now and if I can safely continue to use this microwave, I will.

Mamma Mia! Massive Mold! Mediation Mandated!

pjern — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 20:24:49 -0800

How to best mitigate a *severe* mold/mildew problem? We had a bit of a rot problem on the eaves, but that has been repaired (we had a new roof put on this summer due to hailstorm damage). We started smelling a mildewed odor in the office near where the roof had been repaired, and it eventually got strong enough that I started investigating. Last night I pulled down the bookcases that I had sort of "built-in" to the wall in that area, and found the entire area behind the bookcases completely black with mold and/or mildew... about 60 square feet of it. I suspect I'll have to replace the entire wall and ceiling in that area, but what should I do immediately to mitigate? I started by spraying it with Clorox cleaner to get some bleachish stuff on it, but I'm wondering if I should evacuate the house and call in a napalm strike or something. It's really bad. What would be your immediate action?

Factors to consider: One 5 year old, four adults and two cats live here. The area can be closed off, although ventilation is problematical due to outdoor winter temps.