179: Is Your Carpet the Moldy Culprit? What to Do and How to Prevent It!

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio Foreign.

Hey, everyone, what's going on today? We are talking about carpets question that came in from our email community that wanted to get talked about on a podcast, and it's happening today on the podcast. So, uh, if you're not in our email community, if you're not part of that, you can go join that and then you can submit questions when we send out emails asking for topics. Uh, so it's yes, weinspect.com join if you go there. You can get into our. Into our community and we will email you topic suggestions or questions for topic suggestions. Anyways, um, so the question today is, does carpet create mold growth? It's a good question. Most homes have carpet. Most apartments have carpet to some extent. And so, you know, a lot of times we hear like, you got to get rid of all your carpet. And I think that there's a misunderstanding of the role that carpet plays generally and what's going on in the space. So I'm going to kind of hit it from two sides. I'm going to answer the question hard first. Right. So can carpet create mold growth? Yes, it can. I mean, it's not creating it. The water's creating it. Right. So I mean, to be technical, moisture is creating mold growth. But what happens with carpet is it's a barrier that is on your floor. Right. And anything that stops water from moving and traps it, that area now becomes a place where mold can grow. So I'm going to give you a couple examples of how carpeting can create issues in homes. Um, I have carpeting in my entire upstairs of my home. I'll tell you why it's in the upstairs and not in the downstairs and what the issue is there. Um, and it'll make sense after I explain this. So here we go. So the way that I've seen carpeting create problems is mainly one of two ways when it comes to mold growing, you know, under carpet. Basically. The first is water coming in from exterior walls, from the ground outside. So generally, this is downstairs that you'll see this happen. And what happens is there's some sort of drainage problem on the outside of your house. Let's say you have a gutter that's releasing water right next to your wall, and it's not moving in a way. Or you have a sprinkler that's constantly spraying against your wall. Right. Or something like that. What happens is moisture will start working its way through that wall, and then it starts getting on, like, through the wall, and it starts going under the carpet. And a lot of times, what we'll see when we're doing inspections is that we will pull carpet back from an exterior wall, and we'll see that there's mold on kind of the attachment of the carpet down there. It's generally. It's called a carpet tack. It's generally like a wood strip, and there's nails coming up from it, and then the carpet goes on top of the nails, and that's how it stays there. So it's called carpet tacks. So generally, you'll see mold growing on the wood, and then if you look at the carpet that was against it, you'll see mold growing on the bottom of the carpet. Now, if the floor is wooden subfloor and it's not concrete, Right. So if your house is not on a sl. Right. And let's say that it's on a lifted foundation or something where you have plywood subfloors, then that water damage is not just impacting where that little wood strip of carpet tack is, which is maybe, I don't know, like an inch wide or three quarters of an inch wide or something like that, but it's actually getting into all the subfloor and soaking into all the subfloor below the carpeting that's down there. And because the carpet is sitting on top of it, you're now trapping more moisture down there. You end up getting mold issues on and within your subfloor as well. Okay. And then what happens is, as you walk around on your floor, you're creating a disturbance all the time, and you're basically pounding on it as you walk around, and that aerosolizes it, and it gets it up into your breathing zone, and there's your exposure path. Right. So with carpeting, I never, ever want carpeting downstairs to prevent that type of thing from happening. Right. Because it hides it, too. Like, you can't see it. If instead of carpeting downstairs, you had, you know, some sort of wood floor, engineered wood, whatever, you know, then you'd be able to see that when. When you're looking in the room, and you would be able to be aware of what's going on. So with that in mind, let's say you're looking for an apartment, right? Then ideally, I don't want to be on the bottom floor of the apartment building if there's carpeting in the house anywhere, because I'll have the ability for what I just described to happen in my apartment, right? But if I was on the second floor, you're not going to get water penetrating in from the outside as the result of drainage problems. The sprinklers against your wall because you're up a floor, right? It's not going to happen. And so having carpeting up on a second floor is much less of a concern than it is on the first floor in terms of mold growing under the carpet. Now listen, if your window has a leak and there's water coming down, then sure, mold can get under there. But the problem isn't the carpet. The problem is the window and the wall and kind of all of it, right? So yeah, it's possible. But your probability goes down so much if your carpeting is on the second floor of your house, right? So like I said, in my house, my entire first floor is non carpeted. It's hard floor. And then my second floor has carpeting partially because I rent, right? And so I couldn't make it all wood flooring if I wanted to. I had to deal with it. And I was like, you know what? I don't. There's not issues in this house, really, everyone's doing fine. The bottom floor doesn't have carpeting. And you know, sometimes you make the best of what you got, right? And so it's, it's not the end of the world if you have carpeting in your house. There's just ideal places where you don't want carpeting, right? So for example, you don't want carpeting in your basement either because that's, that is downstairs and you're still on exterior walls. But what happens in a lower level is if water hits the, the, the ground up above on your main level, well, gravity is going to bring that water down and it can now penetrate through your basement walls. Right? That's why being above it is okay, but being below it, you don't want to be. So you don't want to have any carpeting in an ideal situation on your main level or any levels that you have below your main level to reduce the amount of, or to reduce the probability that you can have water come in from the outside. Okay? So that's the first one. Now the second most common way that I see mold issues in carpet is the result of steam cleaning, like the carpet cleaning process. Okay. So a lot of times, y', all people come in, they'll use water, and they'll, you know they're going to steam clean your carpet, right? Well, they're putting moisture through your carpet, and then it gets trapped under your carpet. And under your carpet, you have carpet padding or you have your wood subfloor. You have these other layers under there. And so you're pushing water through that, and then it doesn't dry. Right. A lot of times people will just let it dry naturally. And if you're doing that, then you're really, you know, creating a potential for an issue. I know there's times where they could come through and maybe dry it afterwards. Is it 100% dry after? I would say probably not. Right. So if you do have carpeting, what I would completely avoid is any sort of water or steam cleaning. Like, you don't want to do that on carpeting. Okay.

Vacuuming, you know, that sort of thing. Like, that's fine. Right. You want to. You want to get the dust and everything out of it. Right. You want to get all that particle out as much as you can. You're limited in how much you can get out with carpeting. That's sort of the back end challenge with carpeting, which I'm going to talk about in a second. But the. Yeah. The other big thing is that you don't want the way you clean your carpet to be using water as your. As your source of cleaning, because you're just introducing the moisture, which can then cause mold growth in many areas under your carpet. And again, every time you step on it, mold, you know, you'll. You'll start just dispersing mold. Um, same goes. Like, you don't see it much now, but if you have carpeting in a bathroom or you have carpeting in a kitchen, or you have it near any water appliances, you don't want that either. Right. So you don't want carpet near water sources. Right. Internal water sources or exterior walls that are on your main level or a lower level for that. So that's. That's the can mold cause or, sorry, can carpets cause mold growth Questions. So that's. That's the take there on that. Now, the thing with carpet and why a lot of people say you can't have carpet in a house if you're mold sensitive is not necessarily from what we just talked about. It's more so about what carpet does from a retention perspective of what's floating around in your house. So carpeting is like this big net at the bottom of, of your floor and dust and particles settle into the carpet and they get into the fibers of the carpet, then they get under the carpet, right? And then they get underneath where the pad and the subfloors and all that. I don't know if any of you have ever seen carpeting removed, but when you pull carpeting up, there's all kinds of dirt and dust and all kinds of stuff under there. And it's because it's constantly setting, settling on top of the carpet, and then we're constantly walking on it and pushing it down, and then we're popping it up and pushing it. It's like all this stuff is happening and it retains all this dust and debris and stuff throughout the house. And we know that dust harbors mold spores and mold fragments. So at the end of the day, what happens is carpet can become what I call a secondary source of exposure, meaning that the carpet isn't where the mold grew necessarily. Right. You might have mold in a wall or in a shower area or even in your air conditioning system or wherever it is, and it moves around the house and then it settles in the carpet and the carpet holds it and it kind of soaks into the carpet basically. And there's no way to really get it all out. Right? You can vacuum, you can clean, you can try to get some of it out, but there's always going to be stuff that gets under the carpet. And so from a long term, just general indoor air quality perspective, not only mold, although that's a big piece of what we talk about, but I mean, there's all kinds of stuff. There's semi volatile organic compounds that get anything that floats around, insect fragments, fiberglass, like, like from insulation, anything like that, it gets in the carpet and it gets under it. And so if you have the ability to not have carpet in your house, and you are really wanting to be on top of controlling indoor air quality as best as you can, then the ideal solution would be no carpet in the house. And if you do that, there's way less dust, way less particle floating around, and it's way less that you can breathe. And it's just a generally a better air quality situation inside the house. So if you have the ability to do that, that's great. If you're like me and you're renting and there's carpet, where there's carpet and there's nothing you can do about it, then just try to make sure you're not in a place where there's carpet in the downstairs, if you have the ability to do that. Right? And that's what my situation is. And, you know, we're doing fine, and I'm not ever really concerned about it at all, right? We get our carpets cleaned all the time, but it's just dry cleaning, right? If you will. It's vacuuming. It's, you know, it's all that stuff. And so I'm sure that there's stuff under our carpet up here if we pull it up, and there's really nothing that you can do about it. So we counteract that with air purifiers and filters in every main living space in our house, especially upstairs, too, right? So our upstairs has a loft. It has a bedroom for each kid, it has a bedroom for us, and it has my office. And every single one of those spaces literally in my entire upstairs has an air filter in it. And when you replace them, they are really dirty, right? You can see how much stuff this thing is pulling out of the air when you replace those filters. And it just goes to show you, like, how much moves and floats around when you're in a space that has carpeting like that, okay? So if you're in a space that does have carpeting and you're. It's kind of out of your control, and there's nothing you can do about it, then you can try to offset the particle resuspension and circulation in the air with air filtration devices and try to pull some of those particles out. And just make sure that your carpeting isn't getting wet. If it's getting wet. And guys, I don't freak anyone out, like, if you spill a glass of water, just dry it, right? Like. Like, get your towel on there, soak it up, dry it. If you do a good job drying it, it's not going to create generally a massive mold problem, right? It's more so, you know, mold needs time to grow, right? So if you get it dried out in a. In a good amount of time, you know, immediately, like when you drop something, like, gosh, I have kids. Of course they drop stuff, right? You clean it, you dry it, you get it ready, and then you're good to go. And then downstairs, I have no carpeting. I only have rugs. And when we feel like the rugs are done, we replace them, we get new rugs, and then we don't have to worry about that anymore. So that is. That's the quick. The quick carpet overview. So hopefully, those of you who, if you're looking for a place if you have a place. Hopefully this is helpful for all of you listening. And thanks for the.

For the questions and the ideas of things to talk about. Really appreciate it. Remember, go to yesweinspect.com join get on our email list and you will be able to submit things for or topics I should say for me to talk about in the future. All right, thanks.

So that's it for today's show, everyone.

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