How to clean moldy wood?

What's a protocol for cleaning wood in a home that's moldy? What do you do when there's framing or trusses or sheeting that you just, you need to deal with it all and maybe you can't remove it. So obviously mold remediation, the number one step is removal, right? Removing the mold, removing the affected material, if you can. Why? Because wood is semi permeable. The hyphae, which is like the roots of the mold, literally go into the wood. So if, and this is why we don't use bleach. If you just bleach something off, the color is gone, but you're leaving behind water. You're feeding the roots and they can start growth again. So if you can, the preferred option is to always remove the affected material. But sometimes you can't. I get it. I mean, not everyone can take the roof off their house if their trusses have mold growing on them. If they're in the basement and they see the floor joists have mold growing on them, you can't rip floor joists out easily. So what do you do? What are your options when you need to treat the lumber in your home that can't be removed? After removing and replacing everything that can, for example, like subfloor, you got a big problem on a floor. You can cut out whatever subfloor needs replaced and lay new sheets of plywood or osb. There's. But like I said, there's a lot of times you can't. So what does cleaning wood look like? Well, the good news is there are options, and options are always good. People. We get into trouble when we don't have options. But some of the options you can do. And again, everything should be under containment under proper negative air pressure, blah, blah, blah. I'm just, I'm skipping a lot here just to answer this question here, but your options for cleaning your wood, you can dry, have it dry iced. Okay? That's where a company will come in and use dry ice and repeatedly blast that. You can have something soda blasted. Okay? You're going to clean away all the mold. You can first hepavac it, do whatever, and then you can have it blasted with soda. Okay? And then that all has to be hepavac and cleaned up properly and everything in containment. Like I said, you can do a high hydrogen peroxide, a 12 to 15% hydrogen peroxide scrub, okay? So you're going to spray it down. If it's mold or bacterial, you're going to see it foam a bit. You're going to see a Bubble, you're going to use a coarse, stiff brush and you're going to scrub it and then you're going to do it again. If it's still reacting, you're going to scrub it. And the wood just brightens up and looks like new. After that, the staining goes away, the mold goes away. It's a good way of doing it. Decon 30, it's, it's another good tool that can be used on the wood for cleaning. And I just had someone share with me today that they had a large area wood in their home. They had the whole house gutted and they couldn't scrub everything. And they had used a sprayer. And decon 30 kept it wet for the 10 minutes so that it could saturate in. And then they came behind and sprayed it with hydrogen peroxide to see if it would bubble or not. And most of the time it was clear. But when there was bubbling, they knew that it still, it needed a second dose. And they went back and applied their decon 30 and kept it wet for 10 minutes and then hydrogen peroxide after until it was clear. And they never had to do that more than twice in problem areas. So that's another cool thing there that I learned just today. Also, it can be sanded. When you have areas that are in spots that you can't get in with or you can't don't have the budget to bring in like big equipment and have it soda blasted or dry iced, they can be sanded. You know, sanding with a coarse sandpaper is a good option because you just want to chew that, you know, top layer of wood off that has the hyphae in it because you don't want those roots to be left behind. What else do we have? Scraping? People scrape it as well. Sanding, we talk about hydrogen peroxide, decon 30, dry icing, soda blasting. That's a bunch of the ways, guys. I'm sure you can find an option out of all those, but it's just about picking one, knowing it's what it can do, what it can't do. Having everything under containment, protecting yourself, ppe, like I said, negative air pressure and going to a window to keep things moving out and cleaning up properly after. The worst thing you can do during remediation is leave stuff behind. Okay? You don't want to produce, you don't want to go to all this effort, all this expense and then just have have to redo it again later. So make sure you understand what you're doing. Make sure your company understands what they're doing. Make sure and don't be afraid to ask lots of questions. Have them put everything in writing. But if you're doing it yourself, which I don't recommend unless you're very handy, these are some of the options you can consider for yourself, too. All right, guys, hope that helps.

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