5 min read
Mold remediation in Chicago North Shore, or any other area, is crucial for many reasons.
Since mold exists to decompose natural materials, it can destroy your home’s wood surfaces and other building materials if left unchecked. It can also cause serious health issues like respiratory problems, headaches, and eye, nose, or throat irritation. Children, seniors, and those with existing conditions are also at risk of having severe reactions to mold.
Lastly, most homeowners insurance plans consider microbial growth as a home maintenance issue like insect infestation, so they exclude mold infestation from their coverage.
With that said, how can you prevent mold from entering and taking hold of your property?
Before we move on to some practical tips for preventing mold, it helps to understand how mold grows and multiplies in the first place.
How Does Mold Grow?
Mold is an airborne spore that requires three things to grow: moisture, food source, and oxygen. Unfortunately, since these can all be found inside your home, mold can survive and thrive anywhere, whether it be your carpet, wallpaper, upholstery, ceiling tiles, clothing, or even insulation and drywall.
It’s also worth noting that daily activities like taking hot showers, cooking with uncovered pots, using humidifiers, and drying clothes indoors create excess moisture that further promotes microbial growth.
Mold will always grow where moisture and humidity are present, so managing these factors inside your home is a fundamental step toward mold prevention.
Practical Tips for Preventing Mold
Monitor Indoor Humidity
Keeping the humidity level inside your home no higher than 50% is among the most effective ways to prevent mold growth. An air conditioner or dehumidifier can help you do this, while a hygrometer or humidity gauge can accurately measure the moisture inside your house.
Natural signs like condensation on windows, pipes, and walls can also indicate high humidity, so watching out for these and immediately drying affected surfaces helps prevent mold.
Ventilate Your Home
Ensuring the air in your home flows freely is another way to keep molds away. This entails installing and using exhaust fans venting outside your home in your kitchen, bathroom, attic, and crawl spaces.
If you do not have fans in these rooms, opening a window while you cook or shower and covering pots when cooking are simple yet effective ways to avoid excess moisture indoors.
Watch Out for Leaks
Even the most insignificant plumbing leak can cause dampness in hidden or dark spots in your home, ultimately facilitating microbial growth.
To save yourself from the shock of discovering a mold infestation a little too late, it’s best to watch out for and fix leaks regularly. Common areas worth checking are the spaces around your washing machine and dishwasher, under your sinks, and behind toilets.
Regularly replacing hoses, pipes, and fittings to major appliances like dishwashers, water heaters, and kitchen and bathroom sinks also aids in mold prevention. Keeping these in good condition helps minimize the risks of experiencing stressful plumbing emergencies and their accompanying water damage.
Maintain Your Bathroom Regularly
Your bathrooms are another space you want to focus on, mainly because they’re among the best breeding grounds for mold.
Fortunately, preventing mold in these often damp and dark areas isn’t rock science. You can keep spores from propagating in your bathroom by:
- Spread towels out after every use so they dry quickly.
- Wiping down the shower with a clean towel at the end of the day.
- Using shower curtains that dry easily.
- Cleaning the room with mold-killing products regularly.
Dust Your Bookshelf
Letting dust and dirt rest on your books, magazines, and newspapers is a recipe for disaster, as this makes for an excellent food source for mold. To prevent microbial growth from affecting your valued reading materials, it’s a good idea to clean your bookshelf regularly. Dusting your books and the shelves they were sitting on can help you preserve your collection and prevent microbial growth, even before it starts.
Remove Water-Damaged Items Right Away
If you recently experienced flooding or a major plumbing emergency, you may have to let go of certain affected items to keep mold from propagating inside your home. For example, soaked carpets, mattresses, and upholstery that are beyond cleaning and drying have to be discarded right away. Food, paper, clothing, or other items with moldy residue must be bagged and disposed of to prevent further contamination.
Some water-damaged items may still be saved, but you will need professional mold remediation in Chicago North Shore to get the job done right. Experts in mold cleaning know how to safely and effectively remove mold from your prized possessions.
Since Chicago experiences a hot-summer humid continental climate, it’s best to always be on your guard when protecting your home from mold. On that note, prevention is always better than cure. Following the practical tips listed above can go a long way in preventing mold from wreaking havoc inside your property.
If all else fails, know that Restoration 1 is always here to provide you with swift, effective, and transparent mold remediation in Chicago North Shore. Our IICRC-certified specialists are trained to deal with mold, address the moisture problem, and restore your home to a mold-free environment. Contact us to get expert help today!
