Mould and dehumidifiers!

[winterwonder]

Ok, so i live in a top floor flat, which has a flat roof (doesn't help with keeping the place warm etc) and we only have electric wall heaters as there is no gas running in our building. My problem though is we do suffer from some very mild mould, it is literally behind things like our wardrobe, a little bit by our window, basically a little on all the outside walls but its not the black nasty stuff, and currently is easily controlled with the use of the dehumidifier, and the odd spot treatment ( and we dont get it in the summer its mainly a winter thing). Anyways i am worried about this as i would like the baby in our room when its here and obviously will keep it closer to us and as far from the mould, which i going to treat soon again with some anti mould paint, but will running a dehumidifier cause a problem? Also the room which is going to be the babys room doesnt suffer from mould at all.

sorry for the long post.

 

[gingerwhinger]

Are you renting? I would get on to the landlord if so. If you own then I suppose you just have to make do, I am sure running a dehumidifier isn't a problem.

 

[winterwonder]

We own and we've been trying to sell but at the moment nothings selling. I'm looking into some anti mould/damp paint at the mo.

 

[M0rningview]

When we bought our house last year we were told it has a damp problem which covered all of the rooms. However, we have been able to cure (or at least continue to improve) all of the visible signs in less than 6months.

An external wall that was covered in mould (hidden by the sofa when we viewed the house) we used anti fungus treatment, just paint on with a paint brush, I think it was about £10 from Wickes. Problem has not returned, if the problem is really bad you can keep adding it to the problem area.

There was mould around most of the windows, this was treated with anti fungus dettol you can get at the supermarket, in all but one window has not come back.

We also run a (cheap) de-humidifier in the kitchen to dry out the walls there as running water was left for months (if not years) to penetrate into the walls from outside.

I can't reiterate enough how much all of this has helped and it really didn't cost very much. Maximum £50 to solve it all.

 

[Lara310809]

we have a similar problem, and it's caused by external plaster being missing on the 8th floor (we are ground floor), and it's seeped down to our level. It's only on external ewalls, so we keep our daughter's cot against the inside wall, to keep her as far away from it as possible. We sleep against the external wall, which isn't ideal since I'm pregnant, but I woudl rather it be me than her.

We don't find that a dehumidifier does much TBH, but we don't have any central heating, or any heaters AT ALL, and in the winter the house is regularly around 10c. In the summer it's up to 30c indoors, so we don't have the problem in the summer; only the winter.

In the winter we were using the dehumidifier, but we found that it kicked out cold air at the back and it wans't good with LO crawling around, especially when it was already as cold as 10c; it would have made her colder! so we started using it in rooms where she wasn't. Eg we would put it on in the bedroom during the day, and in the lounge after she'd gone to bed.

We painted the walls with anti-mould paint, and it seemed to do the trick, but the odd patches have started coming through again. It's summer now though too, so it's naturally dried up and we don't get much rain in the summer months, so it's hard to tell whether the paint is working or whether it's just been better during the summer. I expect it to get worse in the winter again

My daughter has been living in with us (only have the one bedroom, and anyway, our entire flat suffers with mould) since she was born 16 months ago, and she hasn't shown any signs of asthma, ill health or anything like that.

 

[xdxxtx]

Due to a bad leak in the bathroom next to it, I just found mold in my baby's room, but it's something that has affected my home in the past (elsewhere), so I knew just how to deal with it. I first get an air purifier running in there, and I have my OH spray it down with loads of bleach-water, let it sit for about 10 minutes, and scrub it off with a cleaning brush and then wipe it clean with a rag. For the baby's room, I figured it would be safer if I found a mold-preventing sealant/primer to spray on the wall/floor where the mold used to be. If the walls are white, you can definitely get away with this, as the spray will come out as white. If you're planning on painting in there anyway, you can spray this on the wall, let it dry, and then paint over it.

 

[winterwonder]

Thank you all for the tips, i've just popped to b n q and picked up some anti mold paint and on my days off next week (weather permitting) i will go mad cleaning and painting everything!