Comment by notslow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notslow | Hacker News Reader

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> Afaik mold is only a big topic because of lawyers seeing a nice liability and the media a spooky story.

Unfortunately, mold is also a growing health concern for a sizable portion of the population. My family got severely ill from a moldy house, and it is taking us years to fully recover. The longer we have been aware the more and more folks we find are dealing with something similar.

The EPA Guide is a great start, but in our experience lacks some situational nuance that might increase its helpfulness. Each person reacts differently mold, some folks are just more sensitive than others. There are no federal standards for mold, either for allowable amounts in your home or guidelines for construction. So depending on your health response you may in fact need to go crazy tearing apart your house to hunt for mold.

After talking with ~30 different mold remediators, inspectors, remodeling contractors, etc. We got ~30 different responses for possible causes for mold in our our home. Ultimately, the cost to fix the true sources of mold in our home (due the sources being related to construction practices around the foundation) was equivalent to new construction. We ended up tearing down the moldy house. We're hoping to move into our new house late next spring!

I have a similar story, but in our case it was a rental house in the Bay Area. It's been 3 years and who knows how many temporary places to live, and we're still not even close to recovery.

We ended up with the realization that the rental housing stock in the Bay Area are all very old, usually not well maintained and depending on the area, very likely to have or have had water damage, the only thing we could do to get into newly built housing, was to rent an apartment.

The amount of bad information and advise is pretty staggering – if you're adversely reacting to the environment you're in, the best thing you can do is remove yourself from it, then accept that you may never be able to return to it.

Anyway, this all sounds very familiar and you're welcome to reach out to me at <hn-name>@icloud.com – and that goes for anyone else dealing with similar stuff.

If you're living in a house without active water issues (roof leak, foundation leak, etc), proper filtration/ventilation/de-humidification, and are still having reactions to mold; it's probably best to just move (like you found out). No need to tear apart the current house.

If you need supreme indoor air quality, that'd take the following:

- A fairly air tight building envelope - Proper WRB and insulation strategy (exterior+interior in many places) for your climate (including basement) to prevent condensation - Adequate continuous ventilation/filtration

Which is not feasible for most housing stock in the USA. You might be able to keep the framing, plumping/electrical, and foundation (if you're lucky). Framing is relatively cheap compared to the rest of the house.

What kind of issues did you have with the foundation?

There’s many individual damage symptoms, but typically humidity somehow enters through the walls of the basement, making them damp/wet and thereby leading to mould infestation.

The expensive but thorough solution is to dig around the foundation and install a vertical damp-proof course around the outside walls. The walls would additionally require drying and depending on building material removing the old plaster and re-plastering.

If a concrete floor is damp, the culprit would be a crack which can be sealed with special injected sealants. If it’s an older type of floor, it may need to be replaced with concrete.

How did the basement infest the rest of the house, just regular air transfer or did humidity rise through the walls and caused infestation in the above-ground rooms?

Some people charge insane prices. I can't believe a foundation issue would cost as much as new construction. It's not that hard to put in a French drain, even if the house needs to be cribbed up due to structural issues.

I know, seems crazy from the outside looking in, but nothing was particularly outrageously priced (and we did get several estimates from all sorts of people). To be fair, it wasn't just the foundation. Because of the mold in the basement the rest of the house also became contaminated and needed to be remediated (and my family is now super sensitive). I will also note that this during COVID so prices were somewhat higher than they are now. Believe me we did not set out to tear down our house, but that ended up being the best way to address the issues with the old house.

How did the rest of the house become contaminated? It would need moisture. Did it not have HVAC?

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