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So we’re going to talk about shower mold today, the causes and remedies, what’s the deal with shower mold?
David: Well, I’d like to talk about shower mold and I hope you’re ready to see some photos of said mold, Mark. It’s kind of a common problem we have in homes especially you don’t have to have a flood or a leak to get shower mold, you just have to have a shower. So I’ve prepared a couple photos and I’m going to try to screen share again. Hopefully this goes through this time; I’ll ask you to verify if you see it on the screen here. Can you see that?
Mark: There it is.
David: O.K., excellent, so that’s our cover page. So shower mold. I want to look at some of the myths about it and the facts about shower mold and then at the end I’d like to go through what you can do about it to fix the problem. Let’s get right into it. Showers are gross, they’re dirty, there’s a lot of standing water in them and so they’re a perfect breeding ground for mold growth. So here we see a photo of a pretty standard, tile shower. Obviously this one’s had a significant amount of water leakage over the pan, you can see in the foreground there, couple tiles have been removed and you can see that there’s nothing left of the backing board at all. What we have here is a moldy shower. Now I’m going to differentiate between the shower mold that you can see and the shower mold that you can’t see. If you’re looking at the surface of the shower, you’re standing in the shower and you’re looking down and you see black you’re probably looking at surface growth of mold and it’s taking root in porous surfaces so one of the things about mold is that it like to set up in porous surfaces, it really likes organic material, it really likes drywall, it really likes anything it can bite into and take root. So here in this case we see it around the bottom edge and it’s probably because we’ve got some silicon, there’s silicon caulking right around bottom edge of the pan and the mold has taken root in there. We’ve even got some black fuzzy stuff on the left hand side so this is obviously a pretty significant problem. In this case the shower was actually being torn out and rebuilt due to the moisture problems. But if you have a fairly standard shower, it’s not uncommon to get this kind of growth and it’s not necessarily a reason to panic.
So we’re looking at the edge of the shower here. We can see that the caulking has started to peel up and we’ve got some growth occurring at the edge, the inside corner, so the first thing we can do to make sure we don’t get shower mold growth is to scrub it down and dry it out after you shower. Sometimes you’ll see a squeegee or one of those windshield wiper blades inside the shower where you can wipe it down afterwards. The dryer you can keep the shower the less chance you have of growing mold in it. Second thing you can do is you should be resealing your showe
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