How can you prevent mold with no heating?
I tried to heat as little as possible, leaving rooms without heating, and I already can go around hunting down mold on the walls
Reducing humidity might help. Depending on your home climate control it may have a humidity setting to lower, or you could get a dehumidifier.
Check for airflow around the frame of windows inside. Caulking/spray insulation behind the moulding to fill gaps left between window and wall during last installation will help both mold and CC inefficiency issues.
Yeah, dehumidifier is on my shopping list.
Sadly my climate control isn’t that fancy. I can only activate the fan of a electrical buffered heater (heats up over night with cheaper tariffs and stores the heat in some stones, which gets “accessed” when a fan is activated, when the room temperature drops under a set temperature)But as this is our storage room (we didn’t immediately need the room, so it’s just cramped full with stuff…) the air flow surely is a problem.
Will need to clean the room anyway, so I can treat the areas with mold…I have a dehumidifier but it consumes energy, which I think is ultimately going to come from Russia. Belgium is shutting down its nuclear power plants (2, iirc) and replacing them with 3 natural gas burning plants. Not sure about schedule… maybe it already happened.
I didn’t know leaks exacerbated the condensation. I don’t think I have any noticeably big gaps but probably all the seams leak a bit. Maybe I should try to seal off entire windows with plastic film.
I didn’t know leaks exacerbated the condensation.
Drafts are a source of rapid temperature change which encourages condensation.
I have the problem on the inside of exterior walls around the windows, which are usually covered in water. The proprietary anti-fungal sprays work quite well for the cleanup, which I don’t do too often. I’ll just tolerate it until spring.
That’s crazy you guys have to deal with that, in my part of the world it doesn’t get that cold and we never have to worry about mold growing on the walls, dry in the desert most of the time
How can you prevent mold with now heating?
By removing organic material from walls, if possible.
Besides condensation water, the kinds of mold that grow on walls need something organic to feed on. Mold grows on wallpaper because it feeds on the cellulose; in the case of paint, it’s the organic binding agents that do it.
Silicate paint employs mineral binding agents and so mold can’t feed on it. If building a house with “mineral” walls, like bricks or concrete as opposed to wood, using silicate paint may be more expensive upfront but spare trouble in the long run. If renovating a house or apartment with appropriate walls, removing any wallpaper and underlying paint –painstaking as that is– and applying silicate paint should prevent mold growth.
I’m seeing the most mold on the plastic frame of the window. Seems strange that the mold finds food in plastic.
That’s strange indeed. The mold is hopefully not feeding on the window frame, but rather on invisible dirt laying on the surface of the window frame, in which case regular scrubbing (after removing the mold) should keep it from growing again. In any case, I’m sorry you have to deal with that pesky fucker. Mold sucks.
Having said that, plastic eating mold in the wild, damaging as it could become, would be a wonderful discovery.
Plastic is organic. You might be thinking of the food definition ofeorganic not the chemistry definition.
Get an infrared lamp, like the ones used for baby chickens. They’re insanely efficient at heating water (ie: your body), just make sure to not leave it on when you’re not there as they are a fire hazard if not properly secured.
250W in infrared lamp heats a person better than a 1500W electric coil space heater can in a shorter period of time due to direct transfer of energy.
The pipes are what you need to worry about. with theiright coat humans are fine to at least -40 bit the pipes freeze and break at much warmer.
When I’ve got clothes layered on, what could use improvement is cold hands. I’m not going to type with gloves on but your suggestion could be a fix if I could mount a heat lamp above my keyboard but in a way that does not obstruct the screen.
(update) It has been done:
https://www.pcgamer.com/the-envavo-heatbuff-is-an-infra-red-lamp-to-keep-your-fingers-warm-as-you-play/
is there any chance you can get solar + battery?
Maybe. But I hesitate because Brussels does not get much sunlight so I would need many panels. At the same time hail storms are common, which would likely reduce the lifetime of PVs.
there are hail resistant solar panels now and batteries really help capture 100% of the solar output but it can be expensive, if you did it today it would be more of a donation to ukraine via yourself
i did it for climate change, i almost never use grid power anymore and i’m installing a co2 hot water heatpump next month
it looks like much bigger and cheaper solar batteries are coming next year from china which will make getting a battery a nonbrainer
20kw for 6k usd? crazy if true
