need help fast!--wet, moldy carpet

24 years ago

okay, so this disaster didn't exactly occur at home--i'm at work! the air conditioner leaked over the four day weekend, and now my office carpet is soaked. it's short loop institutional carpet over cement (if you fell on it, you'd know there's absolutely no reason to suspect the carpet is padded!).

here's the deal--i work at a university, so i'm lucky they're going to come and do the wet/dry vac thing. what i'm wondering is if i should do something else about the mold, which has already given me a humdinger of a headache. i'm really allergic to mold and pollen and such, so if the wet/dry vac won't get it all out, i'm gonna be one sick puppy. i need to know ASAP if anyone has any ideas about this. the university is usually pretty slow about certain things, but i suspect that they might be here tomorrow or very very soon.

HELP!!! please :)

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Comments (3)

trekaren
24 years ago
I don't think the damage to the carpet can be reversed. Ins. Co. replaced my dad's wet carpet, but they first pulled the wet carpet out, then ran big fans for 3 days. Then they called the installers to put new carpet in. They said that it would end up mildewing the new carpet if the slab wasn't properly dried out. Three days was the minimum time the fans had to be running.
parhelia
Original Author
24 years ago
kudos to your dad for getting them to fix his carpet, but there's no way i'll be that lucky. this has happened to people higher up the food chain than me, and they just tell you to put a fan on it.

is there anything i could spray on the carpet to kill the mildew? this nasty carpet is already discolored from some cleaning stuff the physical plant sprayed, so i don't really care about that. i just don't want to be sick!
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ranchhand
24 years ago
There are products manufactured by different companies used by hospitals and food institutions for antiseptic cleaning, and are known as quaternary antiseptics. Some have detergent added to help their housekeeping staff clean, so you do not want those, just the pure quat antiseptic.
Get a little trigger sprayer and spray this stuff on heavily up to three feet around the damaged area and let it dry. That will be the end of your mildew problems, and it will not harm the carpet. If you have a small home pump-up sprayer that will work, just rinse it out when done.
You can try hospital supply stores, or a pro janitorial supply store. I used to treat water damaged carpeting for years with this stuff, and only had a couple of callbacks for mildew formation in water flooding damage situations.
Do this just before you leave at night, because it is pretty strong stuff and you don't want to sit in the office and breath it all day.