How a microscopic flaw in the work of air conditioner installers led to three years of mold in an apartment
Our reader shared her story with us.
My husband and I bought a long-awaited apartment in Sochi. The repairs went quite quickly and without any particular difficulties.
After 2 years of living in the summer, mold began to appear on the walls below.
What measures were taken by us:
1. The neighbors' apartment adjacent to the wall was checked.
2. Checked the water pressure at the entrance to the apartment and at the exit.
3. Observations of the state of the open balcony during showers were carried out.
4. Split system drain checked.
On all points, the answer was no, that is not the problem.
What options for the appearance of mold in a practically new apartment can you suggest?
We decided that these were poorly dried walls during the renovation. The walls were covered with non-woven wallpaper and 6 layers of paint (at first the apartment was painted with velvety paint. But there were traces of any touch on it, so they repainted it with paint with a matte effect).
We invited familiar builders, they took off some of the wallpaper where there was mold. We cleaned the walls, treated them with an expensive German product, plastered the walls and painted them again.
For a year the mold did not appear, it seemed that the problem was solved. And in June, traces of this disease began to appear on the walls. We began to think that this is due to the humid Sochi climate, moisture is collected during the autumn-spring months. But in the summer, mold began to grow even faster. Two walls in the living room, plasterboard wall in the bedroom. Moreover, the laminate next to the balcony began to disperse.
Happy ending to this story.
We are back to the split system. It was installed beautifully, visually no pipes and hoses. The drain of the indoor unit went along the wall and out into the hole in the balcony floor. The drain pipe itself went through the hole into a common drain pipe.
When we removed the protective grill, the following picture appeared to us:
- The pipe from the air conditioner entered the drain pipe through a hole made by the craftsmen. But this hole in diameter was 0.5-1 cm larger than the tube. And the tube itself entered, though at an angle, but still only a few millimeters into this hole.
- The craftsmen did not seal the resulting gap with a sealant.
- We turned on the air conditioner, after 30 minutes water dripped through the tube into the common drain.
- But after an hour of work at hot temperatures, the water did not just drip, but began to pour. And with such a flow, the water did not have time to drain into the pipe, but began to pour out through the gap, in contact directly with the concrete floor cushion. Water was absorbed into this concrete and sucked into the walls and floor.
- We live in Sochi, so the air conditioner worked almost continuously in summer. Several liters of condensate could leak out per day. Hence the formation of mold in the summer. We flooded ourselves.
As you can imagine, we had to re-do the repairs: we removed the wallpaper from two walls to the end, dismantled and installed a new drywall wall, because this time the drywall is rotten through and through, bought and installed new skirting boards, bought paint (only the paint cost us 8,000 rubles), repainted half of the apartment, since the color of the paint was slightly different from the original. This renovation cost us a lot, and we have not yet begun to renovate the laminate in the living room.
We brought the condensate drain directly into the general drain pipe. Ugly, but safe.
The problem of 3 years old mold and triple repair was only one unsealed centimeter.
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