How to Remove Black Mold from Carpet​

Finding that scary, dark, fuzzy patch on your floor might feel like a homeowner’s worst nightmare, and honestly, it kind of is because it looks terrible and can make your family or pets feel sick if you don’t act fast. Understanding exactly how to remove black mold from carpet is one of those things you hope you never have to do, but when the time comes, you need to be ready to get your hands a little dirty to keep your indoor air quality from tanking.

In this detailed guide, we are going to walk through all the messy steps, the safety stuff you shouldn’t skip, and the best ways to do some home cleaning that actually works to get your floors back to normal.

How to Get Rid of Mold in Your Carpets?

Mold spores are pretty much everywhere, think of them like tiny, invisible hitchhikers just waiting for a chance to move in. They don’t really cause trouble until they find a spot that’s damp, dark, and warm enough for them to hunker down and start growing.

Before you grab your scrub brush, you need to know what you’re actually dealing with, because a common thing to know about is the difference between white and black mold all the time. To put it simply: white mold is usually that powdery, stringy stuff that shows up early on. On the other hand, the “famous” black mold or Stachybotrys chartarum if you want to be fancy is darker, looks kind of slimy or wet, and is usually a red flag that there’s a serious water problem you might have missed for a while.

It doesn’t really matter what color it is. If you see something growing in your carpet, you’ve got to make it a priority and deal with it right away before it spreads.

Preparation & Safety

Before you start worrying about how to get mold out of carpet, you have to make sure you aren’t breathing in all that junk because when you touch mold, it sends spores flying everywhere.

• Protective Equipment: Wear N95 respirator to avoid spore inhalation, thick rubber gloves to avoid skin contact and safety goggles to protect your eyes.
• Ventilation: Open up the available windows and doors. Install a fan to move the air out of the room to avoid the circulation of spores to the other parts of the house.
• Isolation of Area: In a case where feasible, isolate the affected part by using plastic sheeting taped up around doorways to ensure that the spores cannot infect the rest of the house in the course of the cleaning operation.

DIY Cleaning Steps: How to Get Mold Out of Carpet Naturally

If the moldy spot is small, like less than ten square feet or about the size of a small rug, you can usually take care of it yourself with stuff you already have in the kitchen. A lot of people really want to know how to get mold out of carpet naturally because they don’t want their whole house smelling like a chemistry lab or harsh bleach.

Step 1: Dry the Area

Since mold’s best friend is water, you have to take away its favorite thing by using a wet/dry vacuum to suck up any moisture that is still there. Dont use your regular vacuum, get a new one, so that it just does not suck the mold in and blow it right back out the exhaust, spreading the problem to every room in your house.

Step 2: Use Natural Killers

White vinegar and baking soda are secret natural killers of mould. People always ask “Does baking soda kill mold?” and the answer is actually yes, because it is a mild disinfectant that dries the mold out while it eats up the moisture.

• The Vinegar Soak: Get a spray bottle, fill it with straight white vinegar (don’t add water!), and soak that moldy patch until it’s good and wet, then let it sit there for at least an hour to do its thing.
• The Baking Soda Scrub: After the hour is up, sprinkle a ton of baking soda over the wet vinegar so it starts fizzing up like a science project, then take a stiff brush and scrub it deep into the carpet fibers.

Step 3: The Cleaning Process

Once you have finished scrubbing, you have to be patient and let the whole thing dry out completely, which might take a while. When it is totally dry, use a vacuum with a HEPA filter to suck up all the dried-up baking soda and dead mold, and if it still looks a little gross, just do the whole thing one more time.

How to Get Mold Smell Out of Carpet

Even when the mold is physically removed and the carpet seems clean, the strange, musty, old-basement scent even tends to linger. The last thing that you will need to do to make your house feel clean is figuring out how to remove the smell of mold on carpet.

• Baking Soda Treatment: Add another layer of dry baking soda to the area and simply leave it there overnight since it is excellent in extracting the smell off of the air and the garment.
• Essential Oils: It is possible to combine several drops of tea tree oil with a drop of water and spray it on the area, which is also excellent, as tea tree oil is counterfighting fungus in nature and much more enjoyable to smell than vinegar.

Post-Cleaning & Prevention

It is one thing to clean up mess but it is not the whole task since you do not want to be the one to repeat it again in two weeks.

• Check the Humidity: This means that you should aim at maintaining the humidity in the house to a level lower than 50 per cent with the help of a dehumidifier, particularly in the basement or during rainy seasons.
• Airflow: Do not push your large heavy sofa completely near the wall when it feels wet since you need the air to circulate there to avoid the development of a mold in the dark.
• Professional Help: Sometimes you just need a deep clean, so looking into professional Home Cleaning Services in Redwood City, CA can help make sure there aren’t hidden spores waiting to jump back to life.

When to Call a Professional

Sometimes, a DIY job just isn’t enough, and you have to know when to give up and call in the pros for some serious Home Cleaning. You should definitely call someone if:

• The moldy patch is bigger than three feet by three feet, which is way too much for a spray bottle.
• The water that caused the mold was “black water,” like from a backed-up sewer or a flood, because that stuff is full of bacteria that vinegar can’t handle.
• Anyone in your house has bad asthma or allergies, because it’s just not worth the risk of them getting sick.

Professionals have the big industrial machines and special antimicrobial chemicals that can soak down through the carpet and actually clean the wooden subfloor underneath, which is where the mold usually likes to hide.

FAQs

What cleaners kill black mold on carpet?

Although vinegar and baking soda are the most natural options, you may also apply some special antifungal sprays that you purchase in the store, or even some combination of rubbing alcohol and water. All you have to do is to apply it to a small patch of the carpet first to ensure that it does not turn the color or bleach the fibers, and then you can proceed with another issue altogether.

What causes mold in general besides moisture?

The big one is water, but mold will not grow without food, and in your home, food is dust, or dead skin cells, or even just the crumbs of food that work into a ball deep in your carpet. When you have those and some stagnant air and a warm temperature you have very likely created a five-star hotel on which mold thrives.

What’s the difference between white and black mold?

It all depends on the species of fungus and the length of its growth there; white mold is normally detected early and has something of the appearance of spilled flour whereas black mold is often an indication of a more profound, long term water problem that has been wetting your floors a long time.

If you are tired of fighting the dampness on your own, reach out to the experts for the best Home Cleaning Services in Redwood City, CA and let us handle the hard work for you!