mediatechnology wrote: ↑Mon Mar 26, 2018 4:07 pm
Do you have carpet?
I've pulled it up in every home I've owned.
In the slab floor home we had I slept better the first night.
The air freshness difference was amazing.
I removed the carpet from my bathroom that was totally trashed by mold from a leaky toilet... mold likes water. I replaced that carpet with a wood floor a bunch of years ago.
Nothing ever comes out of carpet. Nothing.
Every little bit of silt collects underneath and stays there.
In a 20x20 room with carpet that's been down for 10 years you'll easily get a 5 gallon bucket of dirt from underneath the padding.
I have a beater brush vacuum with a dirt finder LED and it's remarkable how long it takes for the LED to turn green sometimes.
My carpets in the large living area were replaced about 20 years ago when my roof leaked.
I removed the redneck indoor-outdoor carpeted kitchen floor and replaced that with linoleum (vinyl?).
When I got serious about cleaning I literally broke the handle off my old carpet shampooer from fatigue. I replaced it with a serious (better) Bissell big green shampooer that doesn't suck, actually it sucks real good.
I souped it up by blocking 2/3 of the suction intake slit, so it pulls with 3x the suction force of stock and it picks up dirt that much better. In fact it never stops finding dirt,
so after a while I get tired and stop shampooing for the day.
I am inclined to agree, my carpet will never be completely pristine again. In fact I use some anti-bacterial shampoo that keeps it from coming alive and smelling bad from the dampness introduced when shampooing.
My carpet is night and day cleaner now than it was before big green several years ago, but I could keep cleaning it perpetually. My pattern is to spend summer weekends doing yard work, and (cold and dry) winter weekends shampooing. Last winter only allowed a few weekends of serious cleaning so I got the carpets back only to last year's clean level but there is always more to dirt to get up. Of course there's always next winter.
In 2/3 of the home I had hardwoods underneath and they were OK.
In the slab home, until we replaced the floors, we lived on concrete.
Most areas got tile.
We moved before I was able to stain the living room.
Stained concrete can be really pretty.
You're on pier and beam?
I guess.... brick/cinder block foundation... empty crawl space, particle board flooring under carpets.
House is not worth redoing the carpets or floors... I did the wood floor in my bathroom and that one small room was enough of a PIA.
I literally had lung congestion from breathing the mold several years ago...it was bad enough I even had trouble sleeping at one point (noise from me wheezing kept me awake), but now no problemo....
Of course I replaced my bed mattress and cleaned up mold from literally everywhere. Even the insides of my windows were covered with a film of mold. Kind of disgusting (mold loves water so condensation on the single pane glass was hospitable to mold colonization).
Now the low indoor humidity (<50%) and my redneck storm windows fixed that.
JR
PS: I am noticing ozone smell with my new CFL UVc lamp... they claim ozone is only made by shorter wavelength (<200 nM) than than my 250nM UVc lamp, but I don't know how pure that lamp output is so may be making small amounts of ozone... a little ozone is OK. FWIW my old 6W CFL lamps make ozone smell too. Dedicated ozone lamps target 185nM or so. I expect the wavelength has something to do with energizing oxygen molecules to break up O2 and form O3