Hello,
I have taken a plastic cover off the bottom of my shower (under the tray) and it looks like water has been seeping in via cracks between the tiles and running down. This has caused damp, mold, swollen wood etc.
What is the best way to treat this? Obviously I can attempt to fix the crack in the tiles, but what about drying out the woodl and plasterboard, and getting rid of the mold? Any suggestions?
Thanks
Does it need repairing -- is it damaging anything structural or normally visible? If not, fix the leak and leave the cover off so everything can dry out for a few weeks. Refit with ventilation so if it happens again, small amounts of moisture can escape.
Oh -- I should have asked what the mold looks like. If it's dryrot, you should remove the infected wood.
The skirting board in the room on the other side of the wall is swollen, and the carpet is suffer a little around the edge. Nothing major though.
Thanks. I have a fan heater. Is it OK to use this? I am just not too sure about warm air on mold? I suppose as long as it is drying out that is the main thing?
Not sure. There is a mixture of white mold (like icing sugar) and black mold. Well, I presume they are both molds...
Doh! Just had another look (after checking what dry rot is) and it looks like I have a little. Only a few strands so with any luck it won't be too much of a nightmare to repair..
Dry rot mold looks like white cotten wool, sometimes with a brown area in the centre, and sometimes with a brown dust spread some way from the mold (spores, which the mold pings out). However, there's often no mold at all, or it can die away, and the rot still be present and active. It's like a plant or creeper, but instead of soil, it roots itself in wood. It breaks down the wood to feed itself, making the wood dry, shrink, and crack, and all strength is lost. It seeks to find more wood to feed itself, and can grow up brick and plasterwork in this search, unless its food source runs out before it reaches some suitable new timber. It can grow from a wet area into dry areas, carrying the water it needs. Obviously, it can do substantial damage. Its weak link is that it isn't native to this country and can't live in our climate. It's native to the Himalayas where it lives in caves and feeds on tree roots which come through the cave walls/ceilings. It was brought back to the UK in the hulls of wooden ships. It can't survive outdoors here though.
The problem is that the area under your shower resembles a Himalayain cave, because it's damp. You'll probably need to remove the shower to get good enough access so you can find where the dry rot has got to.
I found a small amount under a bath when refitting a bathroom. Again, it was started due to water running into the area. A small wooden block on the wall held the bath panel in place. This became infected, and the dry rot grew out along the wall, looking for more wood to infect. Fortunately, dry rot is blind, and although it went far enough to find the nearest wood, it had gone in the wrong direction and missed it. The infected piece of wood was used up, and it died all by itself. There was no evidence it ever produced a fruiting body, which would have been another way to infect the other timber there (although the spores blow around everywhere anyway, so it's more likely the other wood was not quite at the right moisture content for it to start). The infected block of wood actually looked fine at a quick glance, but on trying to unscrew it from the wall, it just fell in half, and the surface in contact with the wall had shrunk right back like it was hollowed out. You could crumble the wood in your fingers -- basically the dry rot has eaten all the cellulose from the wood, which is what gives the wood all its strength.
Nasty. Very surprised to see it came from the Himalayas.
I have put a few pictures of it at http://194.106.48.135Do you think you guys could take a look and see if it looks like mould, dry rot, or wet rot?
I know think it might just (?) be wet rot but not 100% sure. I haven't see any fruity body, and the "strands" are not white... So not really sure.
Either way, I know I need to treat the leak and dry the wood, but would like to know how serious it is.
I will get someone in to remove the skirting boards on the other side of the wall, and perhaps life a few floorboards etc and see if I can see anything horrible.
BTW, there is no smell that I can detect...
Difficult to tell from the photos, but it doesn't look like dry rot fruiting body to me. Also, dry rot has a noticable smell, like a musty damp cellar or church crypt (or it may be that areas it likes smell like that anyway -- I've never been sure which is the cause). Of course, lack of fruiting body doesn't mean no dry rot. Give all the wood a good prod with a screwdriver to see if it's rotten, although all rots tend to have much the same effect so even if it is, it's more likely to be wet rot unless you find it in some timber which would not have got wet by itself.
What's the thread-like thing between the timber and wall? Since it goes through the air, I doubt it's dry rot which AFAIK grows along surfaces, unless you moved something and it became detached from a surface -- that piece of timber does move in the photos. The wall looks like a partition wall, and it can spread inside those.
Thanks very much for taking a look.
The thready thing between the wood and the wall was what I was worried about to be honest. Do other types of rot go through the air or do they all go along the surface? That "thread" is what worried me.
At first I thought they were spider webs but they are definitely not.
The piece of wood can move (I think), but doesn't. It is has downwards pressure at both ends so shouldn't in practice.
I will try and get someone to look on the other side of that wall and see what it looks like.
Is it possible that it is all just a mould? If that piece of wood is quite tough when prodded with a screwdriver, can I be fairly sure that there is just mould and not rot?
Hopefully it will be treatable without costing the earth...
advanced. The fibre you can see looks more like a bit of spiders web. As far as I can see there is none of the classic pattern of little squares you get on the surface of the wood as it gets digested.
I would guess at a bit of mold and maybe some wet rot - but even then not much.
With wet rot and mold it is not that serious. Once you have stoped the supply of moisture and let it dry out then no further damage should occur.
probably wise.
Thanks very much for that. The more I read about dry rot, the more sure I am that it isn't that. However, even if it is wet rot, I guess that it is still nothing to be sneezed at, and unless I can get the water problem sorted out for good, I will have problems.
My main concern is that I have a similar problem in my flat in London (leaks from the kitchen into the bedroom below). I was renting so wasn't quite so worried, but it seemed to takes weeks, and lots of visits to sort out. I hope I don't end up trying to sort this out for the next six months!!
Cheers
What is the consistancy of the white stuff. Is it solid or like candy floss?
I don't know any other rots which grow threads outside the wood at all, and normally they're too small to see inside the wood.
Oh, I misinterpreted the perspective in the pictures in that case.
I'm not sure it will tell you what type of rot. Most rots will only work on wood that's getting moist and only on the actual moist area. Dry rot requires moisture to start, but it can carry that moisture to dry wood and rot that, hence its name.
Dry rot makes people panic, which enables wood treatment companies to charge a fortune ripping out all wood in a metre radius, spraying everything with chemicals, etc, at great cost. This is normally unnecessary. You need to remove infected timber (can be a problem if any of it is structural) tracing the threads to find any further infected timber. In theory, infected dry timber can't rot anymore once you've removed the thread connections carrying moisture, although I'm sure a wood treatment company would insist on ripping it all out too. Remove the source of moisture, and make sure the area is ventilated. An area under a shower/bath is always going to be susceptable to leaks, and I would also try to reduce usage of timber in those areas. For example, that piece of timber on the floor could have been a thin brick or a few tiles mortared together. Otherwise, consider using pressure treated timber for replacement.
The stuff on the MDF at the bottom seems quite hard. On the top of wooden plank, there is a patch which is a bit whiter than the rest. This seems quite soft, but I don't know if I would call it cotton wool.. Perhaps a bit mushy...
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