Ensure a healthy home: Give mold no chance

For many people, the bath­room is a cent­ral place of well-being. To ensure that their well­ness oas­is is a source of long-last­ing pleas­ure, incon­spicu­ous details such as san­it­ary joints must be sealed with harm­less mater­i­als and be well main­tained.

Mod­ern homes are built to be air­tight. This requires reg­u­lar vent­il­a­tion of the liv­ing spaces to pre­vent mold dam­age. Where a con­trolled vent­il­a­tion sys­tem has not been installed, rooms should be manu­ally cross-vent­il­ated sev­er­al times a day. This applies all the more to rooms that are sub­ject to high mois­ture loads such as the kit­chen and the bath­room. Splash or spray water around the shower or bathtub, water vapor on the tiles released by wash­ing machine and dry­er, con­dens­a­tion on the win­dows – humid­ity in the bath­room is a con­stant com­pan­ion that we would be happy to get rid of. The prob­lem, how­ever, is not the mois­ture itself, but the joints on which it depos­its. There are numer­ous joints around san­it­ary fix­tures, win­dows and along the trans­itions between tiled and non-tiled areas. They are usu­ally sealed with sil­ic­one to pre­vent water and vapor from pen­et­rat­ing into walls and floors. Sil­ic­one is per­man­ently elast­ic and water­proof, but like all mater­i­als it is sub­ject to age­ing and should there­fore be well main­tained.

It is true that some joint seal­ants con­tain fun­gi­cides that pre­vent an infest­a­tion with mold spores. But over time their effect gradu­ally wears off. To provide per­man­ent and reli­able pro­tec­tion against mold attack, the fol­low­ing four meas­ures have proven to be effect­ive: Reg­u­lar dry­ing, espe­cially after tak­ing a shower, keeps the joints elast­ic and tight. This can be sup­por­ted by reg­u­lar clean­ing with a mild deter­gent. Short but intense shock vent­il­a­tion sev­er­al times a day is not only help­ful in gen­er­al, but espe­cially for the dur­ab­il­ity of joints. Last but not least, the bath­room should always be suf­fi­ciently heated dur­ing the cool and cold sea­sons.

It is a well-known fact that our dis­cip­line does not always stand up to the demands of every­day life. Soon­er or later, depos­its are there­fore bound to form on the joints, which in the long run will cause mold to grow. This not only looks unsightly but is also det­ri­ment­al to the res­id­ents’ health. If the mold infest­a­tion is detec­ted quickly, com­mon house­hold clean­ers such as dish­wash­ing liquid, vin­eg­ar essence or scour­ing cream can help to get rid of the “unin­vited guest”. How­ever, care must be taken to ensure that the sil­ic­one joints are not dam­aged and thus become even more sus­cept­ible to mold spores. If the joints are already a bit older and slightly por­ous, this is a weak spot where mold can quickly pen­et­rate. And then even the most aggress­ive clean­ing agents will not help elim­in­ate the prob­lem. In this case, there is only one rem­edy: the sil­ic­one seal­ant must be com­pletely replaced.