My son lives in a rental house in Northern Calif. He and roommates are young and don't use the heater ever/no air conditioner. Single paned windows that condensate and have mild mildew around them. His bedroom has a mildew smell, he found a handful of clothing items like thick sweatshirts in closet with mold and threw them away, the rest in the closet no signs us smells horribly with mildew smell! The window itself is NOT leaking, i checked by pulling the carpet up near it, no sign of water BUT the entire room is moist 68% humidity on a digital gauge. The carpets are moist, his book pages are moist. Under his bed we found a molded backpack everything else was not molded yet under the bed so the moisture is definitely attracted to material items only so far. Mold mites crawling on these items can only be seen with a magnifying glass, super tiny white. He does have a master bathroom, normal amount of mildew in the shower that we also cleaned. We dusted the entire room to prevent food for the spores and vacuumed and telexed the mildew from the window and shower master bath. The fan in the bathroom is okay but we bought a super strong one that we can install this weekend. We are NOW running a small fan and a small Homedics hemp air filtration which lowered the humidity only to 63% . Should he start the heater? they never have used it ever, would it dry things out or just spread spores? We are ordering a de-humidifier and we heard of Theives essential oil diffuser that is guaranteed to kill spores in air. I get very itchy throat and skin when i went into his room, but my son has no symptoms so far and he lives there and sleeps right in it all. Do we really need to panic and through away all porus items if they don't have mold but still smell mildewy???? Is there a way to remove the smell from these items once we get things under control? what about certain clothing that just has a mildew smell what can we do to clean the spores and smell if they aren't washable? He has lots of record albums, cd's magazines, none of these items has mold yet, but i'm sure has spores and mildew smell penetration, can we salvage all these wonderful items and how? We did go under house and we had tremendous rains this year her in No. Calif. and found no standing water but damp soil. Haven't gone into attic yet. Is it possible that the single pane mildewed window and the moisture from the master bath and never using the heater that those 3items caused the high humidity???? or do we need to figure out a deeper scenario. The room is moist, i can feel it when walking on the carpet and touching books and boxes. HELP What do people do in this situation?
