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Mold & The Air System: When Mike Stanovich got in the air quality business, the concession was that indoor air quality concerns were the responsibility of the air system. Does that mean the HVAC system is always to blame? |
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| "Indoor
air quality awareness dates back to the 1970's with the energy crisis,"
Stanovich said. "Buildings were sealed to increase efficiency and the
idea was that we were going to control the air. Now we’re finding that many
problems are with the buildings themselves. In Las Vegas, there are some
buildings with no provision for bringing in outside air."
Stanovich is with Air Care, a Las Vegas based manufacturer of indoor air quality cleaning and mold remediation products. Responsible for research and development, he holds a number of patents on air scrubbers and duct cleaning devices. He got into the field before the phrase "Indoor Air Quality" was coined. "I started out in California in engineering at UCLA. At that time it was called ‘Environmental biotechnology,’" Stanovich said. "Today, you may call it ergonomics; treating the body like a machine. Making a chair that fits the task that you’re doing and the size of the person doing it." Part of his research was with air quality issues. Today, Stanovich is interested in mold exposures and remediation issues, particularly how to properly rid buildings of mold without distributing the spores, thus causing greater contamination. He doesn’t see the air system as the automatic culprit. "The air system may not have caused the contamination," Stanovich said. "But it’s a major source for disbursing contamination." The Good, The Bad, & The Moldy He said there was good news and bad news when it comes to HVAC systems and mold problems. "The good news is that it’s not always the A/C system causing the problem. Mold typically doesn’t like to grow in the kind of dirt and stuff that collects in your condensate tray with the moisture," he said. "You need three things to make mold grow: You need the moisture, you need a food source and you need mold spores. Mold spores are everywhere. Moisture is in the pan. You do have dirt, which will cause some molds to grow." Stanovich said that proper maintenance of the air system is critical. "If you maintain it in a normal way, you’re usually pretty safe because you don’t have high cellulose content in the dust that’s in an air system," he said. The bad news is that there are some new factors leading to mold growth caused by the air system. Short cycle times is one of them. "If an air system goes on and runs for a very short period of time, the moisture will start to collect on the coils and won’t have enough time to drip down into the pan (less than five or 10 minutes), so when the unit shuts off it re-evaporates, so now we’ve got moisture going out into the building area," Stanovich said. Such moisture heading for drywall and other high cellulose materials can lead to mold growth. The mold that grows releases spores into the air, which are then distributed by the air system. "We have a picture of a rooftop air conditioner in a commercial building where the rooftop pedestal it’s sitting on has the roofing peeling away from it and the condensate drain tube, which has been heated by the sun and cracked, is dumping moisture directly into this thing that’s like a funnel that goes right into the ceiling," Stanovich said. "There’s a stain inside the building that’s like 20 feet across and 10 feet wide. And you say, ‘It doesn’t rain here, why do we have a ceiling leak?’" Smell That? Most indoor air investigations begin with complaints, usually about strange smells. "We had a place where there was an odor problem. We inspected the air system, and everything looked fine. Because the head of the company wasn’t there at the time, he called us back and said, ‘Could you show me where this was?’ We went back and there was an inch of water on the floor in the air conditioning room," Stanovich said. "As you looked at it, you could identify things that... well... that come from a sewer." Stanovich realized it was an intermittent backing up of the main sewer into the air system. Since the air conditioning room was a sealed room, all of the air that returned from the building went through it before being pulled into the air handler. Particulates from the sewer overflow would dry out, be moistened again by additional overflow, and be mixed with air being pulled into the system. Maintain The System Keeping the air system out of the mold business starts with maintenance. "The main things are to keep it clean, be sure the drain pan is draining properly, is level, and not cracked or bent because the moisture collects there," Stanovich said. "If the moisture gets into the insulation or the ceiling where you have other materials, mold may grow. And then the air system will be a steady source of moisture." Ironically enough, it is the air system which is the
best source of moisture in the desert. The extremely low levels of rainfall
visited upon the Las Vegas Valley are insufficient for mold growth. |
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Call (702) 615-7644 |
