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Drying Out Construction Materials To Prevent Mold Growth
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Drying Out Construction Materials To Prevent Mold Growth
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" The job and that's become more and more concern for builders all over the country because of mold growth problems within the house as it's being built. We brought in the pros to show us how it's best done."
" My name is Kurt Goldman with the Hydro lab training facility. Training research is what we do for water damage mitigation. New construction drying. We train mainly insurance -- risk or companies and restoration contractors. We do property management and also contractors. Our goal is to basically educate them on on the effects of water damage to a structure. Whether it be from a broken pipe a hurricane. Or just new construction on new construction is a big problem in our industry right now because a lot of materials are being delivered to job sites are wet a lot of people don't know how wet they are. This is an example of a new construction. It has been wet as of up to we can a week and a half ago -- It appears to be dry and a lot of contractors at this point. -- goods would go ahead and start to put insulation hanging wallboard. What they don't know though is what the moisture content load is in the structure obviously moisture. Being more than one of the cause of defects. In -- home a commercial structure we need to map this structure out showing them how much moisture is in all these different building terrorists. At materials. point we dry this being one method we actually install long pins or screws. I can show you how we do this. Once we install the screws we've actually we've actually taken a pin or screw and we put it through this mass of material. The purpose of that is now we can check the moisture content in the core of this entire piece of wood. Are what we do now is we're going to actually use what's called -- Elmhurst an This meter meter basically reads moisture content from these two pins. I'll demonstrate here as you see the moisture content of my finger so it gives you a reading of what the moisture content load using electrical current. The pins or the screws that we install into the wall are basically extensions off of these pins so at this point. A surface reading for example on this piece of wood shows that this wood is dry as if that's as deep as you use this meter. I think you're not getting an accurate reading -- Once you actually take the depends upon among the screws. You can see that the moisture content load of this particular mass of lumber is running about 18%. Industry standard in this region is about 12% this time of year. And a number that's very dangerous is the 16% moisture content load. Which is basically where you get fungal growth -- where you get so if you were to trap this lumber behind drywall and insulation there's no way for it to dry. Obviously leads to a possibility of having fungal growth."
" In the walls wall structure. Inside the building we're creating an atmosphere which is going to promote the rapid evaporation. Of the bound water inside of the building materials. As we bring very dry and warm air into the building and circulate it through the building. The wood will give up its moisture. That moisture will become. Part of the air we will take that air and bring it back out of the building. Basically what this equipment is doing is it's turning. The inside atmosphere into a huge sponge that can absorb tremendous amounts of water. Once that water is. Absorbed into that dry air stream we remove it directly to the outside. So the building dries very very quickly. And there is no odors left behind. Equipment that you looking out the wore out trailer and there are about 200 of them around the country presently. Our typical project is drying flooded buildings from all sorts of -- Mishaps. Anything from a hurricane to a pipe break the ice machine this. Trailer is designed. To create an environment inside the building. That will evaporate the excess moisture. To bring it to the outside. Keep bringing dry clean air in taking wet moist. Taking air -- with odors to the outside. It will dry a building incredibly. Fast whether it happens via a hurricane or just in this particular case about moisture to new building materials."
