11 ms·

I built my own air purifier in 2016, living in London, I was living in a basement and was having breathing problems due to mould. My landlady was gaslighting me

I built my own air purifier in 2016, living in London, I was living in a basement and was having breathing problems due to mould. My landlady was gaslighting me at the time, so I built the air purifier. It worked for a while but mould spores cling to the paper filter and eventually grow into the filter material. I think Dyson uses glass fiber filter to stop this problem. My filter helped a lot, but eventually I had sclerosis infection on my brain and ended up in hospital with lung infection and brain lesion, still recovering after two years, and I will never be my old self again. I was subletting so had no grounds for complaint, I had to choose between homelessness or phoning a distant relative I hadn't spoken to for 24years, I chose the latter and I think it's the reason I'm still here.

simonebrunozzi 8y ago
Wow, what a story. Thanks for sharing it. I feel bad for you, and sincerely hope that you are back on your feet.
electic 8y ago
Woah, this is pretty scary. Thank you for sharing. How did you know it was mold that was in the air? Is there some sort of test kit that you can buy to test for this. Mold is pretty hard to detect because you can't really see it because it typically hides between the walls. Any advice appreciated.
- the_clarence 8y ago
  You can notice black spots in your bathroom or other places where steam doesn't escape properly. I noticed it on my mattress also. I don't think I have any health issues because of that, it was 5 years ago, but it was rough.
  - marco1 8y ago
    Mold is not always black, is it? It can have other colors as well, e.g. yellow.
- sgc 8y ago
  By the time it is a health issue, it is usually visible. There is some air passage from within the walls to the living space, but not nearly as much impact as the visible mold on walls, furniture, etc. Sauce: Get paid to test sometimes.
- onetimemanytime 8y ago
  Mold needs lack of ventilation /dampness. You see the dark spots (maybe that's too late?) and IMO nothing substitutes air flow, when possible. Even in winter, one needs to open windows and let the air flow freely at least for a while.
- adinobro 8y ago
  I know there is mould in my house. We do three things to deal with it: 1. Air Filter (more for pollution but it helps with mould) 2. Dehumidifier which we leave on 24/7 basically for the mould. This is the big one. 3. Wash any mould with vinegar to change the PH after it is wiped off to prevent it from growing back. The mould is still there but the dry air stops it from growing and sporing which is what makes you stick. If humidity creeps up the mould will grow again. Be aware that mould is virtually everywhere and is only harmful if there is enough of it around sporing or if you touch it.
  - a012 8y ago
    Dehumidifiers are expensive in power consumption, I don't know which model is more effectively. I'm living in SEA, and get humidity level to 50% 24/7 in my studio equally to double my monthly electricity bill.
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      I don't know if these are effective, but in my country we have passive dehumidifiers which are basically containers with a load of salt or something like that which draws the moisture out of the air. Good enough to keep caravans in storage mold free. Probably not good enough for e.g. living rooms or actually moist locations, but maybe it scales up. Of course, you'd then need a lot of salt or whatever the stuff is.
      - majewsky 8y ago
        I used the passive variant that you explained in my previous apartment and while it may be effective at keeping humidity down, it's not very effective in bringing a high humidity down. I got an electric dehumidifier and it's drastically more efficient. It pulls over two liters of water per day out of the air if the air is sufficiently humid. I've since moved, so I don't use it routinely anymore, but I still have it and occasionally use it to speed up the drying of clothes on a drying rack.
        8y ago
- fyfy18 8y ago
  The CDC has some recommendations on it (yes you can have mold tested to see if it's dangerous): https://www.cdc.gov/mold/stachy.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mold/stachy.htm I'm not really sure about keeping the humidity below 50% though. The UK and most of Northern Europe has rather high humidity in the winter. It commonly reaches 80-90 RH outside, so you'd have to heat your house to 25c/77F to bring the humidity below 50%.
  - toxik 8y ago
    Northern Europe gets really cold, so while RH may be high, it’s not moist at all. People get dry skin in the winter.
    - chupasaurus 8y ago
      Northern Scandinavia and west of Urals (I live here) have moist winters (70+% RH most of the time). Skin would dry anyway because water evaporation rate is proportional to a pressure (hence temperature) difference and convection makes a constant supply of fresh unsaturated air.
      - zaarn 8y ago
        Relative Humidity is relative to temperature. Cold air can simply hold less water overall, at 20C it can easily hold double as much water as it can at 0C. There being a pressure difference is nonsense, you can get the same air pressure in the winter as in summer (though it tends to go on the Low side more often). What you probably mean is the vapor pressure, ie the natural pressure the liquid wants to be at in a closed container, though while it is largely depdenent on temperature, it does so in a linear/positive way, so at lower temperature, water will evaporate less (otherwise ice would more easily sublimate). Once you go below zero a water content of a few grams can easily hit 100% RH which would barely manage 5% or less at 30C.
        logfromblammo 8y ago
        I think the relevant pressures are the vapor pressure of liquid water, the atmospheric pressure, and the partial pressure of gaseous H2O at the gas-liquid interface. If you can blow dry air over its surface, you can evaporate liquid water (or sublimate water ice) even when the relative humidity is 100%. You can think of air as a gaseous solution, and its water vapor content like table salt in aqueous solution. Temperature affects the solubility, and if the solution is saturated, no more can dissolve. You can still dissolve salt crystals sitting in a saturated cold saltwater solution by squirting warm freshwater onto the bottom of the container. If that then mixes with the rest of the solution, and everything cools down again, that dissolved salt can then precipitate out somewhere else (like rain), or form a suspension of tiny crystals (like fog or clouds). The solubility of H2O vapor in atmospheric gas increases with temperature. But you can also do something with a gaseous solvent that you can't easily do with a liquid solvent, which is to change the pressure. Higher pressure lowers the solubility of water in air, but to a far lesser extent than a decrease in temperature. Even though the vapor pressure is dependent only on temperature, evaporation occurs whenever the vapor pressure exceeds the partial pressure of H2O at the interface. Increasing the overall air pressure also increases the partial pressure of H2O vapor by a proportional amount, so inhibits further evaporation. But water vapor is also less dense than N2, O2, and most other atmospheric gases, so the means of measuring pressures gets complicated. When you involve wind, and stratified airflows, it gets even more complicated. The air blowing across water or water ice could have been previously warmed by the ground just enough to evaporate more water, then get pushed higher by an angled snowbank into colder, saturated air, and it will then dump the excess water as small ice crystals. A solid block of ice can then become "rotten" as a snowdrift forms downwind of it. The overall average temperature may say that ice should stay frozen, but the wind can still carry a tiny bit of water vapor at a time, thanks to local fluctuations, and with enough volume of air to move it, that ice will drift.
- marco1 8y ago
  You can buy test kits that you expose to your rooms’ air for some time, and then a lab will grow the mold inside the Petri dishes to “amplify” what has been collected in your home. That may be expensive, though, and not easily available everywhere, and perhaps even prone to contamination “in transit”?
Scoundreller 8y ago
> I was subletting so had no grounds for complaint How does that work? You may not be eligible for regular tenant protections, but you're still eligible for recourse through regular courts, no?
- 88 8y ago
  If you’re subletting a place, you have no legal right to reside there, so one would expect legal recourse to be limited.
  - distances 8y ago
    Is this about illegal subletting, then? As normal subletting is fully legal in jurisdictions I know about.
- jlangenauer 8y ago
  This is in the UK. Laws protecting tenants there are, to put it politely, pretty thin.
  - nvarsj 8y ago
    I'll put it un-politely: they stink! My first rental in London had bad mould problems. The landlord refused to fix them. We ended up with dehumidifiers throughout the house to keep it under control. When we left after a year, he complained at us for keeping dehumidifiers around when potential tenants came to visit - it raised too many questions! This was a 2200+/mo rental that he had bought for about 100k 15 years ago. What a crook.
  - leoc 8y ago
    There was recently a vote in Parliament to require landlords to keep their rented properties fit for human habitation. It failed: https://fullfact.org/economy/did-mps-vote-against-homes-having-be-made-fit-live-in/ https://fullfact.org/economy/did-mps-vote-against-homes-havi...
    - 8y ago
kijin 8y ago
A wet paper filter is the perfect place for mold to stick to and send spores all over the place. If you have a mold problem where you live and can't move out of the place, you need an air filter and a dehumidifier. Unfortunately, it's hard to jerry-rig a dehumidifier on the cheap. If you were in London in the winter, it might have been more practical to turn up the heat to keep the room as dry as possible.
- nvarsj 8y ago
  And open your windows a tad. It's the best way to keep indoor humidity under control during winter. Being in a basement room though, I'm not sure this would have helped.
  - kijin 8y ago
    As someone else mentioned downthread, you need to maintain a rather high temperature (around 25C/77F) in order to reduce the relative humidity enough. This might or might not have been feasible given OP's budget, heating arrangements, and general preference. I for one would not want to live in such a hot room for a whole season even if I could afford to. I keep my room cooler than that even in the summer!
    - nvarsj 8y ago
      Hmm, my house during winter is usually between 18-20. If I keep the window vents closed (most UK houses have vents above the windows specifically for this reason), I get a lot of condensation around the windows which gets mouldy. Leaving those vents open makes all the difference - no condensation, no mould. Also the house humidity seems to stay under 50% with the vents open.
      - kijin 8y ago
        Yup, that's a normal house. Doesn't work in a basement, though, unless it has a vent or small window above the ground.
- 8y ago
proee 8y ago
We live in Hawaii and mold is a huge problem here. There are times during the day when the dewpoint spread is only a few degrees. This means that any object that is cooler than the air temperature will condensate. If you can't control the moisture you can't control the mold. Another major factor is the materials in your house. Things like unfinished birch plywood will absolutely mold if left in open air, where other woods like hardwoods don't have as many problems.
clumsysmurf 8y ago
I was talking to a buddy that does construction work in a pretty wealthy area (Scottsdale, AZ). They are just finishing up a large luxury apartment. Apparently, the contractor let the drywall get soaked while sitting on palettes during monsoon season, and since the roofing wasn't done there were inches of standing water that resulted in black mold. They just drywalled right over it. In the US. In 2018. In a luxury condo. So, you never know what nonsense you will have to put up with.
- lmilcin 8y ago
  Wow. I am pretty sure they can not only get sued for this but it may be criminal offence.
  - 7000skeletons 8y ago
    I'd imagine that's true on both counts, but with these things it's notoriously difficult to prove. You'd have to prove that the contractor knew about the damage, didn't do anything to mitigate it and then knowingly attempted to hide it. All of that is pretty tricky to pull off, given that a home damaged in this way might not show signs of the damage for a good while. It's why bad actors (such as the ones described above) keep getting away with what they do.
    - dd36 8y ago
      Those are pretty easy to prove in this case. All you’d need to do is find, remove and test the bad dry wall. There’s no way someone installing it could reasonably claim ignorance of its condition.
      - appleflaxen 8y ago
        how do you prove the timing? that it happened at the time of construction and not after?
        jklein11 8y ago
dartdartdart 8y ago
Sclerosis from breathing that air? Or did the air only cause the lung infection
choot 8y ago
In my filter I've UV-C lamp which is turned on and off automatically after some duration.
tomcam 8y ago
That’s devastating. I hope you recover as much as possible.
tomohawk 8y ago
In order to take care of mold, you need to clean up what you can using hydrogen peroxide. It will foam up when it contacts mold. Keep applying until this is no foam up. Incidentally, peroxide in a spray bottle is great for cleaning showers and places that get mildew. Always use fresh peroxide. For an air purifier, you need one with a UV light.
- mtgx 8y ago
  Or a cleaning solution with chloride.
  - gocartStatue 8y ago
    I've heard that vinegar is better for mould, as it leaves the surface rather more "acidy" than aseptic, as chloride does.
    - morganvachon 8y ago
      In my experience a one-two punch with chloride to kill the mold quickly, followed by a dousing with distilled white vinegar, results in a good short and long term solution for surface mold.
      - endymi0n 8y ago
        Safety advice: If you decide to try this at home, please keep in mind that mixing chloride based cleaning agents with an acid will release chlorine, which is toxic enough to have been used as a WW1 weapon.
        hblanks 8y ago
        Or similarly toxic chloramine gas, when combined with cleaning agents containing ammonia, such as Mr. Clean.
        8y ago
jokoon 8y ago
Sorry for you :( I briefly lived inside an apartment that was previously a cave. There was a plaster wall separating from the outside, and after raining, it ended up covered in mold. We cleaned it with bleach, but moved out soon after. I hope I did not get too much exposure. Do not forget that black mold release mycotoxins, which are carcinogenic.
marco1 8y ago
Really sorry to hear that. Sorry to ask, but I’m not really sure I got it right: Do you think the DIY air purifier was the cause of these health problems? Or did it at least contribute by letting the mold come back (inside)? As others have noted, a dehumidifier could help. But what prevents mold from growing inside these dehumidifiers as well? Sure, they’re mainly built from plastic and metal, so no paper as in your case. Will that be enough to prevent mold (or bacteria)? Otherwise, a dehumidifier could turn into yet another health hazard over time.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
No grounds for complaint? This is criminal.

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

Wow, what a story. Thanks for sharing it. I feel bad for you, and sincerely hope that you are back on your feet.

electic 8y ago

Woah, this is pretty scary. Thank you for sharing. How did you know it was mold that was in the air? Is there some sort of test kit that you can buy to test for this. Mold is pretty hard to detect because you can't really see it because it typically hides between the walls. Any advice appreciated.

the_clarence 8y ago
You can notice black spots in your bathroom or other places where steam doesn't escape properly. I noticed it on my mattress also. I don't think I have any health issues because of that, it was 5 years ago, but it was rough.
- marco1 8y ago
  Mold is not always black, is it? It can have other colors as well, e.g. yellow.
sgc 8y ago
By the time it is a health issue, it is usually visible. There is some air passage from within the walls to the living space, but not nearly as much impact as the visible mold on walls, furniture, etc. Sauce: Get paid to test sometimes.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
Mold needs lack of ventilation /dampness. You see the dark spots (maybe that's too late?) and IMO nothing substitutes air flow, when possible. Even in winter, one needs to open windows and let the air flow freely at least for a while.
adinobro 8y ago
I know there is mould in my house. We do three things to deal with it: 1. Air Filter (more for pollution but it helps with mould) 2. Dehumidifier which we leave on 24/7 basically for the mould. This is the big one. 3. Wash any mould with vinegar to change the PH after it is wiped off to prevent it from growing back. The mould is still there but the dry air stops it from growing and sporing which is what makes you stick. If humidity creeps up the mould will grow again. Be aware that mould is virtually everywhere and is only harmful if there is enough of it around sporing or if you touch it.
- a012 8y ago
  Dehumidifiers are expensive in power consumption, I don't know which model is more effectively. I'm living in SEA, and get humidity level to 50% 24/7 in my studio equally to double my monthly electricity bill.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    I don't know if these are effective, but in my country we have passive dehumidifiers which are basically containers with a load of salt or something like that which draws the moisture out of the air. Good enough to keep caravans in storage mold free. Probably not good enough for e.g. living rooms or actually moist locations, but maybe it scales up. Of course, you'd then need a lot of salt or whatever the stuff is.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      I used the passive variant that you explained in my previous apartment and while it may be effective at keeping humidity down, it's not very effective in bringing a high humidity down. I got an electric dehumidifier and it's drastically more efficient. It pulls over two liters of water per day out of the air if the air is sufficiently humid. I've since moved, so I don't use it routinely anymore, but I still have it and occasionally use it to speed up the drying of clothes on a drying rack.
      - 8y ago
fyfy18 8y ago
The CDC has some recommendations on it (yes you can have mold tested to see if it's dangerous): https://www.cdc.gov/mold/stachy.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mold/stachy.htm I'm not really sure about keeping the humidity below 50% though. The UK and most of Northern Europe has rather high humidity in the winter. It commonly reaches 80-90 RH outside, so you'd have to heat your house to 25c/77F to bring the humidity below 50%.
- toxik 8y ago
  Northern Europe gets really cold, so while RH may be high, it’s not moist at all. People get dry skin in the winter.
  - chupasaurus 8y ago
    Northern Scandinavia and west of Urals (I live here) have moist winters (70+% RH most of the time). Skin would dry anyway because water evaporation rate is proportional to a pressure (hence temperature) difference and convection makes a constant supply of fresh unsaturated air.
    - zaarn 8y ago
      Relative Humidity is relative to temperature. Cold air can simply hold less water overall, at 20C it can easily hold double as much water as it can at 0C. There being a pressure difference is nonsense, you can get the same air pressure in the winter as in summer (though it tends to go on the Low side more often). What you probably mean is the vapor pressure, ie the natural pressure the liquid wants to be at in a closed container, though while it is largely depdenent on temperature, it does so in a linear/positive way, so at lower temperature, water will evaporate less (otherwise ice would more easily sublimate). Once you go below zero a water content of a few grams can easily hit 100% RH which would barely manage 5% or less at 30C.
      - logfromblammo 8y ago
        I think the relevant pressures are the vapor pressure of liquid water, the atmospheric pressure, and the partial pressure of gaseous H2O at the gas-liquid interface. If you can blow dry air over its surface, you can evaporate liquid water (or sublimate water ice) even when the relative humidity is 100%. You can think of air as a gaseous solution, and its water vapor content like table salt in aqueous solution. Temperature affects the solubility, and if the solution is saturated, no more can dissolve. You can still dissolve salt crystals sitting in a saturated cold saltwater solution by squirting warm freshwater onto the bottom of the container. If that then mixes with the rest of the solution, and everything cools down again, that dissolved salt can then precipitate out somewhere else (like rain), or form a suspension of tiny crystals (like fog or clouds). The solubility of H2O vapor in atmospheric gas increases with temperature. But you can also do something with a gaseous solvent that you can't easily do with a liquid solvent, which is to change the pressure. Higher pressure lowers the solubility of water in air, but to a far lesser extent than a decrease in temperature. Even though the vapor pressure is dependent only on temperature, evaporation occurs whenever the vapor pressure exceeds the partial pressure of H2O at the interface. Increasing the overall air pressure also increases the partial pressure of H2O vapor by a proportional amount, so inhibits further evaporation. But water vapor is also less dense than N2, O2, and most other atmospheric gases, so the means of measuring pressures gets complicated. When you involve wind, and stratified airflows, it gets even more complicated. The air blowing across water or water ice could have been previously warmed by the ground just enough to evaporate more water, then get pushed higher by an angled snowbank into colder, saturated air, and it will then dump the excess water as small ice crystals. A solid block of ice can then become "rotten" as a snowdrift forms downwind of it. The overall average temperature may say that ice should stay frozen, but the wind can still carry a tiny bit of water vapor at a time, thanks to local fluctuations, and with enough volume of air to move it, that ice will drift.
marco1 8y ago
You can buy test kits that you expose to your rooms’ air for some time, and then a lab will grow the mold inside the Petri dishes to “amplify” what has been collected in your home. That may be expensive, though, and not easily available everywhere, and perhaps even prone to contamination “in transit”?

Scoundreller 8y ago

> I was subletting so had no grounds for complaint How does that work? You may not be eligible for regular tenant protections, but you're still eligible for recourse through regular courts, no?

88 8y ago
If you’re subletting a place, you have no legal right to reside there, so one would expect legal recourse to be limited.
- distances 8y ago
  Is this about illegal subletting, then? As normal subletting is fully legal in jurisdictions I know about.
jlangenauer 8y ago
This is in the UK. Laws protecting tenants there are, to put it politely, pretty thin.
- nvarsj 8y ago
  I'll put it un-politely: they stink! My first rental in London had bad mould problems. The landlord refused to fix them. We ended up with dehumidifiers throughout the house to keep it under control. When we left after a year, he complained at us for keeping dehumidifiers around when potential tenants came to visit - it raised too many questions! This was a 2200+/mo rental that he had bought for about 100k 15 years ago. What a crook.
- leoc 8y ago
  There was recently a vote in Parliament to require landlords to keep their rented properties fit for human habitation. It failed: https://fullfact.org/economy/did-mps-vote-against-homes-having-be-made-fit-live-in/ https://fullfact.org/economy/did-mps-vote-against-homes-havi...
  - 8y ago

kijin 8y ago

A wet paper filter is the perfect place for mold to stick to and send spores all over the place. If you have a mold problem where you live and can't move out of the place, you need an air filter and a dehumidifier. Unfortunately, it's hard to jerry-rig a dehumidifier on the cheap. If you were in London in the winter, it might have been more practical to turn up the heat to keep the room as dry as possible.

nvarsj 8y ago
And open your windows a tad. It's the best way to keep indoor humidity under control during winter. Being in a basement room though, I'm not sure this would have helped.
- kijin 8y ago
  As someone else mentioned downthread, you need to maintain a rather high temperature (around 25C/77F) in order to reduce the relative humidity enough. This might or might not have been feasible given OP's budget, heating arrangements, and general preference. I for one would not want to live in such a hot room for a whole season even if I could afford to. I keep my room cooler than that even in the summer!
  - nvarsj 8y ago
    Hmm, my house during winter is usually between 18-20. If I keep the window vents closed (most UK houses have vents above the windows specifically for this reason), I get a lot of condensation around the windows which gets mouldy. Leaving those vents open makes all the difference - no condensation, no mould. Also the house humidity seems to stay under 50% with the vents open.
    - kijin 8y ago
      Yup, that's a normal house. Doesn't work in a basement, though, unless it has a vent or small window above the ground.
8y ago

proee 8y ago

We live in Hawaii and mold is a huge problem here. There are times during the day when the dewpoint spread is only a few degrees. This means that any object that is cooler than the air temperature will condensate. If you can't control the moisture you can't control the mold. Another major factor is the materials in your house. Things like unfinished birch plywood will absolutely mold if left in open air, where other woods like hardwoods don't have as many problems.

clumsysmurf 8y ago

I was talking to a buddy that does construction work in a pretty wealthy area (Scottsdale, AZ). They are just finishing up a large luxury apartment. Apparently, the contractor let the drywall get soaked while sitting on palettes during monsoon season, and since the roofing wasn't done there were inches of standing water that resulted in black mold. They just drywalled right over it. In the US. In 2018. In a luxury condo. So, you never know what nonsense you will have to put up with.

lmilcin 8y ago
Wow. I am pretty sure they can not only get sued for this but it may be criminal offence.
- 7000skeletons 8y ago
  I'd imagine that's true on both counts, but with these things it's notoriously difficult to prove. You'd have to prove that the contractor knew about the damage, didn't do anything to mitigate it and then knowingly attempted to hide it. All of that is pretty tricky to pull off, given that a home damaged in this way might not show signs of the damage for a good while. It's why bad actors (such as the ones described above) keep getting away with what they do.
  - dd36 8y ago
    Those are pretty easy to prove in this case. All you’d need to do is find, remove and test the bad dry wall. There’s no way someone installing it could reasonably claim ignorance of its condition.
    - appleflaxen 8y ago
      how do you prove the timing? that it happened at the time of construction and not after?
      - jklein11 8y ago

dartdartdart 8y ago

Sclerosis from breathing that air? Or did the air only cause the lung infection

choot 8y ago

In my filter I've UV-C lamp which is turned on and off automatically after some duration.

tomcam 8y ago

That’s devastating. I hope you recover as much as possible.

tomohawk 8y ago

In order to take care of mold, you need to clean up what you can using hydrogen peroxide. It will foam up when it contacts mold. Keep applying until this is no foam up. Incidentally, peroxide in a spray bottle is great for cleaning showers and places that get mildew. Always use fresh peroxide. For an air purifier, you need one with a UV light.

mtgx 8y ago
Or a cleaning solution with chloride.
- gocartStatue 8y ago
  I've heard that vinegar is better for mould, as it leaves the surface rather more "acidy" than aseptic, as chloride does.
  - morganvachon 8y ago
    In my experience a one-two punch with chloride to kill the mold quickly, followed by a dousing with distilled white vinegar, results in a good short and long term solution for surface mold.
    - endymi0n 8y ago
      Safety advice: If you decide to try this at home, please keep in mind that mixing chloride based cleaning agents with an acid will release chlorine, which is toxic enough to have been used as a WW1 weapon.
      - hblanks 8y ago
        Or similarly toxic chloramine gas, when combined with cleaning agents containing ammonia, such as Mr. Clean.
        8y ago

jokoon 8y ago

Sorry for you :( I briefly lived inside an apartment that was previously a cave. There was a plaster wall separating from the outside, and after raining, it ended up covered in mold. We cleaned it with bleach, but moved out soon after. I hope I did not get too much exposure. Do not forget that black mold release mycotoxins, which are carcinogenic.

marco1 8y ago

Really sorry to hear that. Sorry to ask, but I’m not really sure I got it right: Do you think the DIY air purifier was the cause of these health problems? Or did it at least contribute by letting the mold come back (inside)? As others have noted, a dehumidifier could help. But what prevents mold from growing inside these dehumidifiers as well? Sure, they’re mainly built from plastic and metal, so no paper as in your case. Will that be enough to prevent mold (or bacteria)? Otherwise, a dehumidifier could turn into yet another health hazard over time.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

No grounds for complaint? This is criminal.