Yikes! Mold in our RV!

“Oh…there’s mold down here” is sure to make anyone’s heart sink. We’ve noticed a couple of stray leaks near our front windshield during this abnormally wet summer. But just a couple of weeks ago, Eric noticed a patch of mold in the far corner of the carpeting under our steering wheel. Yikes!

The growth can’t be too old because I like to consider us observant. It’s also not due to any leak we know of, which means there’s water coming in from a mysterious location (not good). We haven’t been able to fix the source of the problem yet, but we jumped on treating what we could see. And it wasn’t pretty…

I decided to tackle the problem with every housewife’s best germ-killing tool: bleach. I wasn’t worried about bleaching the carpet for two reasons: 1) This corner isn’t seen by anyone but us, and 2) I knew nothing I did could be worse than what the mold could do.

My disinfecting supplies

I applied water and bleach to the carpet with a rag, using a disposable glove. After scrubbing for a while, I moved on to our second cleaning tool: ZEP Clear Shell Mold & Mildew Inhibitor (link to Home Depot – not an affiliate link).

ZEP’s product can be used to clean away mold, and it’s also supposed to inhibit its growth in the future. It’s possible that I could’ve skipped the bleach and just used ZEP, but I figured a two-step disinfecting process couldn’t hurt!

ZEP’s instruction are to spray directly onto the infected area, let sit for 1-2 minutes, and then wipe or scrub as necessary.

After my mold treatment

My “after” picture is here. It looks like the mold did stain the carpet, but the mold appears to be DEAD. I’ll have to report back on how well ZEP does with inhibiting mold growth. I suspect that if we have a leak somewhere, no amount of ZEP is going to permanently fix the problem. But it seems to be a good tool to have on hand.

When we were RV shopping, we said so-long to at least one potential home because we found mold. As part of our annual maintenance, I plan to do a complete inspection of all of our carpeting, cabinets, and those hard-to-reach corners, to make sure we don’t have any other growth.

Do you have any mold stories to share? What kind of treatment do you recommend?

-Brittany