We’ve got a great question from Dmitri in Kentucky, and he wants to know what’s the proper way to soda blast a crawl space. He’s getting some information from his contractor that he doesn’t feel comfortable with.
Crawl Space Soda Blasting
Is soda blasting good enough to kill the mold or should you apply a disinfectant before soda blasting to make sure the mold is dead? Because your concern is that once they begin soda blasting, they’re going to spread that mold everywhere and it’ll land on surfaces and contaminate the area. Well from what we understand and from what we’ve read about sodium bi carbonate, which is the active ingredient, obviously the only ingredient in soda blasting is that sodium bi carbonate does kill mold.
When we soda blast, we create a containment area. We even air seal the sub floor to minimize how much of it goes up into the living space. We put in air scrubbers and fans and all these other things, kind of like a full mold remediation project. I know not a lot of people do that, but that’s one of the things we do in order to minimize the spread of mold spores to other areas of the home. But what you got to realize is that whether you apply a disinfectant before soda blasting or after, the effect should still be the same with proper containment. So if you wanted to go ahead and apply the disinfectant before so that the soda blaster is removing dead mold, that’s fine. Just keep in mind, even dead mold can be an allergen.
If you want to do proper containment and then put a disinfectant on after the soda blasting in order to address mold, you could do that as well. We apply a disinfectant because we don’t feel that soda blasting alone is good enough for mold that is deep into the wood. What we want to do is apply the disinfectant so that it penetrates deeper into the wood source to kill that root system. And my concern is if I put it on before, depending on how thick the mold is, that mold may not allow that disinfected to transfer properly up into the wood after or before soda blasting. So after soda blasting is how we choose to do it.