Mold has become a major concern for today’s homeowners and home builders. According to the EPA, molds can produce not only allergens and irritants, but in some cases, even potentially toxic particles called mycotoxins. Along with a proper cleaning and maintenance of your house, choosing the right building products can help protect you and your home from the potential hazards of mold.
We’re coming to the important part of the project to house that you normally want to think about and that’s the dry wall itself. Now conventional dry wall has a paper backing on it, say we ripped a piece open here, and you can tell it’s just paper. Now water is going to get into your wall cavity at some time, it could be a leak from outside, getting into your wall cavity or it could just be due to temperature differences between inside and outside your house in the summer or winter it builds up condensation. Now when that moisture gets in the wall cavity, it attracts mold and paper is a great feeding ground for mold because it’s organic. Now that mold in your wall releases spores, and those spores can really cause allergies for you and your family.
We’re using a system here called DensArmor Plus, it’s a different type of dry wall that actually has a glass exterior. You pull it back you can actually see the shards of glass there. Now the reason for this is, mold won’t feed on the glass plus it helps dissipate water. We have an example here, we took conventional paper bag dry wall and we stock it with the DensArmor Plus into this bucket of water for 30 minutes. As you can see when we pulled out the paper bag it’s really starting to wrinkle up, disfiguring the paper itself and it’s actually holding the water and absorbing it. Now that’s going to give the mold plenty of time to start to grow.
This glass backed dry wall, it looks identical whether it’s dry or whether it’s wet and that’s because the water is dissipating off the glass, and it’s not holding it against the wall itself. So, for safety of you and your family and to help prevent allergies, it’s really good to take a look at something like DensArmor Plus, a glass backed dry wall.
We used this similar product called DensGlass Silver to shade the exterior of our house. Paperless gypsum products aren’t new, in fact they’ve been used for construction for several years, as Barry Reed of Georgia Pacific explains, “Georgia Pacific, about 20 years ago, introduced the first paperless gypsum products made with glass mats instead of paper faces.”. As, important as mold resistant products are in today’s home building market, it’s equally important that these products retain the functionality of conventional building materials. The DensArmor Plus can be installed and finished just like regular dry wall meaning it can be primed and painted just like you would regular paper faced wall board.
To install our wall board, the crew carefully fits pieces to the wall and nails them to the frame. Once the room is finished, the joints between wall boards will be covered to give the wall a suede look.
Tape is used to make the wall surface smooth and uniform looking and it also adds strength and rigidity to the wall. A fiber glass tape used with DensArmor Plus makes a lot of sense cause it’s fiberglass and not paper, thus, you maintain the inorganic surface of the wall. After the wall board is hang, holes are cut for electrical outlets and switches. For areas of the home that are not uniform, like this corner at the ceiling. The pieces are carefully measured, cut to fit, then nailed in place. We are using this glass matted wall boards throughout our project home, but the product would be especially useful in rooms that are constantly exposed to moisture. DensArmor Plus is a great product to use in high humid areas, such as bathrooms, kitchens, basements, because of the glass mat surfaces. You don’t have paper, thus, you don’t have the two ingredients, moisture and paper that are important for mold growth.
If you like more information about mold resistant products for your home or like to see the plans for our project house, please visit us at MichaelHoligan.com.
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