Carpet Flooding and Replacement

[airjay81]

The washing machine in our apartment flooded this past Friday morning due to a malfunction and caused some significant flooding of the carpeted areas of our living and dining rooms. Maintenance responded extremely quickly, brought out water vacuums, and got floor flans blowing underneath the carpet (i.e. between the carpet and the padding). The area of carpet that flooded was a good 200 sq. ft. I also went out and purchased a deumidifier and ran the a/c all weekend. By Monday morning, the carpet and padding was pretty much dry to the touch everywhere. I did not notice any dampness, although there was a slight musty smell in the room. The apartment maintenance came back out Monday afternoon, put the carpet back down and brought in a carpet cleaner to clean the carpet. To be perfectly honest, but for a few edges of the carpet that had some unraveling and fraying of the carpet fibers from the fans blowing all weekend, the carpet looks decent and the apartment smells pretty good too (like fresh cleaned carpets).

My primary concern is whether the padding underneath the carpet fully dried or was even able to fully dry using these methods. I have read elsewhere that when carpet floods, it is next to impossible to save the padding, even if you act quickly. Before the carpets were cleaned yesterday, I asked the management to consider fully replacing the carpet and padding expressing my concern about whether the padding would ever be able to fully dry. Now that the carpets have been cleaned and put back, I am second guessing whether I was overreacting and whether I should continue to push for replacement of the carpet and padding. My fear is that if the padding did not fully dry on the bottom, in a couple of months, the musty mildew smell will be back, and then we'll have a bigger mold problem on our hands and probably need to move. On the other hand, I don't want be an annoying tenant that sounds concerned where there is no need to be concerned. I find myself obsessing about this problem and am even considering offering to the management to pay for part or all of the carpet replacement just for peace of mind. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[Nestor]

It won't be a problem.

The musty smell that did occur was due to the same reason that dogs smell when you give them a bath. It's because the dirt that accumulates deep in the carpet pile where you can't remove it is mostly organic (skin cells, pollen, paper and cotton fibers, etc.) and when you get it wet, you create a bacteria's idea of heaven; plenty of food and the ability to move around to feed on all of it. The result is all that organic matter starting to rot as the bacteria feeds on it, and your carpet smelling until it dries out and the bacterial action stopping. If you ask a professional carpet cleaning company to clean an old carpet that they know is gonna stink to high heaven, they'll add a biocide to their solution tank that kills any bacteria the water comes into contact with, and that's how they can do the job without creating a stench.

If your carpet had a LOT of crap in it, it woulda stunk more until it dried. The fact that you only got a bit of a musty smell means that it's a relatively new or relatively clean carpet.

There are both closed cell foams and open cell foams. If the blowing gas bubbles in the foam don't interconnect, the foam is called "closed cell" and is impermeable to air and moisture. Unless you pay extra for a "premium pad" or a "pet pad" which is made of closed cell foam to prevent pet "accidents" from permeating through the underpad and being absorbed into any wooden underlayment or subfloor under the underpad, your underpad will most likely be "chip foam" which is open cell foam and will allow any moisture absorbed into it to dry out in time. Chip foam underpad provides the best value for the dollar and is what's most commonly installed under carpeting. So much so that most carpet retailers will only keep 3 or 4 and 7 or 8 pound per cubic foot chip foam underpad in stock. If you want closed cell foam for a firmer feel underfoot or to protect your wooden underlayment from absorbing puppy pee and smelling as a result, you have to special order that kind of underpad from the local wholesalers who do keep it in stock.

[jeremymichael]

You can try to clean and dry your carpet by yourself just follows these simple steps: 1. Vacuum up excess water that is in the carpet and the pad with the hot water extractor. Make sure that you get as much water out of the carpet as possible. 2. Place the carpet on a large flat outdoor surface. Place fans in the room blowing on the subfloor to dry it out. 3. Now fill the bucket with water and a cup of laundry detergent. Saturate the sponge in the soapy water and clean the mildew on the carpet and the carpet pad with the sponge. 4. Wet a cloth and wipe away any soap in the carpet. When the soap has been cleaned, leave the carpet and the carpet pad out to dry. 5. Reinstall the carpet and the carpet pad once the subfloor has dried out. carpet stair treads