Cross Contamination: Your Neighbors are Closer than You Think

16 Apr

A condo is a wonderful place. It’s the beauty of the beach right outside your home. Everything you need is right there. To boot, you have a built-in community from the owners’ association. But that community is often sharing a lot more than their building without knowing it.

Whether your condo is in a building with four stories or twenty stories, the floor plan is typically shared from each floor to the next. This allows the plumbing, HVAC, and Freon lines to connect smoothly throughout the building. Your AC and your upstairs neighbor’s AC are right on top of each other, leaving one mechanical pathway from the ground floor to the penthouse - this is called the chase.

Cut to the Chase…

This chase is open from one condo to the next. Because of this, there is a constant exchange of particulates in that space, which can spread throughout your whole condo. Throughout your whole condo, air circulation is a necessity - but when your neighbors aren’t managing their air quality, that means you can’t manage yours, no matter how hard you try.

If a condo sharing your mechanical pathway is experiencing a mold problem, you are too. Whether there is mold in their HVAC unit, closets, or AC drain line, that mold is pushed around and spread between condos. If you have a brand new AC system, but your downstairs neighbor has let theirs collect mold, you’ll see signs of mold in your new system within six months.

Owners’ associations don’t attend to this issue as vigilantly as they should. When one condo is contaminated with mold, all owners should be proactive about addressing it at its source and mitigating its spread to their own property. This requires thorough and regular cleaning of air circulation systems, the use of non-toxic fungicides within these systems, and swift fixes for any infrastructural issues which may be contributing to mold growth.

You’ve Got the Power

Talk to your owners’ association urgently to discuss your community’s anti-mold plan. Talk to your neighbors and let them know that this is an issue. When united, you can ask for results of mold assessments through the building. Spread love, not microbes.