One thing about natural cleaning products: They need time to work. Don’t spray and wipe. Spray, let sit an hour, and then wipe.
Thanks to all again. Will keep up the search. On the vinegar, we left it on the wall for awhile, but no visible effect. Will keep at it though and thanks.
I’m afraid we’re beat. Everyone tells us that boric acid, a controlled substance here, must be available someplace, but no one knows where. No trisodium phosphate at the building-supply places. They do have stuff for killing mold, but they say it’s for regular walls and will shred the wallpaper, which would sort of defeat the purpose. So we’ll be changing the wallpaper. Hopefully we’ll find the source of the moisture, but it IS something like 90% humidity year-round in Bangkok. Maybe I should be surprised we haven’t had more of a problem in the past.
Try vinyl wallpaper if you ever change it all again. Paper stuff stains too easily.
You know, I’m not even sure if ours is paper or vinyl now, but since we’re changing only the walls affected and not the entire unit, we’re going with the same style. That’s in the bedroom. Irksome is that what we have outside the bedroom has been discontinued! They do have something similar, though, so we’ll go with that when we change that section. It’s not affected badly (yet), so we’re going to do only the bedroom parts for now. Once the paper is off, we’ll leave it off for a while to see if we can find where any moisture is coming from.
Turns out we DO have vinyl ow.
Just an update: We have a workman here right now. There seems to be a slight design flaw with the way the bathroom sink is attached to the wall, so there does seem to be some water leaking out from behind there into the wall. It’s just that the mold on the other side of the wall is not opposite the sink, so it must be trickling over and settling at this different spot. On Monday, the wallpaper people will come in to strip off some the wallpaper and see what the situation is. In the next couple of weeks, the workman who’s here now will return and knock out some of the tiles under the bathtub to see what’s what in there for the other section of wall that we’re having problems with.
Sounds complicated, but the whole thing probably won’t cost us more than about US$60 total. For everything. One advantage of living in the Third World.
Well, for future reference, since you can’t find borax there, try copper. Vineyards in France used copper wire (and copper sulphate, IIRC) on their grape vines to keep mold from forming on their crops. Not sure how you’d get it on your wallpaper in a manner that kills the mold and doesn’t make your wallpaper look funny, but it does work. One of the first things I do when I work in a new machine shop is go around to all the machines that use water based coolant and throw a couple of pennies in them to kill the mold (I’m allergic to mold and a couple of pennies are cheaper than allergy meds ).
On the exteriors of builds they will run a band of zinc on the roofs and at the tops of walls, to prevent molds, mosses, and algae from growing on the building. Not of use here. I added this for the heck of it.
I knew you’d eventually find a leak somewhere. Hopefully it’s going to be properly fixed now.
It’s still a mystery about the carpet in that other, different room. There’s no moisture getting to it.
Any homebrewing supply stores in the area? Or a source you can order from? TSP is a common sanitizing agent in some homebrewing circles.
ThaiPoly.com is for sale | HugeDomains (PDF!!!) seems to indicate that someone makes it in Thailand. Perhaps they can point you towards a distributor? A google search for trisodium phosphate bangkok shows TONS of links, and with suppliers.
Thanks, but we’ve given up. We’ve got the workmen on it now. The leak behind the wall does need to be taken care of anyway.