Wall insulation is a modern convenience most homeowners enjoy. Insulation makes the inside of a home more pleasant during both hot and cold times of the year since it traps in the air that you heat or cool. This of course means your home’s energy bill decreases thanks to wall insulation, making it well worth the cost and effort of having it installed.

Despite all of these benefits, wall insulation can fall victim to mold. Water damage is an unfortunate reality too many homeowners endure. Sometimes water damage results from a leaky roof, damaged water pipes that go undetected for some time, exterior wall damage or even flooding from heavy rains. And while wall insulation can endure quite a bit of abuse, water damage is one thing that can lead to its demise.

If the walls in your home have been drenched with water, there’s a good chance the insulation was soaked along with the part of the wall you can see. The only way to check if the insulation was soaked is to actually cut a hole in the wall and take a look at the insulation. You can of course fix the wall you cut, making it well worth the effort to check on the insulation.

Wet wall insulation can become a breeding ground for mold. Despite what some homeowners might think, wet wall insulation will not just simply dry out by itself and everything will be fine. The lack of airflow inside the wall means the insulation will not dry out for a long time, if ever at all. This means once your home’s wall insulation has been soaked, you must open up the walls and remove it.

Simply laying out the wall insulation and drying it will not take care of the problem of mold. Drying some materials like wood will take care of a mold problem, once you have scrubbed the mold off the object and washed it with a bleach and water mixture. The fact is that insulation is quite porous, meaning there are many areas inside of the insulation where mold spores can hide and grow. You simply cannot scrub out all of the interior spots in wall insulation, removing any mold spores and preventing others from taking hold in the future. The same can be said for drywall and other porous building materials.

Because you cannot scrub off the mold in wall insulation, you must throw it out. Many homeowners might lament the loss of their insulation and the cost of installing replacement insulation, but the fact is that once insulation has been soaked it is only a matter of time before mold begins to grow.

From the insulation mold can spread to the drywall, wood and any number of surrounding materials in a house. The mold will break down most materials, making them weaker and eventually causing potential structural problems with the house.

Not only can mold affect the structural integrity of a house, mold can also cause health problems. People with respiratory conditions, weakened immune systems, infants and those over the age of 65 are at the greatest risk from mold inhalation. Mold exposure can cause people to feel nauseous, experience persistent headaches, feel achy all over their body and in general feel constantly fatigued. In extreme cases people can experience trouble breathing or even suffer from an asthmatic attack. For these reasons it’s a huge risk to keep your insulation that has suffered from water damage.

Despite what you might believe, new wall insulation is quite inexpensive to purchase. If you have a free Saturday you can easily install new insulation in your walls yourself if you do not want to incur the cost of having the insulation professionally installed. While part of the expense will involve installing new walls in the water damaged areas, you would need to have the walls replace anyway to prevent mold growth in your home.

When your home is affected by water damage, one of the key things to keep in mind is that you need to act quickly. Mold grows exponentially and can spread quickly, so removing any wet insulation from the walls as soon as possible will help curb the spread of the mold.