So my miata has been sitting on my driveway for a long time.. and i decided to open the trunk and i found something damped and wet.. carpet is wet and actually start molding.. I took some stuff out and they are also molded.. I have no experience on tackling this job.. Can anyone help me out? regular APC?
Microban will be your best bet to kill the mold. I'll write up something much more thorough tomorrow but I've got to get to bed.
I've never encountered a problem such as this one but I'm guessing some sort of citrus cleaner might work? Maybe OxyClean?
Totally forgot about this post. Sorry. Irene from Top of The Line gave me some solid advice on this issue which I'll pass on to you: The first thing you'll want to do is thoroughly dry the affected areas. So in my case it required disassembly of the interior (seat, lower trim, carpet and padding removal in passenger compartment). I set the carpet and padding up on separate pairs of sawhorses and let them bake out in the sun for a complete day with fans blowing on them to help. Once they were dried out I injected the padding in several places with Microban and liberally sprayed the surface with Microban. I moved them to the shade for this part so that the chemical would have time to kill off the mold. After a couple hours I moved them back into the sun to re-dry. Since the microban stuff doesn't smell very pleasant I allowed the carpet and padding to sit out of the car for two days to dry and air out. While this happened I wiped down all the hard surfaces with either bleach (on the painted metal) or microban (on the dyed plastics). As for what caused the mold problem in the first place, I had a gallon of water leak out onto the passenger floorboard carpeting and I failed to extract the water well enough from the padding so after about two weeks in the summer heat I smelled something funky. I tried using the typical 20:1 APC ratio and a steamer which didn't help much. I next dried out a traffic lane cleaner and carpet extractor which made a difference at first but then about a week later the smell was back. Hope this helps. Edit: I should also mention that I'm going to replace the carpet padding next week since I've got a slight tinge of odor coming back now. The easiest route for you to consider might just be replacement if the parts can be found for a decent price.
