By way of discouraging mold and wood fungus, I use a water based 9% copper napthenate product called Woodlife on wood:
https://www.rustoleum.com/product-ca...fe-coppercoat/ It has a smell for awhile, but if you need to clean up something like a plywood floor and also stop wood rot from continuing this does the job. This smells a lot less than any of the petroleum distillate-based copper products and the elemental copper is pretty non-toxic. You will want to leave your trailer open in summer weather for awhile until the smell settles down. (The ozone air cleaners can help, possibly.) I use it for a deck coating/treatment and treating wood for projects. The wood treated takes on a nice copper-greenish brown color after the stuff sits for awhile. You have to use an oil-based primer to
paint it.
I have a question in to the product expert at Lowes as to the actual active ingredient in the Concrobium product. The EPA considers all kinds of toxic things "safe". Does anybody have a bottle of this stuff that shows the actual active ingredient?
Be aware that mold-resistant paints and such will contain some bio-cide to discourage mold. Any synthetic product that kills mold will also be toxic to humans like us. Some of the synthetic products used are basically pesticides you really don't want to have inside your trailer. The safest anti-mold
paint additive I ever found was thiabendazole, which is also used to protect bananas, but I only used this outside the house, not inside. You have to read the labels and look up the active ingredients to decide for yourself if you want to breathe them.
Safe practice is to discard all the fabrics and carpets that got moldy. It is better to keep these organisms out of your breathing space entirely.
Use an inexpensive half-face HEPA cartridge respirator when you handle moldy objects.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sop...cat=0&_fosrp=1
A note on ozone-producing air purifiers and such; ozone has many beneficial uses inside and outside the human body, but it is very destructive to lungs and eyes. Do not breathe the atmosphere produced by these systems; use them for cleanup, then ventilate the space thoroughly before occupying it.
To prevent mold: You need a cheap digital hygrometer
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Taylor-5566...gAAOSwcttcBaR1 for monitoring your indoor relative humidity (RH) and to compare to the one that may be integral on the dehumidifier you need. This website allows you to get a working sense of the relationship between air temperature, RH, and mold risk.
Dew Point Calculator
Play with the slide bars and watch the mold risk indicator change. Ideally you want to maintain any trailer to less than 60% RH most of the time; if it has gotten moldy before, keep the RH in the 40-50 range so the mold organisms can't function well. Having a higher indoor RH can cause problems if it happens too many hours of the day or too many days of the week. Lots of rain, tracking water indoors on your feet and clothes,
leaks, etc. will increase your indoor RH to higher levels. You never want to allow your stuff to get moldy or mildewed; the health risks are very consequential and there is no way to completely decontaminate moldy objects that have any porosity to them, like clothing or wood.
Ventilating to stop mold in a trailer is very risky. It has to stay warm enough inside to warm up and dry out the outside air that is coming in, and then that warm wet air that picked up some water from the trailer has to leave the trailer without condensing on any trailer parts on its way out. You might get away with this in east San Diego or Phoenix...
Any compressor dehumidifier is also a 2 COP heater. (2 COP means half as much electricity for the same amount of heat production as any electric resistance heater or
light bulb (COP 1 or less)). It is cheaper and safer to run a dehumidifier than a heater. Note that most portable AC units can also be used to dehumidify, and these days you can also buy portable heat pump units that can cool in the summer, heat in the winter, and dehumidify whenever needed. A dehumidifier also very efficiently heats the space as it removes water from the air. I have been heating my house in western Oregon partly with dehumidifiers for 20 years. A dehumidifier or a portable heat pump would be the cheapest way to heat a place with electricity with a portable appliance. You have to carefully read the installation and use instructions for portable AC/Heat Pump units to be sure they are doing what you need them to. A 8,000 BTU portable AC unit is about the right size for plugging into the wall, or a 30-50 pint dehumidifier.
If you get a dehumidifier with a hygrostat integrated into the control, it will turn itself off when the RH setting level is reached and come on again when RH goes up. This is great except the hygrostat in the dehumidifier is often not very accurate, so you need to compare your little digital hygrometer to see if the target RH levels are being maintained and tweak the settings as necessary. Also, hygrostats typically have a large hysteresis, so you may have to set the control to less than 50% RH to be sure the space never gets above 55%. I took a Honeywell hygrostat designed to use in a house and put it in an outlet box with an extension cord for a more accurate control when the one on the dehumidifier got too far off.
Many dehumidifiers/portable AC come with a garden hose connection so you can drain the bucket continuously into the kitchen sink or bathtub (trailer drain valves locked open!), and you definitely want this feature so you can leave the trailer unattended for months as needed.
Note also that there are two different temperature ranges of dehumidifiers available. The ones you use in the summer in the midwest only function at indoor air temperatures above 64 degrees. The ones you use for trailers in the cold season need to operate all the way down to 42-45 degrees. The cold temperature ones are not hard to find, you just have to be sure they are rated for cold weather operation.
I don't know about you, but I never have any unplanned events in my life...