Friendly Microbes?

I recently had a really good experience with an organic mildew cleaner that I thought more people would want to know about.

You may remember, if you read this blog regularly, that my husband and I suffered a serious flood in our finished downstairs after torrential rains in late June. (The weather forecasters swear this was a hundred-year flood and I sincerely hope they’re right!) Our carpeting and padding were thoroughly soaked. I suppose we could have decided to just toss it all, but I’m incurably frugal and the carpet was only two years old so we decided to see if we could save it. We successfully got everything bone dry and went about putting it all back in place, only to have a faint odor of mildew crop up about a week later.

Everyone knows mildew is bad news, causing allergic reactions in sensitive people (like my husband). Normally the only way to get rid of it is to use toxic chemicals like chlorine bleach or alcohol. Well not in my house! I keep an organic vegetable garden and am very loath to use poisons of any kind. But I really hated to give up on all that carpet, so we took a chance on a new nontoxic product I had read about in the Washington Post. (See “Summer Nice Smells, Summer Not,” August 3, 2006)

It’s called SAEM, which stands for Super Activated Efficient Microbes. It’s an all-purpose cleaner that works with live friendly bacteria that kill the mildew by eating up its food supply. According to the Post, it’s the product of choice for many relief workers in New Orleans post-Katrina.

I ordered it directly from the website of the company that makes it, Sustainable Community Development. It came quickly in a one liter plastic bottle of liquid concentrate that looks and smells rather like apple cider that’s starting to ferment. I mixed a few tablespoons of the concentrate with water in a plastic spray bottle and spritzed it on the downstairs carpet where the water damage had been the worst. The next morning when I bent to sniff, it smelled yeasty and slightly sour, a little beer-like but not unpleasantly so. Definitely better than the smell of chlorine bleach. The first application took care of 95% of the mildew smell but not all, so I sprayed it again after five days. After the second application the mildew was gone and it hasn’t come back.

If you read the SCD website, this stuff is the greatest thing since sliced bread. They suggest you use it for weed control in the garden, controlling odors from your compost pile, in your laundry as a deodorizer, on your cutting board to discourage harmful microbes, etc., etc. I haven’t tried it yet in all those ways, but it certainly saved my bacon (and my carpet) downstairs.