- [Narrator] Of our mold and leak here, just as I thought.
I took the scissors and just dug it into the wall
and the wall just sliced away like butter
'cause it was saturated with water.
Here you can see the problem right here, it's dripping.
See it right there, it's just dripping inside the wall.
The reason why this is dripping is this is the,
I forget the name, I think it's called Polybutylene
or something, but everybody knows it is the gray,
plastic piping which is illegal to use now.
This is a banned material now for builders
but this unit was built in the early eighties,
I believe on the last year that they were able to use it.
So this Condominium Association has a known problem
with it and we just found out where it's happening.
So here I've come around to the other side of the wall
where we cut a little hole in the living room there
to expose it and you can see
how it's just dripping like crazy.
So it's a good thing they had
turned off the water last week.
We turned it on right now just to do this test,
but you can see just how much water is dripping there.
And see that wood right there, it's soaking wet,
the whole inside of this wall is soaking wet.
There's ants everywhere, are attracted to it.
The wall feels pretty soft, we can push
our thumb into the drywall here.
Now on the living room floor along the baseboards
you can see there's mold, it's small,
it's not like a whole lot.
I can breathe in here without the mask.
I had the mask on earlier, but it's really not
a whole lot of mold here.
But certainly I would say probably half-way up
both walls are gonna have to be replaced.
And you can see, now we had previous water damage
in here on these floors, okay?
But now you can see the mold is growing,
that wasn't even here a couple of months ago.
So, there it is, solved.
Probably all this tubing's gonna have
to pulled out of here and replaced with PVC.
What I don't understand is why builders
in their right minds ever used this garbage to begin with.
It's just stupidity, how much cheaper
is this stuff than PVC?
I mean really folks.
Just to save a buck.
Okay, so we opened up the wall a little bit more here
to see exactly where it's coming
and if you look really closely, right there, see it?
See how it's like gushing up against the back drywall there?
We're cutting a hole on the other side right now,
we're gonna walk around and take a look at it
to see what's causing that.
But you can see there's some mold spores
that are starting to grow back
in the corner there on the stud next to this pipe.
This is just garbage pipe, nobody should ever use it, ever.
(sawing drywall)
- [Man] I just made it worse, I cracked it.
- [Narrator] Okay, so here you can see
how it's just spewing right there,
where we moved the drywall on the back side
and it's just spraying into the kitchen now.
So essentially this is what was happening,
it was spraying inside the wall the hole time.
(rushing water)
Okay, so here we exposed the wall just a little more
to see all of the piping that's in there.
We cut the water off now so the leaking has stopped,
it's not spraying anymore onto the kitchen counter.
But the good news is, is all of this piping
is contained in this wall so that the kitchen is there
and then there's the vertical components that go upstairs
to the bathrooms and showers and then the guest bathroom
is right here to the left of it, so all they have to do
is rip out this one wall, replace the piping
in there and put the drywall back.
And they may have to fix the drywall
along the living room floor here over here, too.
Usually you wanna go about three feet
beyond where you see any mold.
It all depends on how far up
the water whicked off the floor.