Florida has no mold law for gym saunas. Sign the petition for a mandate.

Sign the Petition
MOLD’S GYM Mold information & reporting. Not a gym.

Report It: The Consumer Action Center

Found mold in a gym sauna? Here is exactly where to file, state by state — starting with Florida, worked end-to-end from a real 2024 case: FDACS, the Attorney General, the health department, and what each can actually do.

You found it. Now you want somebody official to care. This page exists because our founder had to learn the hard way which desks can act, which desks can only write letters, and which desks have no mandate at all — and filed at all of them anyway, because the paper trail is the point.

File your own mold report

Official desks are one half of the paper trail. The other half is here: file your report with us, in your own words — a gym sauna, a rental, a workplace, a school, anywhere mold hurt you and nobody acted. An AI intake structures your account into a formal report; a human reviews every report before anything is published; and you get back a report packet — your account as a clean timeline with your evidence list, plus the exact complaint routes for your state (below) — the document you can hand to a landlord, an employer, an attorney general, or a lawyer.

You choose how it’s used: published anonymously, published with your first name, or kept private and counted only in the totals. Your name and contact details are never published, ever.

Where did it happen?
What happened?
Show it — photos and video

Words describe it. Pictures prove you were there. If you took photos or video of the mold — the wall, the vent, the ceiling, the sauna bench, whatever you saw — add them here. A report with photos carries weight that a report without them can’t.

Photos and video from a phone usually carry the time and place they were taken, inside the file. That data helps us verify your report. Here’s our rule: we read it privately, we never publish it, and if your media is ever published, the data is stripped from the file first. The most the public will ever see is the city — never your address, never a map pin from your phone.

Accepted: photos (jpg/png/heic), video (mp4/mov), documents (pdf).

No photos? File anyway. Your report still counts — plenty of people never got the chance to take a picture. Photos strengthen a report; they don’t make one.

Already filed with the government?

If you already took this to a health department, code enforcement, a housing authority, the attorney general, OSHA, or the BBB — tell us here, and send the proof if you have it. Most complaints like yours die alone in an agency inbox. Filed here, yours joins the public record: it gets counted, and so does the response — or the silence.

Did you file a complaint with any official office about this?

Have the paperwork? Add it above in Show it — there’s a slot for the complaint you sent and a slot for any reply you got.

How may we use your report?
Where do we send your report packet?

Your name and contact details are private — they are never published and never shown on the site. They exist so we can email your formal report packet (your account as a clean timeline, plus the exact complaint links for your state) and follow up once.

What we do with what you send

  • Your name, email, and phone are never published — not with your report, not anywhere.
  • Nothing is published until a person reviews it. Reports are published as reports — what you say happened, in your words — never as findings.
  • The time-and-place data inside your photos and video is read privately to help verify your report. It is never published, and published files have it stripped out. Public location is the city, from your report — never a pin from your phone.
  • Your complaint copies and any responses you upload are part of your record. They are published only if your report is published and you chose to share them; your contact details on them are yours to black out first, and we will never publish a document showing your email or phone.

Start with your state

Every state section of this center carries the same kit: your attorney general’s official consumer-complaint route, your health department’s route, and the honest label for what each can do about a sauna in your state. The verified 50-state attorney general directory is being compiled now; state kits publish as their entries are verified. Florida is fully worked below — it is the case state, and its trail is documented from experience.

Florida: the worked example

1. FDACS — Florida Dept. of Agriculture & Consumer Services

What it is: the agency that registers Florida “health studios” (gyms) under Fla. Stat. §§501.012–501.019.

What it can do: enforce registration, bond, and contract/cancellation rules. If your gym is also jerking you around on your membership contract, this is a real lever.

What it cannot do: inspect sanitation. There is no hygiene mandate in the health-studio law. When Thomas filed in August 2024 (case number beginning 248-0184), FDACS’s remedy was to mail/email the gym. File anyway — the record matters — but file knowing what the desk is.

2. Florida Attorney General — Consumer Protection

What it is: the state’s top consumer-protection office; gym complaints and patterns of complaints land here.

What happened in 2024: per Thomas’s account, the AG’s office passed his complaint off to another department. A single complaint can be routed away; a pattern of complaints about the same chain is what an AG’s office cannot ignore forever — which is why your filing counts even when the first answer is a form letter.

3. Your county health department

The honest label: in Florida, the health department has no mandate or rules for gym saunas — Volusia County told Thomas exactly that, and had no power to swab or inspect. (Pools and spas are different: those are permitted and inspected as public swimming pools.) Call and file anyway. Every “we have no mandate” answer, logged, is evidence for the petition — and health departments do track complaint volume.

4. City/county code enforcement

Worth one filing — in 2024, Daytona Beach code enforcement never responded to Thomas at all. Your mileage may vary; a sauna built without cleaning access can raise building and property-maintenance questions even where sanitation rules don’t reach.

5. The Better Business Bureau

Not a regulator — no enforcement power. Thomas filed against both the corporate chain and the local franchise owners. BBB complaints create a public, dated record that companies often answer when they answer nothing else.

Before you file: build the record

Agencies act on documentation, not adjectives. From How to Test a Sauna:

What to expect (the honest version)

Thomas’s 2024 trail, agency by agency, is in the founding story: the AG passed it off, the Governor’s office passed the buck, DBPR could send a letter, FDACS could send an email, the health department had no mandate, code enforcement never answered, and the gym’s corporate CEOs never contacted him at all.

File anyway. Every one of those filings is now a load-bearing wall of this website and the Florida petition. The system counts complaints even when it disappoints complainants — and changing what the system is required to do is the entire point of the petitions.