Hanging pots are overgrown by mold

[RavenTheJust]

Hello there,

I've been growing Phals since a few years now but dunking has always been a nuisance to me. It just takes so much time if one has a few orchids and also creates quite a mess.
With a cat and a toddler in our houshold windowsil pots are anyway not ideal. About three months ago I found out about haning pots.

They are made from specially treated clay and will let water through but just a tiny bit.
The orchid is bound on the outside of pot with a flexible thread and some sphagnum to hold water around the roots. I also added Hygrolon to hold sprayed water a bit better and prevent roots from getting "cold" because of the evaporation but I am not sure that it would be needed.

The good thing is that orchids hang and therefore cannot be knocked down and watering just involves adding a cup of desalted water to the pot every other day.

So much for the theory and in the beginning everything seemed to go well. New roots and leaves started growing and the Phals really seemed to like this sort of cultivation.

Now about two months in all pots have developed mold. It's sometimes quite significant. On some of the pots the plants are still fine but on others the mold has started to attack the roots and the sphagnum. Hence I think I have to stop this experiment but I find it very frustrating!

I don't know what I could've done differently. The mold started growing on the top of the pot first. This is the part that dries first because it's above the waterline. So not only the constantly wet parts are affected and having the pot to go "dry" once in a while wouldn't help.

I tried spreading some moss spores on the pot but the moss grows so slow that it cannot compete with the mold. Above the waterline (where the mold started) the moss will simply dry out since there is not enough water there. The manufacturer from Germany suggested that I should have moss grow on the pot before tying on the plants but that will takes months - seems impractical to me. Also they said the pots can be used right away and the moss is just for optical reasons.

What would you suggest? Fungicides?
It is a pain to take all seven plants off the pots now since it takes quite some time to fix them to the pots properly. But I won't have them all die because of root mold.
Then I somehow need to wash the pots to ever have a chance to reuse them - but how? I fear that the mold has completely penetrated the clay.

Any advice greatly appreciated!