Here’s how a pro tackles water damage restoration.
When you think about it, it seems rather odd that something we all need to survive can be so harmful. But water damage remains one of the most common causes of home insurance claims in the country. Even a couple inches of water can cause thousands of dollars of damage.
Water damage can occur in a variety of ways—a window left open during a storm, leaky or burst pipe, or flood, just to name a few. In some cases, a puddle of water can simply be mopped up with a few towels. But a lot of water left for a few days or more? That’s a much bigger job.
It doesn’t take an expert to know that water can cause a lot of damage if left unchecked. That’s the reason water damage restoration companies exist.
Drying out your home and furnishings after a plumbing or weather-related issue is not something you should take lightly. Water damage restoration is a job for the professionals.
“It’s just water. It’ll dry, right?”
While a single ice cube kicked under the refrigerator probably isn’t going to pose much of a problem, heavy amounts of moisture can cause a wide range of damage:
Depending on the source of the intrusion, water may even be hazardous to your health. Water from your dishwasher, toilets, or the ground (classified as “grey water” or “black water”) contains chemicals, bacteria, and microorganisms that pose a significant health risk.
Do you really feel capable of handling that on your own?
Water has many unique properties, and one of them is its ability to seep into the tiniest cracks and crevices: underneath carpets and floorboards, within drywall, or behind baseboards. If the moisture isn’t fully removed, it can lead to serious damage.
In a typical home, evaporation is a slow process. Your living spaces are filled with porous materials such as carpets, upholstery, linens, carpets, and rugs. Even with commercial grade equipment, it can take days for these materials to dry to an acceptable standard.
Whenever there is water intrusion, you need a professional water damage restoration company to assess the damage, extract the water, and restore your property to its original condition.
Proper water damage restoration involves more than just pumping standing water out of your house.
To truly restore your home to its original condition, you need a restoration company like Axel Works who can fully assess, remediate, and repair your home.
The first step in any water damage restoration is assessing how bad the damage is.
If you have puddles of standing water inside your home, that’s an obvious sign of water intrusion. But in most cases, the moisture will be absorbed by the drywall, carpet, padding, and other materials in your home, making it hard to tell how wet it actually is.
This is where a moisture meter comes in handy.
Once the restoration company knows how much moisture is in your home, they can get a better idea of how to remove it.
If there is a large amount of standing water, we will use commercial grade pumps to siphon the water out.
We then use fans to speed up the evaporation process and dehumidifiers to remove the moisture from the air. These machines are heavy-duty, commercial-grade equipment that can complete the job in a matter of days (in most cases), rather than the weeks or months it would take to air dry.
Throughout this process, we will continue checking the items with a moisture reader until the materials are within 4 percentage points of the dry standard.
All items have some moisture in them, even if they feel dry to the touch. (For example, the dry standard for drywall in Central Florida is between 8-14%, depending on where your home is located.) This is why it’s unreasonable to keep the dehumidifiers on until the moisture reader reads “0.”
Once everything has been sufficiently dried out, we can begin the important process of restoring your home to its original condition.
It takes a highly trained professional to determine what can be repaired and what needs to be replaced. Our skilled technicians will do their best to save as much furniture as possible. Of course, if you are interested in a full-scale renovation, we can take care of that as well!
Water damage restoration is not something that can be accomplished with a roll of paper towels and a ceiling fan.
When it comes to any kind of disaster cleanup, make sure you are putting your home into the hands of a professional with the kind of training, experience, and skill to get the job done the right way.
Axel Works is locally owned and operated and we are continually innovating our methods to provide you with the most efficient cleanup methods in the industry. Plus, our disaster response team is available 24/7/365.
Leave a Reply