Which Restoration Procedures Can Help Save My Items After Water Damage?

6/25/2020 (Permalink)

A water intrusion can quickly cause damage in your home. Call SERVPRO today to avoid additional water loss of your property.

SERVPRO Offers a Wide Range of Water Damage Restoration Services Helping Bronx Homeowners Save Valuables Affected by Water Intrusion Incidents

Salvaging more items after a water intrusion incident in your property can help minimize the costs of recovery. Apart from minimizing costs, you can also save items that have sentimental value, such as family heirlooms. Saving contents after exposure to water is a challenging process, but SERVPRO avails various resources to Bronx residents to help ease some of the difficulties.

What Items are water spills likely to affect most?

When making plans for water damage restoration in your Bronx property, you need a strategy to ensure your restoration efforts yield the best outcome. Identifying which contents are likely to sustain severe damage due to direct or secondary water exposure is one crucial aspect of such a strategy. Typically, water damage is most severe on: 

• Items made from permeable materials
• Items that have electronic circuits
• Metal items
• Items made of hygroscopic materials

Among your valuables, fabric items, upholstery, and wooden furniture, which readily absorb water due to their higher permeability, also sustain a wide range of damages including:

• Breakdown of chemical bonds leading to loss of structural integrity 
• Decomposition or mold infestation
• Physical changes such as warping or shrinking
• Staining due to soiling or deterioration of dyes

Should I worry about non-porous valuables?

Although items made from non-porous materials do not absorb water, exposure can ruin them in other ways. Metal items rust when exposed to water or high humidity levels. Sometimes, the damage can develop internally, while everything seems okay, outwards. For instance, when electronic items are exposed to high levels of humidity, internal components can rust - by the time you notice, the damage is too widespread to save the item.  

What level of damage can restoration procedures reverse?

One advantage of involving a professional team like SERVPRO is access to a broader array of restoration resources, including highly trained technicians and sophisticated equipment that simplify some challenging tasks. Even with the availability of such resources, reversing extensive damages is not always possible. In other cases, it is better to spare the effort altogether. Before embarking on restoration, our technicians consider several factors to ensure we deliver a desirable outcome:

• Cost of restoration compared to replacing the item
• Level of damage
• Age of the items
• Sentimental value of the items

What does a typical restoration involve?

Since the damage results from exposure to water, moisture removal is one of the typical restoration processes. Depending on the item, the procedure can vary. For fabrics such as carpets or upholstery, extraction is necessary to remove the absorbed water. After removing all liquid water, other processes, such as evaporation, and dehumidification can help remove the remaining moisture. Our SERVPRO technicians move the items to a dry room then set up air movers to increase airflow around them.

For items made of semi-porous materials such as wood, extraction is not necessary since they do not hold liquid water. However, elaborate drying procedures are essential to release the moisture they hold. When removing surface water from furniture, it is better to pat-dry them rather than wiping to avoid ruining finishes or leaving marks. Wood requires slow drying to remove absorbed water, without causing other problems such as cracking. Our technicians place the items in a dry yet shaded place, which can be one of the rooms in your house to permit stable drying. We can run some air movers and monitor wetness levels constantly to ensure even drying.

Apart from individual items, water also affects fixtures such as hardwood floors and cabinets. If left unaddressed, they can continue to deteriorate, necessitating a costly replacement process. Drying assemblies presents many challenges, especially since they cannot be moved like individual items. Our crews rely on their advanced training to overcome drying challenges. For instance, we create drying chambers over hardwood floors by setting up plastic sheets over the floor for better control of air movements and humidity levels, thus allowing stable drying.

Can I save heavily soiled items?

Soiling is easy to resolve through cleaning if it does not involve contamination or stains. The good news is that a clean water spill is not likely to involve contamination. However, stains can develop on carpets, upholstery, and other fabrics. Our SERVPRO technicians take steps to establish whether the stains fall under these categories:

• Protein soils
• Color-adding or discoloring soils
• Water-soluble or oil-soluble soils
• Insoluble soils

Depending on the results, we can use a wide variety of cleaning products or procedures to reverse the damage. For protein soils, we use enzyme products to break them down, making it possible to remove the stain. We can also use stain-absorbing powder, natural fabric brighteners, and peroxide bleach solution to deal with other forms of stains. 

Assistance from professional water restoration technicians can help you save more items after water loss incidents. Call SERVPRO of South Bronx at (347) 590-9902 to help. We're Faster To Any Size Disaster.