Recovering Fragile and Porous Materials from your Home after a Fire Damage

3/11/2020 (Permalink)

One of the challenges you are going to face when performing fire restoration is the considerable amount of different materials and surfaces you may encounter. Your home is full of fabrics, stones, woodwork, and plastics. Each of these categories divides further into even more considerations. Silk, for example, cannot respond well to the same restoration procedure as a robust polyester or cotton. Smoke does not delineate between different materials but can bond with some and not others.

Pre-testing and due diligence when applying cleaning methods to a fire damage home are both essential. While agitation may be an easy option to dislodge and remove soils, it can spread costs further or cause harm to the materials you are attempting to recover. Take care to read the instructions of both the article you are trying to clean as well as the cleaning solution itself. Oil-based cleaners work with oil-based stains. Water-based cleaners, on the other hand, work with water-based soiling.

At SERVPRO, our technicians undergo years of training and qualifications to assess your home after a fire confidently. While we have extensive access to mechanical cleaning equipment, there are many parts of your home that may not suit abrasive cleaning. Carpeting and expensive fabrics, for example, may lose much of their texture and fibers during aggressive vacuuming or rotary cleaning. These fibers may also clog up your vacuum cleaner or extractor, causing problems.

Our routine for sensitive materials and fabrics is to use absorption. Absorption incorporates the dispersal of power directly onto the surface of the material. SERVPRO can adapt truck-mounted extractors to disperse powders quicker over a large surface area. These powders absorb odor particles as well as smoke. SERVPRO technicians find they are effective at recovering porous materials like marble, brick, and concrete, as well as fabrics, upholstery, and drapery. Once soiling is absorbed, we can use light vacuums to remove them from the affected material.

Fragile materials that are a part of your home environment could suffer permanent harm without the correct cleaning method. Contact SERVPRO of Greenwood, Abbeville & McCormick Co. at 864-229-6610.