Our SERVPRO team can help you with your fire damage anytime!

11/2/2020 (Permalink)

Are you prepared?

Steps to Help Make Fire Cleanup in Your Home More Effective

A sudden flare-up in an area like the kitchen is likely to leave surfaces or fixtures such as cabinets, doors, and even the ceiling scorched or caked with soot. You can fix these damages in many ways, including replacing the degraded materials. However, you are more likely to prefer a cost-friendly solution. Fire cleanup offers that solution when done correctly.

What cleanups can achieve
Before choosing a solution such as fire cleanup in your home, it is essential to establish whether it is appropriate. Cleaning can help you deal with blackened or stained surfaces as well as bad odor. It can also restore charred surfaces effectively if the charring is not too deep. However, you cannot restore damages that compromise the structural integrity of a material.

Home-based solutions
For minor incidents, you may be able to do the cleanup on your own. Knowing particular tips can help you achieve the right outcome. To deal with surface discoloration and soot from surfaces such as walls, use warm water and detergent. Cleaning products containing TSP, tri-sodium phosphate are great for reducing smoke odors so you can look for cleaning agents containing that agent. Here is the caveat. SERVPRO techs ALWAYS pre-test detergents and cleaning agents before applying to surfaces. Often, DIY'ers smear and stain and exacerbate the fire and soot damage. Try calling us first.

Using Advanced Cleaning Procedures
While conventional methods can be useful at times, in many cases the damages left are too extensive, thus requiring advanced cleaning methods. Otherwise, you would have to replace or resurface the affected materials.  Dry ice blasting and soda blasting are two great advanced cleaning options our SERVPRO teams use. They rely on air pressure to drive the abrading material over the surface removing thick soot or charring.  Both are also mildly abrasive, so they do not cause additional damages to the surface.

To clean or not to clean?
For surfaces with unique properties such as acoustic tiles or other porous materials, wet cleaning can cause problems, including dissolving the textured surfaces. Our SERVPRO technicians use Peroxide Active cleaning, which helps remove all soils while retaining the properties of the material. Often, inexpensive, porous materials should be removed and discarded.