Fire Damage Technicians Out of New Hope Discuss Cleaning Techniques

4/24/2022 (Permalink)

Regardless whether the fire affected your kitchen or another room in your home, team SERVPRO offers cleanup and effective remediation services.

Smoke and Soot Cleanup Can Be Challenging--Call SERVPRO for Help

When most think about a fire starting at their house in New Hope, they realize that burnt building materials may need to be replaced. Any structural components that received charring must either be treated or repaired. After problems with burnt materials are mitigated, other issues related to smoke can exist. Smoke spreads throughout a structure leaving behind soils and soot residues.

Residues can ruin the finish on some objects and produce burnt aromas. One significant part of restoring fire damage in New Hope is cleaning and removing soils created by smoke. The difficulty of cleaning these residues varies based on the type of soot present, and what kinds of elements got affected. When synthetic materials like plastics burn, the soot generated is more challenging to remove than soils left behind from fires that burn mainly organic elements such as wood.

The soot removal process usually involves a combination of methods and specialized chemicals. Our SERVPRO technicians use cleaning solutions to release soils from being stuck onto surfaces. In most cases, we must use some form of agitation to cause friction that aids in the releasing of soot particles. In some scenarios, mechanical action can remove residues without using any type of chemical.

Some mechanical actions produce mild agitation and can be used to clean most surfaces. Feather dusters can often be used to remove soot from hard surfaced furniture items. Paint brushes can work well when cleaning decorations and ornaments. On surfaces like walls, carpets, and upholstery vacuuming can help pull particles off of the surface. Typically, the first choice of cleanup of smoke and soot is to vacuum dry areas and then move on to another step with detergents. Other things get cleaned well using compressed air to blow off the soot.

When soot residues adhere strongly, and the affected surfaces can withstand more agitation, methods like dry sponges prove to be useful. Dusting cloths containing light mineral oils also work well to clean soils. Crumbly cleaners work like a graphite pencil erase and crumble away as they clean objects. When wet cleaning products are used, our SERVPRO restoration crew uses cleaning towels to scrub items.

In certain situations, choosing the best method that can remove the soot and not ruin the object can be difficult. Many times we try multiple techniques until we find the one that works the best for your specific situation. For help with soot removal after something burns on your property, call SERVPRO of North Raleigh & Wake Forest at (919) 790-1222 seven days a week.