Does Cleaning My Centerville Home After a Fire Remove Odors?

4/15/2020 (Permalink)

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Smoke Odors Can Be a Challenge to Remove, But Our Professionals Have Many Tools and Products to Get the Job Done.

After a fire loss incident, you might find that the damage has stayed localized to a specific area. However, migrating effects like odors have penetrated almost every area of the house. This situation might be even worse when structural damage and the destructive effects of a fire encompass more than a small area of your Centerville property. Cleaning up after a fire loss can be easier said than done, as different materials and areas of the house require different approaches to protect underlying substrates.

When you consider how quickly and thoroughly the spread of fire damage in Centerville homes occurs, it can show how critical fast-responding technicians are in this situation. Even in the reduction and eventual neutralization of smoke and fire odors, steps to make odor elimination more efficient can begin with the arrival of our emergency responders. There are many ways that we can limit the concentration and continued spread of smoke scents.

Will Fire Odors Disappear on Their Own? 

It is a common belief that given enough time, fire effects like odors dissipate and disappear on their own. In truth, while it might appear as though the effects have wavered some, it might be due to a closing of the pores in the affected materials in the fire-damaged areas. When temperatures in the house rise again naturally, pores can reopen and spread a smoke smell throughout the property once again. The only effective way to address this is during the mitigation and restoration phases of your home following fire losses with sophisticated equipment.

Some materials are more susceptible and sensitive than others when it comes to absorbing smoke and fire odors. Often, this has much to do with the permeance of these materials and how likely they are for gases and liquids to penetrate surface layers and infiltrate the molecular structure of the structural element or content. Some of the most vulnerable in your home are:

• Drywall
• Wood Framing
• Soft Materials
• Porous Surfaces
• Carpets
• Fabrics

What Can Reduce Odors from a Fire? 

Reducing the immediate severity of odors is a step that is often left to the emergency technicians responding to the disaster. By implementing some of these practices, we can reduce the great lengths necessary to neutralize odors without slowing the spread of it.

• Debris Removal 

One of the first steps that our SERVPRO team can take is to remove rubbish, debris, and charred remnants of structural elements and contents out of the house. These piles of ash and debris can be highly concentrated points of odor circulation.

• Cleaning

Cleaning surfaces and exposed contents might be part of the mitigation and restoration phases, but it can also help to reduce the severity of odors and threatening circumstances like soot circulation.

• Content Management

It is no surprise that one of the priorities of the customers that we serve is the belongings in their house, and these items can become odor hot spots as well. With content management practices like pack-outs, we can remove damaged possessions to our nearby facility for cleaning, deodorization, and storage until mitigation completes.

What Equipment is Best for Fire Odor Removal? 

Choosing one piece of equipment for odor removal is much like traveling through Tallahassee in the same way every day, regardless of traffic patterns, the time, or construction projects. You might always get where you are going eventually, but there are often more efficient routes than the same path over and over. We have several critical pieces of deodorization equipment, including:

• Thermal Foggers

Foggers are a versatile piece of equipment. By superheating deodorizing products to a vapor fog, the gaseous compound can penetrate porous materials with trapped odors to neutralize these odor molecules permanently.

• Hydroxyl Machines

By using the same natural reactions from our atmosphere with UV interacting with water droplets, we can use this equipment to clean environments and eliminate odors with the production of hydroxyl radicals. The onboard HEPA filter can help to reduce circulating debris as well.

• Ozone Generators

A machine that divides an oxygen molecule in two produces an unstable result that bonds with odor compounds in the environment and breaks them apart. Ozone itself is harmful to be exposed to, so this is only a beneficial approach in a vacated house or our warehouse’s ozone chamber, which can eliminate odors in several items simultaneously.

Odors can often be one of the most troublesome aspects of fire recovery, but our SERVPRO of North Leon County team can help. We have experienced professionals ready 24/7 to reach out when you need it most. Give us a call anytime at (850) 536-6599.