Fire Damage Experts in Jaffrey Talk About Sorting Clean and Claim Items

9/16/2018 (Permalink)

Both wet and dry smoke can affect your household items during a fire. Contact SERVPRO to help you through this tough time.

Team SERVPRO can Help Determine Which Items Need Replacement and Which can be Refinished

If a fire ever ignites inside your Jaffrey home, several different types of problems can take place. All of the conditions created during the blaze including excessive heat and smoke can cause fire damage to your property. The heat coming from the burn can char items forcing them to be refinished or replaced. Smoke consists of partially combusted materials and can also ruin things by coating them with soot residues and making them smell burnt. When mitigating fire damage, our SERVPRO technicians address problems with both heat and smoke.
 
Once the blaze ignites, it can spread quickly using anything in its way as fuel to grow. The smoke created during a fire damage project in Jaffrey can vary depending on what was burned and how hot the fire was. When things burn hot and have plenty of oxygen the smoke created is called dry smoke. When items burn more slowly and are oxygen-starved wet smoke is put out. In most cases, a structure will get affected by various amounts of wet and dry smoke.
 
Dry smoke tends to be less sticky and does not adhere well to surfaces making it easy to clean off. Whereas, wet smoke adheres very well to most surfaces and can sometimes be impossible to remove. In some situations, our SERVPRO team is unable to clean items that are covered in soot residues, and they must be replaced.
 
Whenever we are dealing with affected contents of your home, we keep a detailed inventory list of everything that was in the affected area. During the initial estimate, our estimators use a test cleaning kit to determine what we think we can restore and what must be replaced and counted as a loss. We then keep track of each of your items and sort them in either the "clean" or "claim" category.
 
Objects only become claim items when we know for sure that we cannot restore the item. Some items that are questionable we will record the chances that we can get the item cleaned as a percentage. For example, if we think there is a 70% chance that we can restore an item by cleaning we will record that in the inventory list and initial estimate.
 
After a fire ignites inside your house, call SERVPRO of Cheshire County at (603) 352-7251 immediately.

Click here for more information on the city of Jaffrey.