How to Clean Fire Damaged Fabrics

2/21/2020 (Permalink)

Cleaning Fabrics After a Fire Often Requires the Professionals at SERVPRO Bath

Fire creates smoke, and smoke can spread throughout an entire building or home. Because smoke rises with the heat and attaches to cooler surfaces, this can cause extensive damage to your property. Soot and soil residue are left behind from gases as the fire burns and touch surfaces throughout your home. Every room in your home and business can be affected because smoke travels. Many fire damage restoration projects in and around the Bath area often require a lot of soot removal and cleaning during the process. Different types of fires emit different kinds of smoke, based on the way it burns. SERVPRO Bath technicians employ a wide variety of cleaning techniques to clean different surfaces inside different spaces. 

When technicians first arrive, their top priority is to test and clean your materials and belongings that were affected. To do this and begin the restoration process, the SERVPRO Bath team determines what can be salvaged and what soot removal process will be work best for each item.

Often times, items inside the home, like carpets and furniture are affected by soil and soot residues. Our trained team has the experience to know what types of methods to use when cleaning residues from fabrics based on the types of soot present. For example, because heat rises, many times carpet can be restored through a cleaning process. However, in some cases carpet collects the fallout of burnt smoke particles.

To clean carpets, SERVPRO technicians start by dry vacuuming the entire affected area. Our vacuums are equipped with high-efficiency filters that can be useful when removing light soot residues from fabrics. However, when soot residues are soaked deeper into carpets, we clean them with detergents and deodorizers.

If any of your upholstered items, such as furniture and draperies, get damaged, we can often remove the residue with dry cleaning methods. If the soot is only on the surface, vacuuming or dry sponges are usually able to get soils from upholstered furniture. In some cases, soot residues can cause furniture to stain. If this occurs, we can clean them with a one percent chlorine bleach cleaning solution to remove any stains.

If you have soot or soil residue following a fire, call SERVPRO of Bath at 252-923-0213.