The Most Important Thing You Need to Know About Fire Damage in Covina

10/25/2019 (Permalink)

After fire damage strikes your home call SERVPRO to remediate the damage.

Fire Damage Professionals In Covina Talk About Refinishing Charred Materials

When something burns inside your Covina home, the flames can spread, and the heat created can ruin your building materials and contents. Many types of fire damage exist in the form of partially burnt items. In some situations, objects inside your house get burnt so badly that the have to be removed and replaced. In other cases, many of the burnt and charred items can get refinished and saved from being removed and replaced.

The first step to saving burnt or charred items by refinishing during a fire damage situation in Covina is to remove the burnt materials. When dealing with wooden items, the general rule is that if the charring goes into the material deeper than a quarter-inch, then the object must be replaced. However, if the charred material is less than a quarter inch deep into the item, then we can remove the soot and refinish the item. Refinishing your building materials and contents can be much cheaper than having to replace everything that got burnt. Therefore, our SERVPRO technicians always strive towards cleaning and refinishing items to help save you and your insurance company money.

Sometimes, the best way to remove charred materials is to use a brush or sander to agitate the burnt surface. When using hand sanders, our SERVPRO crew then uses a vacuum equipped with a HEPA filter to vacuum up all of the soot so that it does not soil any other previously unaffected area. But, sometimes the burnt area is large, and sanding and brushing methods can become too time-consuming.

In cases where we are dealing with large areas, more abrasive blasting methods can help us save time and money. Two methods often used to help restore burnt items are soda blasting and dry ice blasting.

Dry ice blasting uses carbon dioxide pellets that change from a solid to a gas as soon as they contact the affected surface. This rapid change in chemical states causes a miniature explosion when the volume instantly expands by 800 times. Soda blasting uses baking soda as its blasting medium. The baking soda getting blasted onto affected surfaces removes soot by agitation, and the baking soda particles also react with odor-causing soot particles and help neutralize them.

The more items you can save after a disaster, the better off you will be. If you call SERVPRO of Azusa / Covina at, (626) 387-4111 because we can help you find the cheapest methods to restore your home to its preloss state "Like it never even happened."

Click here to learn more about the city of Covina.