Drying Water Damaged Structures

7/17/2019 (Permalink)

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Often times, plumbing failures happen in NOVA and a small crack inside a water pipe can spill hundreds of gallons of water into your home or business in a short period. Once moisture begins to leak into the interior of the property, many of the contents and building materials can become the victim of water damage. In more extreme situations, saturated building materials must be removed and replaced. Whenever our technicians mitigate water damage in any building, we work towards drying out and saving materials as opposed to removing and replacing them.  

The applied structural drying process, commonly referred to ASD, can save you and your insurance carrier money during the restoration phase of the loss. When mitigating water damage in NOVA, our team knows that it’s less disturbing to the occupants of the building to have us dry the structure rather than demolishing it. Although, if building materials lose their structural integrity once they get saturated, then the replacement of items becomes necessary.  

During many plumbing failure situations, several items such as carpeting and drywall become water damaged.  Our water restoration technicians at SERVPRO can usually dry these items using air movers to circulate the air in the building and dehumidifiers to remove the moisture from the air. However, some building materials such as exterior walls can be tricky to dry out.  

A layer of insulation is included in most exterior walls. It’s installed to trap heat inside of a structure but it may also work as a barrier to prevent air from getting pushed into exterior walls. In some situations, when insulation gets wet, the R-value drops and the material must get removed.  

However, when dealing with fiberglass insulation air can get pushed through the material, and exterior walls can be dried and saved. In other situations, our technicians drill holes on the bottom and top of the drywall so that air can circulate inside the wall cavities and dry out the exterior walls.