Best ways to remove smoke odors during fire damage cleanup.
Home fires represent one of the most dreaded disaster by homeowners. The impact of a home fire can easily affect your life for a long period of time. The after-fire cleaning is one of the important steps to take in order to get back to a more normal life. After dealing with this kind of disasters, you will most likely have an awfully long to-do list, one of the tasks on this list will surely be cleaning.
This might sound like the easy part, especially if you hire the right professionals. However, dealing with the smoke odor represents big challenge during such situations. The smoke is always known to linger for a while, and if you do not know how to get rid of it properly, it will be several days or even months before you start breathing fresh air in your home again. If this describes your current situation, then we have a few tips you can use to remove smoke odor when undertaking a fire damage cleanup, Read below to find out how.
Understand the specific places to target
Smoke odor is likely to affect every material or every item in your home. It is important to know that some items or places will not be affected by the odor for long. For such items, allowing proper aeration will be enough, for other items/materials, a much deeper cleaning will be required.
For example, the method you will use to clean a wall will be quite different from cleaning your carpets or upholstery when getting rid of the smoke odor. The important thing to remember is that you need to understand how the smoke odor affects the various materials in your house so that you have a proper understanding of the kind of care you will give them. This is obviously a lot of work; this is why we advise you to get in touch with your preferred fire damage cleanup crew for further assistance.
Getting rid of the odor in your house
The first step towards getting rid of the odor from the house is to open all the doors and windows to allow some fresh air inside. With proper circulation, most of the smoke particles responsible for the odor will be removed naturally, hence, leaving only those that are attached to the items inside the house. The second step is to remove all items in the affected rooms, such items should only be brought back into the room once they have been cleaned and treated. This includes furniture, carpets and rugs, upholstery, electronics, and curtains, among others. Moreover, taking all the items out of the house will also allow you to visually assess the damage to then determine the kind of care each item requires.
Take care of the carpets
One of many purposes of after-disaster cleaning Montreal is to clean rugs and carpets. These are usually the number one source of smoke odor. You could clean everything in the house, but if you ignore rugs and carpets, you will never be able to fully get rid of the smell. Depending on the fabrics of your carpets, you may choose to clean on your own or to hire professional odor removal experts to help you with the cleaning process as well as odor removal. We recommend the latter because it is the easiest way to ensure that all your carpets and rugs are thoroughly cleaned, especially after a disaster.
Do not ignore the HVAC system.
Certain components of your HVAC system can absorb smoke particles which, compromising the quality of the air that you breathe. After a fire incident, it is important that you replace all the filters to promote clean air. Also, it is always a good practice to have your system inspected after a fire disaster. This step will help you ensure that none of the components were compromised due to the fire.
Wash and dry all the fabric items.
Items such as curtains, seat covers, and other upholstery will also require thorough cleaning if you are to get rid of the smoke odor from your home. The good thing with these is that they can be quickly and easily taken care of by the after-disaster cleaning brigade if you choose to have experts help you out with the cleaning. However, you can also choose to do the cleaning yourself, though this option may be time consuming. Let our experts help you easing the process.
Do not forget about the walls!
The best way to get rid of smoke odor from the walls is to first wash them and then allow plenty of fresh air in order to for the walls to fully dry. However, depending on the intensity of the fire and how long it took before it was put out, this may not be enough. In such cases, you may consider repainting the walls to completely get rid of the odor and to give your interiors a fresh new look.
Hire professionals
Though you may be able to conduct fire damage cleanup and remove all the odors by yourself, it is likely to take you a lot of time, and you may be ill-equipped for this process. To save you time, money, and lots of headaches, simply seek the services of after-disaster cleaning experts such as KBS Maintenance. With us, all the smoke odors will disappear within a noticeably short period of time, allowing you to enjoy the comfort of your house again.