What Few People Know When It Comes to Dealing With Upper West Side Water Removal Issues

12/8/2019 (Permalink)

Whether the water damage in your home came from above or below, it's high time to call SERVPRO to investigate and then remediate the damage.

Water Removal Best Practices in Your Upper West Side Apartment

When water escapes into your Upper West Side living areas, ridding the space of it involves both extraction of standing water and drying out any affected structural components. The interior areas of multi-family residential buildings like lofts, high-rise, and brownstones pose some challenges when extracting and drying. Our comprehensive training from the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) offers efficient strategies to ensure we remove all water and residual moisture.

Tight Spaces Need Innovative Approaches

Our crews select from a variety of exaction equipment options when completing water removal on the Upper West Side. Portable units permit our technicians to access and service your unit even if it is many stories above street level. We establish baseline moisture levels by using detection equipment for building materials. We rely on thermal imaging cameras to locate areas where hidden pooled water might lurk behind walls, comparing differences in temperature readings.

Minimally Invasive Methods to Reach Hidden Water

When SERVPRO plans how to dry out walls in your apartment, we first check the bottom stud to see if water fills the channel. Our crew takes great care when removing baseboards to drill 1.5-inch vent holes between wall studs if water or high moisture levels are evident. Technicians protect the wall with a thin, protective board, bracing the claw hammer or nail puller we use to loosen the baseboard. The holes must pierce only the wall facing us, so that warm air we force in using a venting system moves up between your wall and your neighbors rather than leaking water or air next door.

Air Flow Techniques with Limited Cross Ventilation

In many apartments, reliable ways to establish cross-ventilation are limited or non-existent without the use of our equipment. When the SERVPRO team sets up an airflow configuration after extraction, we manipulate angles to ensure that the air movers do not direct humid air full-on into a wall. If the machinery is not set up to move air at a 45-degree angle to the verticle surface, it runs the risk of forcing more moisture into the wallboard or plaster as well as merely “bouncing” the water vapor back into the room. 

Count on SERVPRO of Upper West Side to use experience, training, and appropriate commercial-grade equipment to remove water and moisture from your loft, condo, or apartment. Call us at (917) 498-1362 without delay for the best results.

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