Professional Floor Drying Services
We know how to dry your floors – fast!
For any home or property owner water damage can be an absolute nightmare. There are many reasons you could suffer from water damage but the most common causes are burst or backed up pipes, flooding, leaky plumbing joints, a faulty appliance or simply a forgotten bathwater left running. Water can cause major problems with the main area being your floors. Cleaning up after a serious water leak or flood is bound to be messy and laborious, and time consuming. Do you have the team and the time (and the knowledge)?
There are just the two fundamental rules of cleaning up after an incident involving any level of excess water, 1) get rid of the excess water as quickly as possible, and 2) thoroughly deep-dry the entire affected area of which a mop up using all the available linen will simply not cut it. Please understand, the longer you leave the water to sit on the floors of your home or property, the more the damage worsens. This means it is not only your carpets and underlay getting soaked, your sub-floor is also sucking up the water.
That leads me into the next issue. The most common mistake that is apparent for flooded floors is that the well intentioned people attending to the clean-up assume that once the visible water has all been removed, it is dry enough to start on the repair work. I need to impress upon all that unless floors, walls etc are completely dried out, you risk locking in the damp by laying new surfaces over the top of damp floors or leaving dampness in wall cavities and thus creating even bigger problems further down the line.
With the technology of improved science and technology available to us in this current era, we can save floors that have been subjected to excessive exposure to water. Whereas there was a time that the only option you had was to rip up your floor and replace it. We have the traditional hot air blowers together with injection floor mats and that machinery together with our tented drying process* gives us a number of options to dry your wooden floors which means that you no longer have to be concerned about having to face the possibility of a floor replacement.
DRYING WOODEN FLOORS
If your timber floors have been subjected to excessive water and they have absorbed the moisture the timber begins to swell and will continue to do so until such time it is dried. Once the swelling starts it exerts pressure across the entire floor between each floorboard. With enough moisture, ‘cupping’ will occur which is when the floor begins to rise at the joints, often quite visible to the eye but in less severe swelling, only noticeable by running a hand across the joints or checking with a straight edge.
If caught in time, the floor can be dried at a pace relevant to the level of moisture in the timber and the type of timber. In most instances the floor will very slowly settle back down to its original condition thereby allowing the final stage of the drying process to commence.
There are some proviso’s to ending up with a satisfactory ending and they are;
- You needed to have removed excess moisture from the surface of your wooden floors immediately
- You have instructed a contractor within four hours of the incident (ideally)
- It is imperative that your contractor has the required skills and knowledge to not only dry your timber floor but to ensure the underside (where practicable) is also dried
- If your floor is on a concrete slab your contractor must also moisture test the concrete to ensure it is also dry and not likely to leach upwards to the surface of the concrete which could result in wood rot and mould underneath your floor
A timber floor that has suffered water damage and absorbed a considerable amount of water can be saved. But as you can see by the notes above, it is important for the client to act promptly.
DRYING SUB-FLOORS & CONCRETE SLAB FLOORS
Does concrete absorb water? There is only one answer to this, YES, you may be surprised to know that concrete is porous and will absorb water just like a sponge! You may also be surprised to know that concrete continually absorbs moisture from the air when the ambient relative humidity is high. It will evaporate as the humidity level lowers. But if your concrete floor is subjected to excessive exposure to water, then you have a serious problem that needs to be attended to.
In most instances of a burst pipe or accidental overflow in a home the concrete floor will only require a relatively low amount of attention to get it completely dried. If the carpets or other floor coverings have had to be lifted in part or whole due to the flooding, then the concrete must be completely dry before replacing those floor coverings. If this is not done, the moisture will first create mould and then it will rot the floor coverings from underneath.
There are many cases where the house concrete slab is compromised due to incorrect drain laying, undetected broken drainpipes and one of the worst culprits, raised garden beds alongside the house.
We did a job recently whereby the garden beds around the house allowed for water to sit at the edge of the concrete slab and it was slowly sucked through the concrete from 3 sides of the house. All floor coverings had to come up and we used heating mates throughout the floors together with the *Tented drying process. With the heat of the concrete surface we were able to create a capillary action which brought the moisture to the surface for evaporation. This drying process took just under two weeks.
TIP: Check around your home for any garden beds or wet areas near your house slab.
* Tented drying is a method of controlling the air space between the wood surface and the atmosphere. This process is a much slower way of drying wooden floors but does not cause rapid evaporation that could possibly lead to drywall damage.
