From Wet to Dry and In Between… The Drying Process Overview

About 1.2 million homes are affected by water damage each year, with billions of dollars of insurance claims filed and costly damage. You may have been led to believe that restoring a room and its contents to normal condition after water damage is simple—just turn on a fan and let it dry for a few days, for example, and you’re done.
If so, think again. Professional water-damage restoration has come a long way. Improved structural drying technology is required to reduce the severity of the water loss and damage. It’s a complicated business, requiring a careful, scientific approach, with frequent monitoring of specific and relative humidity, temperature and moisture readings of the contents and structure, from start to finish. Otherwise, you are liable to end up with an unsatisfactory result: under drying that doesn’t get the job done, and may produce a mold condition, or needless and costly over drying, which can cause its own problems, such as wood cracking.
How long a job will take and how much dehumidification—which equipment, and how much of it--is required to accomplish the job depends on how wet the contents and air have become, the relative humidity, temperature, how effective the drying method being used turns out to be, and constant checking on the drying progress.
There is no rule of thumb, like: the drying process takes three days or six days or six weeks or a month. Jobs are dry when they’re dry. And modern methods are a must. For example, we don’t use fans to dry out wet environments any more. A fan is something you buy at the Mart for $18.95. Instead, we use high-velocity air movers, and we may need to use several units for an affected area, depending on the extent of wetness in the area. We may also bring in dehumidifiers—using a refrigerant, which reduces moisture by lowering the temperature, or a desiccant, which absorbs moisture directly. We may use high-capacity pumps to remove water from the area to begin with, and then wand extractors, then use specialized deep extraction units to remove moisture from the pad. Extraction is 1,200 times more efficient for drying than evaporation or dehumidification.
A wet-carpet service in the past would typically extract water from the carpet, replace the pad, then dry and re-install the carpet. Now, we use scientific techniques and state-of-the-art equipment that can sharply reduce the severity of damage. We delve deeply into “psychrometry”—the science of drying, which involves the relationship between temperature and relative humidity, using a psychrometric chart and calculator to figure the air’s moisture content, or GPP (grains of moisture per pound of air) from those two factors. We would already have used a thermo-hygrometer to assess the temperature and relative humidity of the air, both indoors and outdoors, which affect the drying process (low-humidity outside air can sometimes be used to dehumidify inside air, by opening doors and windows). We measure air moisture in both affected and unaffected areas indoors, to give a benchmark for restoring the environment in the affected area to the pre-loss condition. We may use moisture sensors to tell us if materials are wet or dry, and penetrating or non-penetrating moisture meters to measure the extent of wetness in building materials.
In all of this—from evaluating the moisture in the air, structures and contents to diagnosing the nature and amount of water damage to prescribing drying methods to monitoring the drying process to judging when the drying job is really done—we rely on precise standards set by the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification, or IICRC (see the institute’s website, www.iicrc.org, for the institute’s S500 Standard and Reference Guide for Professional Water Damage Restoration—2006.)
So restoring rooms and contents to pre-loss conditions has become a much more sophisticated process, just like auto repairs have moved from the days of “shade-tree mechanics”— repairing a vehicle under the shade of a tree, to computer-controlled corrective work, starting with electronic diagnosis of the vehicle’s problem. Today’s technology and science play a huge role in water damage restoration. Your water damage restoration company must be technically trained and should be certified to perform any drying or restoration work for you. Proper liability and pollution insurance is a must in today’s litigious world.
The consequences of ineffective drying and restoration can include possible health effects, secondary damage or even mold growth. Most property and home owners are not familiar with the science and technology for proper restoration, and naturally, they have a lot of questions. We’ll detail proper drying and restoration techniques in part two of this series.