PuroClean Restoration Specialists 
Untreated or improperly treated water damage is one of the top causes of unwanted growth in a home. In extreme cases, unwanted growth in your home can lead to allergies, irritations, and even death. However, there are ways to prevent unwanted growth from growing in your home, starting with proper water damage treatment. Keep reading these top tips for preventing unwanted growth after water damage.
- How to Prevent Unwanted Growth After Water Damage
- Evaluate Your Home
- Remove Furniture
- Extract Standing Water
- Dehumidify & Dry
- Deodorize Your Home
- Clean & Sanitize
- Get Help From a Water Damage Restoration Company
How to Prevent Unwanted Growth After Water Damage
Evaluate Your Home
One of the first things you need to do after having water damage in your home is to assess your home. This way, you can look for all impacted areas of water damage to make sure the entire problem can be resolved to prevent any type of future unwanted growth.
First, you should start off by looking through your entire home to see what is wet, how wet it is, and whether or not it is salvageable. This evaluation will help you know how much of your home has water in it and will allow you to establish starting points for your water removal.
After this first assessment, you may want to inspect each day to see if anything else has finished drying or if it needs additional time until it is safe to use.
Remove Furniture
After your initial assessment of your home, you need to remove all of your furniture that was damaged by the water. If your home was flooded, this might even include removing your carpet.
If your furniture isn’t salvageable, you can throw it out immediately. However, some pieces of furniture can be dried outside for several days to prevent unwanted growth from growing on your furniture.
Extract Standing Water
Once your home is cleared out, you must begin extracting the standing water inside. If there is standing water from a flood, this can keep causing water damage, so it needs to be removed as soon as possible.
Often, you can find a wet-and-dry vacuum that allows you to suck up this water from your carpet and from other areas of your home. Otherwise, you may need to hire a company to extract the water.
It is also important that you dispose of the extracted water in a safe place to avoid tainting the water supply.
Dehumidify & Dry
Extracting the standing water will get most of the water out of your home, but there will still be some water in your carpet or furniture that needs to be dried. You can do this by using drying and dehumidifying each space in your home.
If you haven’t already moved your furniture and other belongings, you need to do this now so that your home can dry properly.
You can start by placing fans and dehumidifiers in the area. This will move the air around and pull out any trapped water or moisture. These machines are also meant to increase the evaporation in your space to make it more effective.
You need to make sure the humidity levels in your home are normal before moving your furnishings back inside. Typically, mold can grow in spaces with about 60% humidity. Making sure the moisture levels in your home are normal will prevent mold from growing in the future.
Deodorize Your Home
The next step for how to prevent unwanted growth after water damage is to deodorize your home. This is because odors are a sign that something is still wet inside. Typically, your house will smell musty if there is still moisture in it.
By being extra sensitive to musty odors in your home, you can ensure your home is completely dry and that there are no undetected wet areas during the water removal process.
Clean & Sanitize
Next, you need to clean and sanitize the spaces in your home that were affected by the water damage. First, you can begin by scrubbing the walls and floors in your home. Then you can begin sanitizing each surface.
You can simply use a disinfectant or a bleach solution to clean off any exposed, hard surface in your home. Porous or absorbent materials will need to be dried before you can sanitize them.
You must finish this process as soon as possible, as unwanted growth can grow quickly. Generally, it is best to get your home clean and dry within 48 hours of the flooding.
Get Help From a Water Damage Restoration Company
Finally, you can get help from a water damage restoration company to ensure that your home does not have unwanted growth after water damage.
Our certified water damage restoration technicians are here to ensure that the obvious and hidden water-damaged areas of your property are restored – they do this while giving special care to all of your belongings and property. Water losses not handled and dried down quickly can lead to additional damage, such as microbial growth, and cause structural components to lose their integrity, potentially impact indoor air quality, and may ultimately result in compromised occupant health issues. This is why our team takes such care in assessments and uses specialized equipment and processes to ensure water damage is treated correctly.
PuroClean Restoration Specialists 