Water has damaged your carpets. Maybe you acquired a toilet leak, maybe your water heater burst, maybe your child left the faucet operating in the sink all night.

What in the event you do to dry your wet floor covering to minimize harm to your carpeting and pad?

First of all, generally there is some general information about carpets you need to know that applies to all of the myths .

General Information about Water and Carpets

Residential carpet usually has a pad underneath it. The pad could be anywhere from 1/4 inch to almost an inch heavy. The pad provides cushioning and gives your carpet that comfortable, soft feel when you walk on it.

Commercial carpet in offices and stores generally doesn't have pad underneath it.

Carpet pad absorbs drinking water such as a sponge: The issue with pad under a floor covering is that it's a sponge and may hold often it's own weight in water.

Pad is designed to cushion your foot, so it is spongy naturally and will absorb water like the washing sponge in your kitchen sink.

Carpet doesn't stop https://www.netvibes.com or hold much water:

Although your carpet may feel extremely solid under your ft, it offers hardly any resistance to water passing through it.

Carpet is actually like a sieve to water. A typical carpet will not hold more than a few ounces of water per square foot of floor covering before it is saturated. After these preliminary few ounces of drinking water have entered the carpeting, any further water filters right through the carpeting and in to the pad.

Water loves to travel:Drinking water doesn't stay place, it is always on the road. The rule to keep in mind is "Wet would go to Dry". Water will automatically move towards a dry building material.

Water at the center of a room will circulation through the carpeting and across the pad to the wall space. It'll https://www.washingtonpost.com/newssearch/?query=carpet cleaning migrate to the edges of the area in a matter of a few minutes or hours depending on just how much water was spilled.

When you touch the floor covering at the edge of the area, it may not even experience damp, but the pad could possibly be saturated. This is often noticed using an infrared video camera. An infrared (or Thermal Imaging) camera is useful in finding the real area that the water has damaged, even if you can't see or experience it.

In general I would say that the real wet area in any flood (found with professional water damage and mold meters) is about twice how big is what the home owner reports.

An infrared camera will present how water travels beneath the carpeting through the pad. Also in a 'small' flood, water can migrate through wall space and finish up 2 rooms away within 12 hours.

Bearing the information above in brain, here are some common myths about wet carpets and how exactly to dry wet carpets

Myth #1. The carpeting will dry alone

This is actually true, just like it is true that you could win the lottery with one ticket.

Yes, the carpet will eventually dry alone. However, does it smell bad or have mold on it by the time it is dry? How many other damage will occur as the carpet dries alone?

Unless you reside in someplace like Arizona or the desert where you have high temperature and low humidity, there is VERY little chance that the carpet and pad will dry before mold starts growing or bacteria start creating that wet best carpet cleaners near me carpet, damp smell. Typically you have about 72 hours to dry wet building materials before they start growing mold.

Even if the floor covering itself dries, does that mean the pad is dried out? There is quite little opportunity that the pad is usually dried out. The pad holds more moisture than carpeting and is avoided from very easily releasing the moisture due to the carpeting above it and the sub-floor below it. Therefore even if your carpeting is dried out, the pad is typically not dry.

Which brings us to another point. How about the wet sub-ground? Remember that carpet is like a sieve, and the carpet will pass water right down to the pad very quickly. A saturated pad can then release water in to the sub-floor.

Drying Sub-floors

Sub-floors are often either wood or concrete.

Cement sub floors are sponges too, except they are extremely sluggish sponges. They absorb drinking water surprisingly quickly, but discharge it very slowly. So even if the carpeting and pad are dried quickly, the concrete sub-floor could still discharge moisture for weeks.

Wood sub-floors hold water too. If they're made of chip-board/particle plank/press-board (little chips of wood held together with glue) plus they are wet for lots of hours they absorb water, expand, and eliminate their structural integrity.

When wet particle table dries it has minimal strength and you may end up stepping https://en.search.wordpress.com/?src=organic&q=carpet cleaning through your floor if you are not careful.

Plywood or OSB (Oriented Strand Board) are much more hardy options for a sub-floor than particle panel. If they obtain wet, you can dried out them, so long as they haven't been sitting wet for long plenty of to warp. This falls loosely under the 72 hour rule. Another concern is dried out rot which is a bacterial deterioration that will take 21 days to manifest at lower dampness levels.

Determining whether the sub-floor is normally wet or not can only reliably be done with a penetrating moisture meter. Different building components have different acceptable degrees of moisture, therefore you utilize the meter to let you know if the materials is acceptably dried out or not.

Based on the region you live in, plywood is dry at around 20% Equivalent Dampness Content (EMC). In as little as 4 days, mold can start growing on wet plywood if not really dried correctly.

So, https://www.diigo.com we know that the carpet and pad are unlikely to dry out quickly enough by themselves. But even if they did, is that all you have to bother about when your carpets and rugs are wet? No, it's not.

Like I said, WET would go to DRY. This implies the water will keep spreading outwards from the foundation.

Using one flooded carpet work we did, the carpet 1st got wet about 12 carpet cleaning El Dorado Hills hours before we arrived. During that time the home owner used her wet vac to suck up as much water as feasible from the wet carpet - about 100 gallons.

She simply wanted us to dry her carpets. However, using the infrared surveillance camera and moisture meters, we found that her wall space were wet, in some places to almost 12" above the carpet.

Wet drywall, is a problem?

The problem with wet drywall may be the usual 72 hour problem.

In less than 72 hours mold can begin growing on that wet dried out wall. Mold specifically likes dark, warm places without airflow. That describes the wall structure cavity - an ideal place for mold to grow.

So that is the problem - wet floor covering creates wet drywall that may create mold. Below is certainly an image of a wall after water had been standing for a long period.

In summary. Yes, the carpeting carpet cleaning near me will eventually dry alone. But you'll more than likely have got mold and smells by enough time it is dry, and then you'll be ripping walls and carpeting out to repair the problem

Myth #2. You need to take away the wet pad underneath your carpet

There is a myth that you can't remove water from a wet pad, even with commercial extraction equipment. Individuals who state this are talking about the standard rug cleaning 'wand' demonstrated on the proper. It is what is commonly used to clean carpets. It sprays hot water onto the floor covering and then sucks it back up again.

The wand is made to pull water out of the carpet fibers, not the pad and it can a good job at that. If you have water damage on commercial carpet without a pad, the wand is a great tool to use.

However, on residential carpet with a pad, it extracts almost none of the drinking water from the pad.

So how carry out you get drinking water out from the pad so you need not remove and discard the pad?

There are a number of new commercial extraction tools that will remove water from the pad. Our favorite is certainly the FlashXtractor. It is a wonderful device, probably the best tool. (We've no affiliation with the makers of this tool, and receive no compensation for mentioning it)

The FlashXtractor will pull buckets of water out a carpet that is wand extracted to death!

Before tools like the FlashXtractor came out, there was a method called "floating the carpet" which was used to dry carpet and pad because of the poor job the wand did of extracting drinking water from the pad.

To float a floor covering, you pull up a part of http://edition.cnn.com/search/?text=carpet cleaning the carpet and stick an atmosphere mover or carpet enthusiast under the floor covering to blow air under the carpeting and onto the pad. While this technique still works it is slower, less effective, and often stretches the carpet so that it doesn't fit properly when restretched.