Flood Damage In Your Chicago Home From Snowmelt

4/10/2018 (Permalink)

If your home has been the victim of flood damage from snowmelt, it is something that you need to take care of right away with professional help.

Flood Damage From Snowmelt

If you are a homeowner in Chicago with a basement, you know that it is essential to prevent water from coming into your residence. Water intrusion can have a devastating effect on the integrity of your structure. With the spring here, you need to worry about snowmelt, which is water and runoff from the melting of fallen snow. When ice and packed snow are on the ground when the temperatures rise, the warmer temps create rapid melting of snow and ice, making excess water and runoff very quickly. It, in turn, causes flooding.

If your home in Chicago has been the victim of flood damage from snowmelt, it is something that you need to take care of right away with professional help. The longer the water sits, the more in danger you are for your structure to become weakened, or sustain additional damage, such as the growth of mold. Our SERVPRO staff have the experience and tools to help you out and to get the job done fast.

Once we have extracted the standing water in your basement, the primary equipment we use in drying your home are dehumidifiers and air movers. Two guidelines we use for placing air movers are maintaining a balance between the dehumidifiers and air movers and positioning enough air movers to make airflow across all wet surfaces.

Air movers raise the rate of evaporation. As moisture evaporates from wet surfaces, the layer of air next to it becomes saturated. The higher humidity at the surface then starts slowing down the evaporation of additional moisture. Air movers send airflow over wet surfaces, blowing the air layer that is saturated away and replacing it with drier air. The dehumidifiers SERVPRO techs use create warm, dry air, but we need the air movers for circulating the dry air across wet materials and your structure.

Since air movers evaporate moisture into the airspace and dehumidifiers remove moisture from the air, we must keep the two in balance. Too few air movers in relation to dehumidifiers result in a drying process that is slower. Dehumidifiers extract more moisture when the air is holding a great deal of moisture.

Too many air movers in relation to dehumidifiers result in secondary water damages. Too many air movers mean the dehumidifiers cannot extract moisture from the air as fast as air movers are evaporating it into the air.

SERVPRO of Hyde Park / E. Bridgeport / Bronzeville has trained staff who can properly operate the equipment used in drying your home in Douglas, South Shore, or Kenwood. When your basement has flooded, call us right away at (312) 509-5000, so we can dry you back out.

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