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Salvaging Possessions from Smoke Damage?
SnowDeath asks: "My home caught on fire last Wednesday while my girlfriend and I were off watching the new Harry Potter movie and now we are pretty much left with crap. Most of our stuff didn't get damaged by fire, but rather severly smoke damaged. Does anyone have any suggestions for getting that horid smoke damage out of out clothes, furniture, and computer parts (our mobos were destroyed by smoke)?" Those who would like to donate a buck or two to SnowDeath's "Oh crap, my house caught fire and now I have nothing!" relief fund can go here.
Oh, wrong movie.
This is a job for a pro. They can do it right and you'll never get it out yourself. Please don't muck with it and make it worse.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
THey have good advice on this.(You do have insurance, right? I hope) My parents had the same thing happen. I think for the clothes and stuff they were told to use either that orange clean stuff or that oxy clean you see in commercials. Ill check and post again in the nexe couple of days. Also, for things that cant be washed, they have ionization treatments or something like that, but its expensive and takes a few weeks, i believe.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
My roof is kinda leaky and I have no money to pay someone to fix it. I dont have paypal (no credit card) but if you want to contribute to my keep-eggy-from-waking-up-at-4am-with-freezing-rain water-falling-on-his-head fund, email me at eggstasy@clix.pt :)
:)
Will also take random computer-related tasks such as web development and other programming things.
I'm a portuguese C.S. student and I know most of the right buzzwords and have had some professional web-dev experience too.
Check out some (paid) projects i've been working on:
http://mco.edunau.net
http://porao.edunau.net
http://www.telespot.pt
I can also do translations. I've had some prof. exp. translating stuff from english to portuguese and back. Can do other languages such as french and spanish. Any takers?
Surely Portugal deserves the cash.
Can't you farm one goat and get a 500 euro subsidy?
I can relate. Had a fire in my apartment building last May. Started at the other end of the building, flames were stopped before they passed the walls into my living room, but the smoke and water damage was severe.
For good clothes: Find a good dry cleaner. One with experience in treating smoke damage, or who can outsource it to someone who does.
For average clothes: A few good washes with OxyClean (or similar product) works very well.
Furniture: Well, all I had was old hand-me-downs that weren't worth keeping. If you've got something worth keeping, find a professional.
Computer: This is a tough one. My computer was on when the smoke was filling the air, so the inside got pretty much coated with beads of tar. I ended up claiming it as a loss and building myself a new one. One or two of the parts were semi-salvageable with very careful cleaning, but no doubt the lifespans were shortened.
Books, small items: If it wasn't ruined by water from the firehoses, my suggestion is to put them in a large Rubbermaid-style plastic bin for a few months. Duct-tape around the edge to keep the odor in, and toss a box of baking soda in. (Arm & Hammer makes these boxes now with tear-off side panels that are great for deodorizing.) Works wonders.
Best of luck.
Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
What you have is a really common problem -- smoke is nastier than fire in some ways! -- so teh good news is there is a lot of help available. Even this Heloise I recall reading in the newspaper.
:)
Search the net for info and products. The OxyClean product is a good thing, as is Simple Green, where appropriate, because they're relatively pleasant to work with. I know if you're dealing with rehabbing the house/apartment, but if you do be sure you or the contractor knows about the special challenges in concealing the damage permanently, and getting rid of the smell.
If you have insurance, talk to them about what damaged items it might be better to just declare a total loss and replace.
Condolences. I hope you enjoyed the movie more than I did.
I hope you aren't still sensitive about this because the hounds are going to tear this story apart.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
For smoke smell try ozone. You can hire a restoration company to bring one in, buy one for several hundred dollars or rent one from a rental place. That's what the pros use to deal with flood and fire smells.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Maybe Hemos has some suggestions.
I don't know much about smoke damage. I suspect since you were out that you didn't get a chance to use one of those home fire extinguishers. The ones that shoot yellow dust everywhere. That stuff is a bitch to get out. I had a rack of CD's that got covered. I had some limited success with 409 getting it out of the plastic but not the liner notes.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
--you want one of these things, an aranizer.
They use these things to clean air and all the stuff the air touches, hospitals use them someplaces, meat markets, places with that nasty mold in the walls, etc. Also good for folks with allergies and just general "better" air. It has all the benefits of all the other ozone generators out there, without putting out the nitrous acid stuff. As far as I know they are the only company with that claim.
As an aside, I'm a serious survivalist/prepper. One of the things that this community recommends is "distributed" storage of your gear,you do it with your electronic data, just take the concept to meatworld. The simplest way is to swap with a friend, you store some of their stuff, they store some of your stuff, and now you know one of the reasons why, sorry it came the hard way. You swap a set of basic things for long term storage, food, gear,personal clothing, important papers, medkits, etc, etc, the basics you would need in just such a case as a catastrophic fire. It can get more complicated after that, such as underground cacheing, etc, but that straight mutual storage concept is a good one. It's the old "don't put all your eggs in one basket" deal.
Good luck on the rebuild!
"My home caught on fire last Wednesday while my girlfriend and I were off watching the new Harry Potter movie"
<NELSON>
HA HA!
</NELSON>
Punishment fits the crime, et al.
that this Internet begging stuff can be quite fruitful. One woman raised something like $27,000 just begging it from people.
I guess getting a story of hardship posted on Slashdot and then begging makes good fiscal sense.
(Yes, I'm being harsh...but....really.....lots of us have hardship and aren't tacky enough to resort to asking for cash on Slashdot!).
-psy
just take up smoking, in a week, you won't know the difference ;)
just kidding, my teacher many years ago had all of her stuff subject to heavy airconditioner-on-fire type smoke, never did get over the smell of her room.. so many books lost (i hated her anyways, though)
I used to repair fire-damaged structures for a living, so I've seen this more than a few times.
The easiest, and often cheapest, thing to do is throw everything away and cash an insurance check for new stuff.
For the stuff you don't want to throw away (because it is sentimental or otherwise irreplaceable), try Formula 409, Simple Green, or another general-purpose detergent. Use a brush, a cloth, or whatever seems appropriate.
Electronics can have a tendancy to not survive such cleaning, however. There's (at least) a thousand types of glue used to hold the bits that comprise them together, and no telling how they'll react to chemical treatment.
Water, of course, is generally harmless, but has limited application on smoke residue.
A friend of mine's house burned a few years ago, and the fire department vented the ceiling of his computer room...which is to say that vast amounts of smoke and steam went flying past his gear. I found a number of CDs in that room with their jewel cases melted off of them.
Most of it is still working justfine today without any cleaning, though the CDs did require some special care to come back to life.
You'll also do well to hire a company who specializes in such cleaning projects, if you want to try salvaging stuff. I used to contract with Serv-Pro (they've got offices all over - check the phone book), and they were often able to restore things to new.
Plus, they had a fleet of athletic 18-24 girls to do the work, which always brightened up my workday.
Once you're ready to start painting and carpeting, make sure you coat everything with a good primer. I usually rented a fairly serious airless paint sprayer, and used Killz, or Pro-Block from Sherwin Williams. Killz does a somewhat better job, being shellac, but the alcohol base will kill you dead if you're not extremely careful with your respirator. Plus, there's probably flash hazards with spraying alcohol everywhere... Pro-Block works very nearly as well, is oil-based (thus possible to coexist with) and is a great deal less expensive.
Cover the walls, ceiling, any exposed studs, the floorboards, and everything else you want to never smell of smoke again.
Kid-proof tablet..
When my house caught fire, my computer face melted, but the hard drive still worked.
Throw it in the shower. (Hey, keep reading dammit!)
Use the hottest water you can and/or 409 on everything, open up the power supply so it gets rinsed really well, take the shell off the monitor as well. (This is the only dangerous part, the caps can store a charge for several days!).
Then when everything's totally drenched and you're thinking WTF am I doing, shake as much water off as you can. Then grab your handy spray bottle of WD-40 (you can buy the stuff at the hardware store by the gallon). Use the WD40 to drive the water off and to dissolve the remaining crud. Note - do not use WD-40 on the internals of the kbd or mouse!! (You can never get the residue out of the sensors on the mouse and the kbd contacts will actually soak it up! Both bad...)
Then use a gallon or two of isopropyl alcohol (the purer the better) to clean off the WD-40 residue and to finish the kbd/mouse.
Then let everything sit with a fan blowing on it for a few hours to get the alcohol evaporated.
And for about $30 of household chemicals and a couble hours of your time it'll all be clean!
You can also use 100% evaporating electronic cleaner/degreaser instead of all the above but it'll cost 5 times as much and may not get it as clean.
I have a Tandy 1000SL and a Tandy Sensation ][ that were both in a house that was completely destroyed by fire, except for the bathroom. The computers were not in said bathroom. The casings, I threw away, but the computers themselves work just fine. I've played a lot of old DOS games on the 1000SL (Many games back in the day supported "CGA" or "Tandy CGA" which the SL has... 16 color CGA, basically.. almost as good as a C= 64... but not quite. ) and the Sensation is my LAN's web/email/mp3 server and router. The monitor that came with the Sensation was so fucked up with smoke that it took me almost a month of every day spraying the thing with "Scrubbing Bubbles" and Windex, but I was finally able to use it. i ended up making it headless, and throwing out the Tandy VGM monitor that the previous owner supplied. The casing of the monitor was so tarnished, that even after applying "Bleche-White" (a tire bleaching chemical) for months, it didn't turn anything but dull yellow.
The computers themselves, have never really been cleaned. The motherboards are still smoked black. it's been probably 8-10 years now, and they all still operate just fine. So what's your issue?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Have everything done by a professional. The best treatment for removing the smoke smell is an Ozone treatment. The do this professionally and I had all my posessions returned to me clean and fresh smelling. Try looking in your local phone book for cleaning services that specialize in water and smoke restoration. A local shop did wonders to clean up my computers and laptops that were damaged by the smoke. To treat the actual color left on object, 409 works well, as mentioned above.
what insurance company did she have? i recently read an article on insurance companies trying to screw over homeowners when a fire happens, so im trying to find out what the good ones are.
Lord Voldemort is ALIVE
No. Seriously!
Dishwasher detergent is magnificent at dislodging creosote like contaminants such as one would experience in a fire.
I used to work at a small electronics manufacturer that would, as a matter of routine, run all of their nice shiny newly soldered boards through a big ol' Kitchenaid to get the excess flux off. Worked great.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Ask Slashdot... about old wives tales now huh?
Pixels keep you awake!
Shortly after I moved to Oz,
I met a guy who was making money
"hand-over-fist" in the carpet-
cleaning business... not from
carpet cleaninhg alone, however.
He imported some US smoke-eating
technology: put the smoke-damaged
items into his sealed room, which
gets filled with a (reportedly)
safe gas, which does all the work.
Insurance companies were his biggest
customers... instead of replacing,
they paid for "smoke-removal" service.
More I do not know...
Essentially they make little machines that take some sort of dry product, and kick out ozone.
The ozone permiates everything and takes the smell out nicely.
But I will reiterate what someone above said: Hire a professional. There are people that organize this whole process. You will use several different services, but there are people that know what services those will be needed.
Some laundries specialize in the clothes and linens aspect, for instance.
He has another fund here. When I lived in an apartment, my renters insurance was $9/month.
Still have the mobo and hard drive out of their computer. HAvent had a poersupply to test the mobo, hard drive worked briefly, and the cdrom worked briefly also. If you can get the hard drive running, i would back it up IMMEDIATELY, most important data first.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
from a cigarette (or gasmask) manufacturer, put a paper bag of the stuff in with the stinky clothes in a plastic garbage bag and leave it for a few weeks. The stink will be gone.
A lesser method if you can't get activated carbon, is to use enormous amounts (many kilograms) of bicarbonate of soda in the same way, or even sprinkle it liberally on the clothes and later wash/vacuum it away.
This works. Been there....
Whoops, wrong movie.