Harriman's Commercial Water Damage Experts Describe How Moisture Affects Various Materials

7/3/2022 (Permalink)

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SERVPRO Treats Water and Moisture Removal According to the Nature of the Wet Element

If your bakery and cafe located in Harriman ever become the victim of a water pipe or appliance malfunction, water can flood the building. Excessive moisture inside a structure can cause many issues including the decreased structural integrity of drywall and the breakdown of carpet glues. The longer any building materials are left wet, the better chance they have of falling apart structurally rendering them useless. If organic substances stay wet for longer than two days, microbial growth can occur.

Some materials inside your place of business can resist water better than others. When working on a commercial water damage job in Harriman, our SERVPRO technicians use their knowledge of how moisture interacts with different materials when figuring out the overall scope of the project. Whether materials get affected by water or not depends on how readily they absorb water from the air. This article does not touch on the possible water damage to baking products.

Permeance is the measure of water vapor flow through a material. Very porous materials like carpet and upholstery have a high permeance level. They absorb and release moisture easily. Non-porous materials such as plastic, glass, or vinyl have low permeance factors meaning that they absorb little or no moisture at all.

Vapor barriers are substances that are either waterproof or have a permeance of one perm or less. When a material has one perm of permeance, it means that during one hour only 1 grain of water vapor could pass through 1 square foot of the material’s surface. A vapor barrier is a material that water cannot pass through or is extremely negligible at best such as vinyl wallpaper.

Hygroscopic materials are ones that easily absorb and hold onto water vapor from the air. Having a high permeance factor also means that these materials can be dried more quickly when they do get wet. However, once these materials like fabric, insulation, and carpet do get wet, they get damaged quickly. Once the hygroscopic substances get saturated, they tend to swell. Just as a sponge absorbs water quickly, it can be squeezed to relinquish that moisture also quickly.

When drying a structure, our SERVPRO restoration team concentrates on drying out hygroscopic materials first. Next, we work on specialty drying of materials with vapor barriers or other substances with low permeance. For help with rapid structural drying after a water leak occurs in your bakery or retail shop, call SERVPRO of Loudon & Roane Counties at (865) 986-3015 24 hours a day.