Wildfire Smoke and Your Home

Recent fires in California are spreading heavy amounts of smoke and ash over Redding, other cities, and even other states. Recent reports show smoke from California fires has traveled all the way to the East coast, visible to the naked eye! With the Carr fire near Redding, smoke and ash are thickening the air relentlessly.

Now, it’s challenging to merely keep a neighbor’s second-hand smoke from wafting in and affecting your carpet and upholstery – and Preferred Carpet Care helps with that challenge. However, the smoke from this natural disaster is simply unavoidable. Unless your home is hermetically sealed, the particles causing odors and discolorations are already penetrating your furniture and carpet. After the smoke has cleared, those particles remain. You might not notice them anymore, but your in-laws visiting from Ogden Utah probably will.

Thankfully, Preferred Carpet Care has experience and equipment to successfully meet this challenge, and we will discuss those. But first, let’s discuss what you can do on your own to protect your loved ones and yourself in this situation.

Protecting Your Home from Smoke Damage

Here are just a few tips to implement to keep your home and family safe from the effects of smoke damage:

• Try to keep the air in your home as clean as possible.
• Keep windows and doors closed.
• If you have a portable air cleaner, this will help with at least one room in the house.
• Run your air conditioner, but make sure the fresh air intake is closed – and periodically check on the filters.
• If you really need to go outside, see if you have a respirator on-hand (The EPA recommends an N95 respirator). If absolutely nothing else, try to use a fabric covering over your mouth and nose, like a damp bandana or handkerchief.

This article has some additional tips and pointers for protecting your lungs from wildfire smoke.

Some customers ask us if vacuuming regularly with help. Our answer? Not necessarily. If your vacuum is not equipped with HEPA filters, it won’t trap the microscopic particles that cause the odors and damage. It will simply redistribute them into the air. That’s where Preferred Carpet Care comes in.

Preferred Carpet Care – Safeguarding Your Families Health

Preferred Carpet Care’s proven method of repairing fire and smoke damage includes using modern vacuums with multiple HEPA filters. That gets rid of the surplus, but we certainly don’t stop there. We also use an Ozone machine to neutralize the molecules causing the odors. We then wipe down all the hard surfaces as needed, to remove any rested particles. Finally, we thoroughly clean your carpet, rugs and upholstery, address your shades and drapes, and check with you in a week or two to find out if any issues remain.

Eventually, all the California fires will be contained. With the help of Preferred Carpet Care, the aftereffects of odors and carpet damage will also be contained. If you have any questions regarding other preventative steps, or when to begin treating your carpets, please contact us. We will be happy to clear the smoke from your concerns.