Water damage restoration, mold remediation and cleaning in Franklin Lakes, NJ

It is the third largest municipality in the county by area at 9.88 square miles, of which 4.75 percent is water, with numerous lakes and ponds inside the borough, including Bakers Pond, Crystal Lakes, Hopper Lake and Shadow Lake. All work is performed at the property.

The borough holds 4,051 housing units over 9.41 square miles of land, a density under 400 units per square mile, and fourteen National Register listed houses stand along Franklin Lake Road, Woodside Avenue, Ewing Avenue and Pulis Avenue. Locally the place is read by its sections, Bakers Pond, Blauvelt Lakes, Campgaw, Crystal Lakes, Ferdinands Mills and Hopper Lake. Becton Dickinson headquarters and the Reaction Motors Rocket Test Facility are here. For a wet floor none of that matters as much as what the floor is made of, so the first question on the phone is about the material under the water.

Standing water in a basement starts a clock

Wet carpet does not fail on appearance, it fails on time and on what was in the water. Clean water caught in the first day or two usually comes back with extraction, a new pad and structured drying. Water that stood longer, or that came from a sewer line or a flooded yard, is a category 3 loss, and carpet and pad in that condition are removed rather than cleaned. The decision is made with a moisture meter in the pad and the subfloor, because a pile that feels dry on top can sit on a soaked pad and a damp slab underneath it.

A borough that is almost five percent water

Franklin Lakes is the third largest municipality in Bergen County by area at 9.88 square miles, of which 4.75 percent is water, and the borough holds numerous lakes and ponds, among them Bakers Pond, Crystal Lakes, Hopper Lake and Shadow Lake. Near open water a basement can take on moisture through a foundation wall without any visible leak, and the signature is a damp band low on the block with efflorescence on the face of it. Readings are taken at marked points up the wall and on the slab, and the readings decide what comes out and what dries in place.

What the meter decides, and what it does not

Category and class are assessed to the ANSI IICRC S500 standard before anything is moved. Category describes how clean the water was when it arrived, class describes how much material is wet and how tightly it holds water, and the two together size the job. Extraction follows the assessment, drying follows extraction, and a moisture meter rather than a calendar decides when the drying stops.

Structural drying is sized to the wet material. Fixed monitoring points are set on the wet walls and floors and read each visit, and the equipment leaves when those points come back to normal against an unaffected part of the same assembly. A slab and a plaster wall release water at different rates, so one room can be finished while the next still runs air movers.

When water becomes a mold job

Growth needs moisture, a food source and time, and drywall paper, carpet pad and wood framing supply the first two in any house. The widely cited drying window is 24 to 48 hours, so a leak that has run quietly behind a cabinet or under a stair for weeks is past it. A stain on a ceiling, a musty odor in a closed closet or a floorboard lifting near a bathroom wall are all late signals.

Mold work runs under containment with HEPA filtration. The colonized material comes out, the space is dried, and the result is written down. Containment matters because cutting material without it moves spores into rooms that were clean, and a job that skips it often ends with a second complaint in a different part of the house.

Carpet, rugs and upholstery after the water is gone

Carpet is cleaned by hot water extraction with the method matched to the fiber, and fiber is identified before anything gets wet, because wool and a synthetic pile want different chemistry and different heat. Drying time depends on the season and the carpet. In warm, dry weather most carpet is dry within hours. In winter or humid weather, thick or dense carpet can take up to 48 hours.

Upholstery is cleaned to its W, S, WS or X code, matched to the fabric, and is usually dry in about four to eight hours, longer in cold or humid weather. A wool rug lifted off a wet floor is dried fully before it goes back down, because a rug returned damp to a cool floor will hold odor and mark the boards under it.