Why Do I Still Smell Smoke After Cleaning My Chicago House?

4/26/2022 (Permalink)

You can depend on our SERVPRO teams to cleanup and restore your property and personal belongings after a fire takes place.

SERVPRO Can Help You Get to the Root Cause of Fire Damage Odors in Your Chicago Home

As fire engulfs a section of your Chicago house, it spreads smoke deposits all over the structure and contents. Such deposits contain volatile compounds that evaporate into the air, and your nose picks them up as odor. Ideally, cleaning up your home should eliminate all the residues, and therefore the smoky smell should disappear. However, other factors can interfere, leading to long-term odor issues.

What Makes Fire Damage Odors Linger in Chicago Properties?

•   Residue remnants on some surfaces 
•   VOCs embedded in materials
•   Smelt odors might be non-existent

After a fire in your Chicago home, most of the cleaning efforts are directed towards areas with visible soiling, staining, or charring. However, since some of the fire residues spread thinly over surfaces or might be invisible to the eye, your cleaning efforts might ignore areas that should be cleaned, thus leaving a source of new odors.

Our SERVPRO technicians take steps to trace the spread of residues around a property, starting close to the seat of the fire. Alternatively, we clean the entire property to ensure we remove all traces of the residues that cause odors.

What are VOCs?

Volatile Organic Compounds can be described as chemicals that have high vapor pressure even at room temperature. Since such compounds are in a continuous state of evaporation, they supply a steady stream of bad odor even when absorbed deep within materials. There is a need to reach and neutralize such materials to eliminate the odor, yet regular cleaning cannot get to the areas where the compounds are embedded.

Our SERVPRO technicians rely on a range of sophisticated deodorization procedures to reach and neutralize the odors, including:

•   Thermal fogging
•   ULV fogging
•   Use of Ozone generators or photocatalytic oxidizers

Fogging utilizes odor counteractants that neutralize the odor molecules. It also mimics the process that creates the odors by atomizing the deodorizers, thus reaching deeply embedded odor molecules.

If the odor in your house does not go away, call SERVPRO of West Loop / Bucktown / Greektown at (773) 434-9100 to help remove it. We’re Faster to Any Size Disaster.