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Having a house fire is typically a big problem for a person and their family to have to deal with.  Many times items in the home will have to be either replaced or cleaned thoroughly before they can be used again and this almost always includes clothing.  Clothes that are suffering from smoke damage might not be as hard to take care of as you might think; the majority of the task will simply be sorting things and determining what to wash when and with what.

Cleaning all of your clothes and other fabric items after a fire can be a truly daunting task to have to undertake, but accomplishing this task can be done if you attempt to add a little order to the madness by sorting everything by fabric type and determining the care for each one.  Some things will need to be dry cleaned and others can be put in the washer in your laundry room. 

Depending on how much soot or ash is on an item, what you will probably need to do is sort them according to this information.  Lightly soiled items should be washed with those things that are also lightly soiled and that group should be further broken down into different fabric types.  Cotton and other organics should be separated from synthetics.

Items that are heavily soiled with soot should be shaken out before you attempt to wash them.  This will remove as much of the dry soot particles as possible.  These should be sorted the same way as the lightly soiled items were.  Wash these items at least twice. 

Using the full amount of laundry detergent that your detergent’s manufacturer recommends for each wash load is the best and you should also add at least one cup of water conditioner and a half cup of all-fabric bleach.  Depending on the kind of material you are washing, hot or warm water should be used and using the maximum amount of water your washer will handle is also recommended. 

Wash synthetic items in warm water only to keep them from wrinkling during the machine’s spin cycle. 

After the clothing’s second wash, determine if the soot is still visible.  If it is not, allowing the clothing to air dry instead of using the dryer is the best thing to do.  If the smoke odor remains, air them out outside for a while and wash again.  Perfumes in the detergent may mask the smoke damage odor, but it may come back after the perfume goes away.

Smoke damage odor will be more difficult to remove from cotton items, blankets, bedspreads, and other organic items.  Do not use chlorinated bleach on these items, since the fabric may have been weakened in areas due to the heat of the fire.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Basement Flooding Clean Up In NJ, Elizabeth Basement Flooded. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.