How to Clean Up after an Air Conditioner Leakage in Your Barnstable Home

8/3/2020 (Permalink)

During this summer heat, our air conditioners have been working overtime. During hot times like this A/Cs will often be left on 24/7 to keep our homes cool and comfortable. However, there’s nothing relaxing about coming home to a massive air conditioner leakage on your hardwood or carpeted floor. Both window and standing units have potential to cause disastrous leaks. For window unit A/Cs, make sure they’re fastened into the window sill with the back grate facing slightly downwards. This will often redirect all leakages outside of the house. For standing units, place a towel beneath the unit. At the first sign of the towel becoming damp from leakage, turn off the A/C and attempt to resolve the issue.  Check the unit’s instruction manual to see proper draining techniques. If you find yourself in an A/C leakage related disaster, follow these helpful tips.

Leakage on Hardwood

• Why Hardwood Leaks are Different from Carpet Leaks: When water leaks onto hardwood flooring, it causes what’s known as, “cupping”. Cupping is when the unfinished underside of floorboards warp due to water absorption. If the floor is only minorly warped at the seams, you can either hire a water mitigation company to quickly return them to normal, or wait up to a year for the boards to naturally dry and flatten out. This can be aided through the use of fans and dehumidifiers.
• How to Deal with Heavy Water Damage: If the cupping of your floorboards is so severe that nails and other fasteners start to lift off of the floor, a professional water mitigation company will be needed to dry and replace the floorboards. At the point of severe cupping, the damage has likely set into the subfloor, walls, etc. Leaving these areas untreated may cause permanent damage.

Leakage on Carpet

• Dealing with water leakage on Carpets: Cleaning up water from carpeting is a much more complicated and involved process than hardwood. Not only does water leak into the carpet, it leaks into the Baseboard, drywall, padding and subfloor. Not properly drying carpets will most likely cause deep and dangerous mold damage. Use fans, wet-dry vacs and dehumidifiers to dry. Do not use a household vacuum to suck up water.
• If mold appears on your carpet, don’t use bleach to attempt to remove it. Bleach is good at removing mold from non-porous surfaces like walls, but will not work on porous areas like carpets. For moldy carpets, limit the air flow in the room and make sure to run a dehumidifier. Call a professional restoration company to take care of the rest. In many cases, the carpet may need to be replaced at this point.

When it comes to repairing water damaged floors, taking shortcuts will only lead to more headaches in the future. Make sure you do it right the first time. If your home or business has suffered water damage from an Air conditioner leak, call SERVPRO of Mid-Outer Cape Cod. We’re ready for your call 24 hours a day at 508-778-7378. Trust us to treat your floors right and get you back home or back to work faster than the competition. We’ll work to make it "Like it never even happened."