Document Drying: Use the Right Technology

7/17/2021 (Permalink)

When you’re dealing with a burst pipe or a broken window from a storm, your first priority is either turning off the water or boarding up that window. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to deal with getting the water out of your home and the resulting water damage, which can include damage to paperwork that you have out, like a marriage or birth certificate, insurance policy, or even letters from long ago that you’ve been saving to re-read. 

You may have heard that you can dry out paper by leaving it in the sun. In reality, that only works when you get a little bit of water on a book, and even then, the pages could wind up sticking together.

You also shouldn’t use a dehumidifier to dry out your documents. That does work to suck out the moisture from a room, but it doesn’t work on documents. Instead, the dehumidifier can instead cause your water-damaged documents to become even more brittle than if they were left to dry out in the sun.

So, what can you do to save your water-damaged documents? Turn to the Massachusetts document restoration team at SERVPRO of Stoneham / Wakefield. We use state-of-the art technology in the form of vacuum freeze drying to dry your precious documents. In fact, it’s the same technique that the Library of Congress uses to dry out water-damaged books. 

What’s Vacuum Freeze Drying?

With vacuum freeze drying, an item (your document or documents) that contains moisture is frozen and dried using various vacuums and pressures to achieve sublimation. What’s sublimation? That is the direct conversion of a solid (ice) into a gas (water vapor) without going through the liquid stage, which would cause further damage to your documents.

Our document drying technology is the only method approved by both the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the General Services Administration (GSA). 

Here at SERVPRO of Stoneham / Wakefield, our standard document drying time is seven to ten days, although time frames may vary based on the moisture content and any backlog. Reach out to the Massachusetts document restoration experts at SERVPRO of Stoneham / Wakefield to save your water-damaged documents.