How Air Movers and Dehumidifiers Work Together to Restore Water Damage

While our staff is heavily trained and certified in water restoration and recovery facets, we rely most on our inventory's cutting-edge and industry-leading equipment to carry the load. With flooding and water damage, the two tools most commonly used, as Brad Knauer explains, are air movers and dehumidification units. These work in tandem to manage threatening conditions for your home.

Part One: Air Movers

Air movers, particularly centrifugal units, create high-velocity blasts of warm air that can be directed at moist materials in a structure after a loss. Many materials can benefit from this direct exposure of these tools, including drywall, baseboards, carpeting, subflooring, and wall cavities. Directing this air at wet materials overcomes cool air barriers above the surface and evaporates the trapped moisture.

Some of the common types of air movers used in our response to water damage emergencies include:

• Centrifugal air movers
• Axial air movers
• Low-profile units

Part Two: Dehumidifiers

As our production manager discusses, using air movers can be great for evaporating trapped water in building materials and contents, but this increases relative humidity (RH) in the environment. Our professionals must then utilize a different type of tool from the inventory to regulate this water concentration in the atmosphere. The process could be condensation across cooling coils, as with low-grain refrigerant dehumidifiers, or pulling moist air through a membrane and trapping water molecules such as desiccant units. The manner of pairing these devices by our trained technicians mitigates the water damage.