Water Damage In Your Kitchen? Try These Tips To Clean And Protect Your Appliances
If your kitchen sink's pipe comes loose and floods the room with water, take steps to protect your appliances now. Water can damage large and small appliances, such as your fridge and coffee pot, when it comes into contact with them. In addition, water-logged floor tiles and baseboards can develop mold and mildew that spread to the insides of your appliances. If you don't do something now, you can lose your valuable appliances to water damage. Here are tips to help you clean and protect your kitchen appliances.
Remove or Extract the Water in Your Kitchen
Removing the water from your kitchen is the first and most important step to preventing damages to your appliances. Some of the water in your damp flooring and baseboards evaporate into the kitchen's air. If you don't clean up the water before it evaporates, you place your appliances' electrical wiring, parts and metal surfaces at risk for rust.
Water doesn't just go away once it evaporates into the kitchen. It stays in the air as gases until it condensates or turns back into liquid form. If the room warms up or becomes humid, the gases revert back into liquid form. In most cases, the liquid forms on your appliances' metal surfaces, as well as on the windows in the kitchen.
You can turn your air conditioning system down, but this doesn't always reduce the moisture in the room. Water can evaporate in many conditions or temperatures, even when the room is cool. The best thing to do is soak up as much water from your damp flooring and baseboards as you can.
Placing large blankets over the floor tiles helps you do so. You can also use a high-powered vacuum to extract the water from the kitchen. However, pay close attention to the areas behind your appliances when you vacuum the kitchen. If the flooring is low or weighted down from your large appliances, water can puddle in beneath and behind them.
Wiping down the windows in your kitchen, as well as opening them up to allow fresh air into the room, also helps. Be very careful if you do open up the windows. If the weather outdoors is especially humid and hot, you can increase the humidity inside the kitchen and encourage mold to grow in it.
It's a good idea to place a box fan in one of the windows when you open it but position the fan to blow air out of the room instead of into it. You want to pull as much humid and damp air out of the kitchen as possible to minimize damage to your appliances.
Clean and Sanitize Your Appliances
After you remove the water from your kitchen, clean and sanitize every appliance in the room. Mold can show up in the water and ice dispensers attached to your refrigerator. If you don't clean the gaskets and dispensers with warm water and soap, mold can spread to the items inside the refrigerator.
In addition, your coffee maker, dishwasher and blender are at vulnerable to mold. These appliances hold onto small amounts of water or moisture when you use or clean them. Mold spores can penetrate the water lines, reservoirs and openings to reach the water or moisture.
It's a good idea that you wash the surfaces of the appliances with warm, soapy water, then place them in another room to dry. Also, run your coffee maker and dishwasher through one or two cycles to help minimize or stop mold growth in them. You flush mold spores out of the appliances when you do.
Important Tip
When you clean your appliances, don't use bleach, ammonia or other harsh chemicals to sanitize them. Even though bleach can kill mold spores, it can release dangerous fumes into the kitchen.
If your flooded kitchen is too much to clean up on your own using the tips above, contact a water damage company like Accutech Restoration.
