Do I need professional water damage restoration, or can I dry it myself?

The decision in one table

When we ran restoration jobs, the first fifteen minutes on site were spent answering five questions, and the answers decided everything that happened for the next week: what came out, what got dried, how much equipment, and whether the homeowner could have done it alone. Nothing in those questions requires a contractor to answer. Here they are, with the answer that means you can do this yourself on the left and the answer that means you should call on the right. One answer in the right-hand column is enough.

The rest of this guide is the reasoning behind each row, what a contractor actually does that you cannot, and a fifteen-minute assessment to run before you decide.

Question 1: what kind of water is it?

The IICRC S500 standard, which restoration contractors and insurers both work from, sorts water by contamination.

Category 1 is clean at the source: a burst supply line, a failed water heater tank, a tub left running, an ice maker line, a refrigerator water line. Materials it wets can be dried and kept, and this is the only category where drying it yourself is the plan.

Category 2 is significantly contaminated: washing machine and dishwasher discharge, a toilet overflow with urine but no feces, sump pit water, an aquarium, and clean water that has sat long enough in a warm room to start growing things. Carpet pad, insulation and other soft porous materials it touched come out. Carpet and drywall can sometimes be cleaned and saved by a contractor with the right chemistry; it is not a homeowner job.

Category 3 is grossly contaminated: sewage, any toilet overflow with feces, water that rose from outside (storm water, river water, ground water through a foundation), and anything that came up a floor drain. Everything porous it touched is removed under containment, the structure is cleaned and treated, and then it is dried. Category 3 is never a do-it-yourself job, and crews wore respirators, gloves and eye protection to do it.

Category moves in one direction over time. Clean water that sits for a few days in a warm basement is treated as Category 2; water that sits for a week or soaks into contaminated materials is treated as Category 3. The category you have is the category at the time drying starts, not at the time the pipe broke.

Question 2: how much got wet?

The S500 also sorts losses by how much water the materials are holding, which decides how much equipment is needed.

• Class 1: a small part of the room, under about 5 percent of the floor, wall and ceiling area, in materials that do not hold much water. A sink leak caught the same day.
• Class 2: a significant part of the room, roughly 5 to 40 percent of surfaces. Typically a wet floor with water wicked less than about 2 ft up the walls. Most supply-line and water-heater losses in a basement are Class 2, and this is the upper limit of what one person with rented gear can handle.
• Class 3: more than about 40 percent of surfaces, usually because the water came from above and soaked the ceiling, the walls, the insulation and the floor. An upstairs tub overflow that came through the kitchen ceiling. A crew job because of the equipment count and because ceilings and wet insulation are involved.
• Class 4: water bound in dense, slow-drying materials: hardwood, plaster, concrete, brick, a subfloor under finished flooring. Needs specialty drying (mat systems, heat, desiccants) regardless of size.

The drying planner turns the class and the room dimensions into an equipment count. If it tells you that you need eight air movers and a 130-pint dehumidifier, that number is also telling you something about who should be doing the job.

Question 3: which materials got wet?

Some materials forgive a homeowner's drying setup. Others do not.

Forgiving: carpet (the pad comes out and is replaced; the carpet floats on an air mover), drywall with nothing but air behind it, plywood and OSB subfloor, concrete, ceramic tile on a slab, painted block. These dry in place with air movers and a dehumidifier in three to five days, and a moisture meter tells you when they are done. The wet carpet guide and the drywall guide cover the two most common.

Unforgiving: solid hardwood (dries over one to three weeks on a mat system that pulls air through the boards; dried wrong it cups, crowns or cracks), laminate and most engineered floors (the core swells and they are replaced), plaster (holds water, cracks as it dries), cabinets (water wicks into the particleboard toe-kick and back panel and the cabinet looks fine until it smells), fiberglass or cellulose insulation in a wall or ceiling (comes out, which means the drywall in front of it comes out), any ceiling (sagging board is replaced, and what is above it has to be opened and dried), and the HVAC system (the EPA's guidance is not to run a system you suspect is contaminated, and wet duct liner or a wet air handler is a specialist cleaning job).

Two things in the unforgiving list make the call by themselves: insulation behind the wet drywall of an exterior wall, because the demolition and the drying both get bigger than one person's weekend, and a ceiling, because the water came from somewhere above and the extent is hidden.

Question 4: how long has it been wet?

The EPA's guidance on mold in homes is that wet materials dried within 24 to 48 hours will usually not grow mold. Restoration practice treats 72 hours as the point where a wet building becomes a mold question as well as a drying question. That clock starts when the material got wet, not when you found it. A supply line that burst this morning is a drying job. A stain that appeared on a ceiling this week from a leak that has been running for a month is a removal job, and probably a remediation job, no matter how small the stain looks.

The timeline below is the sequence crews worked a basement loss to, and the first two days are where a homeowner either keeps up or does not. If you cannot have the water extracted and equipment running within about 48 hours of the loss, because you cannot rent it, cannot get the time, or cannot physically do the work, that alone is a reason to call.

Question 5: insurance, and who lives there

Insurance. Sudden, accidental water from inside the house is usually covered by a homeowners policy; ground water, surface flooding and sewer backup usually are not without an endorsement. If you are filing a claim, two things change. First, the policy requires you to mitigate, which means stopping the water and starting drying promptly, and keeping receipts; renting equipment yourself satisfies that. Second, the adjuster will want documentation: photographs before anything was moved, a moisture map, daily readings, and a list of what was removed and why. Contractors produce that in the format adjusters expect, bill the insurer directly in most cases, and know what the policy will and will not pay for. On a large claim, that alone is worth the call. On a small one, our claim documentation checklist covers what to record yourself.

People. The EPA's mold guidance is that anyone with health concerns should consult a health professional before starting cleanup, and the CDC notes that people with asthma, allergies and respiratory conditions, and those with compromised immune systems, are more sensitive to mold. If someone like that lives in the house, or an infant or an elderly relative does, the margin for a slow or incomplete dry-out is smaller, and a crew that finishes in four days with containment and air scrubbers is a different proposition from a homeowner finishing in ten.

What a restoration contractor actually brings

It is worth being specific, because the difference is not that a crew works harder. It is equipment and sequence.

• Extraction. A truck-mounted or large portable extractor pulls water out of carpet, pad and subfloor at a rate a shop vacuum does not approach. Every gallon extracted is a gallon the dehumidifiers do not have to remove from the air over three days.
• Low-grain refrigerant (LGR) dehumidifiers, rated 80 to 140 pints a day at the AHAM condition and still pulling water when the room is below 40 percent humidity, where a consumer unit has stopped. Two or three of them on a basement.
• Air movers by the dozen, placed per the S500 at one per 10 to 16 linear feet of wet wall, which is how a wall dries in three days instead of a week.
• Moisture mapping. Pin and pinless meters, a thermal camera to find the wet area behind finished surfaces, and a documented grid read daily.
• Containment and air filtration. Plastic barriers, negative air machines and HEPA air scrubbers for Category 2 and 3 work and for any demolition.
• Removal and treatment. Flood cuts, insulation removal, pad removal, antimicrobial application per the product label on contaminated losses, and disposal.
• Documentation in the format the adjuster expects, and the experience to know what the policy covers.

What a contractor does not bring is magic. A clean-water, one-room, caught-today loss dried by a homeowner with a rented LGR, two air movers and a meter ends up in the same place a crew would leave it. The question is only whether your loss is that loss.

If you decide to do it yourself

The sequence is the one a crew follows, and the equipment is rentable: make it safe, stop the water, document, extract, remove the pad and anything saturated, set the dehumidifier and then the air movers, close the room, and read a moisture meter every 24 hours until every point is back to a dry standard taken from an unaffected part of the house. The 72-hour basement guide walks every step, the drying planner sizes the equipment, and the air mover roundup covers what to rent. Budget three to five days of equipment and a meter you trust.

One honest test partway through: if on day two the readings are not falling, the room still feels damp, or you have found wet insulation, a wet ceiling or water under a floor you did not expect, that is the moment to call, not day five.

When to call a pro

Call a restoration contractor for any Category 2 or 3 water; for anything wet more than about 72 hours or already smelling musty; for water that came through a ceiling; for wet hardwood, laminate, plaster, cabinets or insulation; for more than one room; for a wet furnace, air handler or ductwork; if someone in the house has asthma, allergies or an immune condition; or if the claim is large enough that you want it documented by someone who does this daily. Call an electrician before anything else if the panel or any outlet box got wet. The form below reaches vetted local restoration contractors through HelpMeNow.com, and on a water loss the same-day call is the one that saves the walls.