What the Polar Vortex Means for Your Pipes

1/15/2024 (Permalink)

Polar Vortexes bring exceedingly cold temperatures

As the winter weather continues, "Polar Vortexes" become far more likely, signaling plummeting temperatures and severe weather conditions. This meteorological term, often associated with bone-chilling cold, can have a profound impact on daily life, particularly for homeowners and business owners. In addition to several drops in temperature to worry about, polar vortexes also heavily affect plumbing systems. As temperatures dive, the risk of pipes freezing and subsequently bursting increases, potentially leading to severely damaging water floods. Understanding the polar vortex, how it affects plumbing piping, and the necessary preventive measures are essential for bracing for the winter months. SERVPRO of Morristown has crafted some preventive measures you can utilize to ensure your plumbing stays safe during the ongoing polar vortex.

Understanding the Polar Vortex and Its Impact

A polar vortex is essentially a vast expanse of swirling cold air that typically envelopes the polar regions. However, during the winter, the vortex at the North Pole often expands, pushing frigid air toward the equator and affecting much of the Northern Hemisphere. This shift can result in a sudden and steep drop in temperatures, often catching businesses and residences off-guard.

The critical issue with these plummeting temperatures is their effect on water pipes. Water expands when it freezes, and this expansion can exert extraordinary pressure on pipes, regardless of whether they are made of metal or plastic. When the pressure becomes too great, pipes can burst, leading to water damage, the potential for mold growth, and the need for repairs on top of restoration and cleaning services.

Prevention and Protection

To mitigate the risks of a polar vortex freezing your pipes, consider the following preventive steps:

1. Insulate Pipes: Wrapping exposed pipes in foam insulation, particularly those in unheated areas like basements, attics, and garages, can significantly reduce the risk of freezing.
2. Maintain Consistent Indoor Temperature: Keeping your home heated consistently, even when you're away, helps keep the internal temperature of pipes above freezing.
3. Allow Faucets to Drip: Allowing a slight drip in faucets can prevent pressure buildup within pipes, reducing the risk of freezing and bursting.
4. Drain Water from Pools and Sprinklers: Drain water from the swimming pool and sprinkler supply lines following the manufacturer's instructions.
5. Close Inside Valves Supplying Outdoor Hose Bibs: After removing and draining outdoor hoses, close the inside valves that supply these bibs but leave the outside valve open.
6. Insulate Vulnerable Spaces: Increase insulation in areas like attics, basements, and crawl spaces to maintain higher temperatures.
7. Open Cabinet Doors: Allow warmer air to circulate around plumbing by opening kitchen and bathroom cabinet doors.

The polar vortex, while a natural weather phenomenon, poses a significant challenge to plumbing, particularly regarding the risk of frozen and bursting pipes. By understanding this meteorological event and taking proactive, preventative measures, you can safeguard your home against the potentially devastating and costly consequences. Prevention actions are far more effective and less costly than repair. Stay warm, stay informed, and prepare your home for whatever the winter brings. 

Should you incur any water or storm damage during the Polar Vortex, feel free to contact SERVPRO of Morristown, and we'll make it "Like It Never Even Happened!"

The Positive Side of Disasters Is That You Get To Redecorate!

2/17/2017 (Permalink)

SERVPRO of Morristown - The Positive Side of Disasters Is That You Get To Redecorate

In the midst of a fire damage restoration or flood damage restoration project, your mind is reeling with all the fears, worries, and expenses of having to replace your destroyed and damaged stuff, but making lemons into lemonade is a part of our lives, and thinking on the positive side of bad things that just happen sometimes, is the key to being happy and peaceful in this life. During a fire and flood, it can be hard to think beyond the moment, so this is a positive post to help you think about the next steps of your process of repairing your house after a fire. You get to redecorate! This is a unique opportunity for you to choose your color palette, buy some new stuff to decorate your home with your own individual style, and introduce some new style tastes, textures, patterns, colors, knickknacks, etc that you have seen and appreciated.

While SERVPRO® is cleaning and restoring your home back to intact to protect you from the elements outside, you can be coming up with your plans for what to do to get organized, design and beautify your new rooms.

Here are some questions to incorporate into your disaster repair home restoration project…

1)   What are your favorite styles? Look online, go to the local mall, flip through magazines, daydream about the things you like and select a few things that you really love to become the focal pieces of your new style. Don’t think about what they would look like together. The key to decorating is to love what you have around you, and if you love the items, designing to tie them all together is the easy part. Choose 3 things from stuff you are keeping and or new stuff that you want in this room you are planning to decorate.

2)   Now that you have had fun window shopping and choosing your 3 favorite things to incorporate into your new decorating “theme,” evaluate the items together. What makes you excited about each item individually? What do the 3 items have in common?  Is there a color of wood or metal similar between 2 of them? Is there a complementary color scheme that just feels good to you? Pull that out to use it for your decorating style in other aspects of the room. If you are buying furniture, buy at least one piece of furniture that is amazing to you, that you love and you can make it the focus of the room. For example, in designing a home office, you can get a desk that you love and make it the design focus for that room, making it so that love being there.

3)   Let’s say they all have bronze metal or a color blue (even if they don’t match perfectly) somewhere in them, then you can paint one wall that color or use a faux painting effect to give that one wall depth as a focal point. All walls the same color is a very common thing for people to do, but the most gorgeous rooms aren’t all the same everywhere. They have different things working well together.

4)   Choose something textured for a wall decoration that has some depth to it, hang a large painting that has mixed media design elements, and hang 2 sconces you love on either side of it. This wall just became AMAZING! By making the one wall a focal point, you have already made the room look bigger with visual effects.

5)   Ok, so now you have your entire design already flowing into a room that looks like you paid thousands for a Decorator to come in and do it for you! Now, choose a calming soothing peaceful neutral color for the other walls tying together whatever the furniture and other items you are going to have in this room have in common. Taupes, burgundy’s deep, rich colors give the room a more elegant mood, while lighter colors give the room a more spacious feel. This focus for this part of the design is to make it feel more like you are being snuggled up in a warm blanket.

6)   You can go to the local hardware store and purchase the paints other people rejected to get them on discount. The colors are pretty, they just weren’t an exact match for the picky people. There’s a selection to choose from, and you can likely find a great neutral color from the local stores leftovers getting it for a great price, to save money.

7)   If you want a rug, the advice decorators give is to have the rug big enough to have every piece of furniture partly or all on the rug so that the edges of the rug are tied into the room well leaving about 9-12” as a sort of border seems to be the best effect. You can still use a rug for decorating with hardwood floors or carpeting, and it protects your floors carpet too, keeping them cleaner and nicer longer.

8)   When designing the layout of the items within the room, the best way to think about it is by thinking of what naturally occurs in the room. If it is a living room, congregation and socialization is the key, bringing people together. Curving pieces thinking of a circle or aligning the furniture within a box in the letter H so that the seats are facing each other is the best advice for this. Use straight lines as a design element. Kitchens and dining rooms are other congregation areas that should be thought of similarly. When people come over, where do they tend to linger and hang out? Set your home up so that they can do as they already want to. This will make people feel more comfortable and relaxed, and that will even get more compliments! Plus, cleaning up daily is easier when you aren’t constantly rearranging things because they aren’t in their naturally proper spots where they can both live and work without being moved around. Bedrooms main focus should be sleeping. Some people like to watch tv in bed, and if that’s your thing, then position the furniture so that it functions well together for your comfort. The office den and play areas of the home should similarly be functionally set up to be efficient for what you need them to be so that stuff stays where it starts and is easy for you and the people who live in the home to just live life and do your daily life without much effort. If you use your desk to collect mail and pay bills, then set it up so that it is efficient for doing so. That becomes the focus of that part of that room.

9)   The next thing to think about is lighting effects. Layering lighting provides ambiance, so you can highlight your 3 focal point items with lighting effects. That is an easy and awesome decorating tip!

10)   Once it is time to start painting, if you are doing it yourself, have a painting party with your friends and family and provide cheese and crackers and a beverage in a big carafe. Hosting an event is a million times more fun that doing it alone and the workload gets lighter when more people are around even when some people don’t actually do any work, others will be helping you, and the overall socialization aspect will give you a great memory of this time to replace the negative emotions with positives.

SERVPRO Helps People Get Their Homes Back

2/7/2017 (Permalink)

Protect your home from flooding

We are masters of disaster restoration after storms destroy homes. We repair the damages from storm damage such as hurricanes, floods, snow storms, noreasters, arctic blasts, heavy winds, and any other kinds of storm ruined a home.

What would you do after a crisis destroyed your home?
Simply call SERVPRO of Morristown New Jersey and we will take care of everything for you so you have nothing to worry about.

Whether you live or work in Morris County, northern New Jersey, north New Jersey or west New Jersey, SERVPRO is New Jersey’s professional restoration service always on call ready to respond to your fire loss, water loss, or storm loss, around the clock.

We have helped people through even the worst catastrophes, including one who said this, “The sprinkler system released and flooded our building. This was the weekend of our biggest event and in less than 36 hours 155 people would be in our bar area having drinks and then being served dinner in the Ball room. This meant we had less than 19 hours to get everything cleaned up. Brian and his team pulled off the impossible task, the kitchen opened at noon and the dinner went off without a hitch!”

We have heard testimonials like these from clients all over New Jersey from Montclair and to Parsippany-Troy Hills, Summit, Westfield, Bernardsville, Millburn, and many towns in between.

SERVPRO New Jersey handles damage restoration as well as professional cleaning services after the fire damage, water damage, and the mold is gone.

"I am recommending SERVPRO of Morristown to my friends and family. They are experienced, trustworthy, and hard working" says John F.

Our Morristown, Green Village, New Vernon, Madison area restoration professionals assisted SERVPRO’s national disaster team during every hurricane and superstorm and noreaster that has caused storm damages in New Jersey.

We have restored many clients’ properties damaged from freezing, flooding and ice damming.

We work with your insurance so that you have less stress and they speak very highly of us:  “We are writing this letter to recognize the EXCELLENT customer service that SERVPRO has provided our agency for over 2 years. This winter many of our insured’s experienced water and ice dam claims and SERVPRO was fast, efficient and set our customers at ease quickly. They exceeded both our agency's and our customer's expectations. We recommend them to ALL our customers because we know they treat our customers with highest priority and care.”

Other insurance agencies refer people to us too, including Elizabeth A. who wrote this review about SERVPRO - “All the guys were professional and cleaned everything up for me. I am thankful my agent recommended SERVPRO!”

Plus, sometimes people like you find us online and then connect us to your own insurance company like happened with Donald B. who said, “You took care of all the damage and worked well with my insurance company.”

We provide a full-range of disaster restoration services including: emergency response, water damage repair, water removal, flood restoration, fire damage restoration, soot and smoke damage services, storm damage repairs, wind damage restoration, industrial dehumidification, structural cleaning and decontamination, mold remediation, environmental services such as hazardous waste removal, duct cleaning services, machinery and equipment restoration, reconstruction, repairing, and cleaning up after fixing the damage from the storm.

Between Mount Olive Township and Newark there is a cure for any disaster, including dehumidification and climate control, smoke/odor removal, structural and content cleaning, large loss scheduling and project management.

Morris Township, NJ Fire & Water Damage Restoration

Professional 24/7 Cleaning & Restoration
Residential and Commercial

Fire Damage Restoration and Repair
• House fire
• Smoke odor removal

Water Damage Restoration and Repair
• Burst pipe
• Flooding
• Water mitigation

Structural Damage Restoration and Repair
• Roof collapse
• Ice buildup
• Mold removal

Call SERVPRO of Morristown (800) 734-3213

Why Hire an IICRC Certified Company?

5/4/2016 (Permalink)

Institute of Inspection Cleaning and Restoration Certificate - IICRC Certified Firm - water, fire and smoke cleanup and restoration

IICRC (Institute of Inspection Cleaning and Restoration Certificate) Benefit:

The IICRC is a non-profit certification and Standards Developing Organization (SDO) for the inspection, cleaning, and restoration industries. In partnership with regional and international trade associations, the IICRC represents the entire industry. The IICRC is recognized internationally as a knowledgeable industry voice and resource.

Why use a certified technician?

Professional restoration technicians understand the need for quick response. Immediate remediation is key to controlling escalating costs. The longer the remediation is delayed, the higher the cost of restoration. Certified restorers have the knowledge to test materials and apply the restoration techniques required in order to return the items to their pre-loss condition.

If you’re looking to hire a restoration company, look for the IICRC logo and ask for the company's certified membership number.

IICRC Certified Firms have earned the right to display the IICRC logo as a symbol of quality. In order to achieve IICRC-certified status, firms must meet a rigorous list of standards in business ethics and expertise, and continue to, in order to maintain their certification status. 

All IICRC Certified Firms must:

• Present accurate information to consumers and conduct business with honesty and integrity.
• Require a technician on all jobs who has been formally trained and passed all required tests.
• Require a continuing education program to keep technicians up-to-date on the latest changes in the industry.
• Maintain liability insurance to protect all parties in the event of an accident. 
• Maintain a written complaint policy and agree to Better Business Bureau or similar arbitration to resolve disputes, and accept the conclusions and recommendations of arbitration.

The IICRC actively has relationships with fiber producers, carpet and fabric mills, furnishing manufacturers and retailers, and others affiliated with the industry. The use of IICRC service professionals is specified in leading manufacturers’ maintenance brochures and warranties.

SERVPRO of Morristown is an IICRC Certified Firm. We follow all IICRC standards in our water, fire and smoke cleanup and restoration as well as our mold mitigation work.

IICRC Certified Firm

SERVPRO of Morristown, NJ is an IICRC Certified firm. This designation from the Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration dictates that we are a professional restoring company known for our professional attitude and for providing the consumer with the highest degree of customer service.

If you have experienced smoke, fire or water damage and need a professional restoration company call us 24/7 at (800) 734-3213.