Unmonitored Space Heaters Can Cause Fire Damage

2/3/2020 (Permalink)

SERVPRO recommends never leaving a portable heater unattended in your home

Space heaters can be a great way to warm up the coldest areas of your house throughout the harshest of winter months. They are not without their potential threats, however. Monitoring them carefully and not leaving these heaters running unattended can help prevent unnecessary damage to your home, let alone those who live inside of it.

Electric and gas space heaters offer a great deal of warmth and can completely transform the coldest areas of your house into the most comfortable. They also put out lots of concentrated heat, and many of them feature grills or open flames that burn hot enough to scald a person or to catch loosely hanging fabrics or drapes on fire. There are some words of caution about these heaters if you want to virtually eliminate the possibility of fire damages to your residence.

The first step is to consider the placement of your heater very wisely. While it might require being close enough to an outlet to plug in, you should be mindful of the furniture and other objects in the room that could inadvertently contact the heater. With the excessive heat and open design of many of the small room heaters, something left too close to the heat could catch on fire (even without directly touching).

As many of our experienced SERVPRO team would tell you, preventing fire damage is often as simple as walking yourself through all of the scenarios that might happen. People do not intend to set their homes on fire, but these accidents can happen with a lack of foresight. As an added precaution, you should not leave these types of heaters on unattended in a room that you are not currently occupying.

While regrettable, house fires and small incidents do occur when using space heaters. While it might not be significant enough to force you to leave the house, sometimes the remains of the soot or the lingering odor of burned materials can be more than you can repair or remedy on your own. Our fire restoration team is equipped with deodorizing equipment to neutralize smoke and foul odors, and our commitment to mitigating your loss ensures that we restore the damage promptly.

No matter what degree of fire damage you might have to deal with, you can trust us at SERVPRO of Breckinridge, Grayson, Meade & Hancock Counties 270-580-2200