Document drying should be given priority after a water-related disaster ravages your home whether it was caused by a flood or a simple case of a leak. The reason is because paper materials become very fragile when wet. Furthermore, they become distorted and discolored when dried under sub-ideal conditions.



It is therefore important to be aware of the possible options you can have when you want to dry your documents. There are currently five (5) familiar drying methods: air drying, dehumidification, freezer drying, vacuum thermal drying, and vacuum freeze drying.

Air drying - This is undoubtedly the easiest document drying method as it does not require sophisticated equipment to be carried out. However, contrary to popular belief, this is not necessarily the cheapest. While you might not have to spend for any equipment rental, it is very tedious and laborious. Thus, if you compute the man-hours, this method may come out as expensive as the others. What makes it worse is the fact that paper products that are dried using this method end up being distorted since the surrounding temperature and pressure is not controlled.

If you have a large volume of documents, this process would require a very huge space, which may not be readily available. What's more, if the outside weather conditions are not suitable for air drying, you would have to leave your documents indoors. Once this is done, you will then be needing equipment such as air movers and dehumidifiers, which can be considered as a different document drying method by itself.

Dehumidification - This method is probably the most convenient of the five (5) document drying techniques since it simply requires the bringing in of dehumidifiers into the area that houses the documents. In fact, you may even leave your books, papers, pictures, etc. where they are located like in bookshelves for instance. Dehumidifiers bring down the humidity of the surrounding air, speeding up the evaporation, and hence, the drying process.

Freezer drying - This document drying method involves self-defrosting blast freezers, wherein wet materials are brought in immediately. These freezers are usually capable of freezing materials in a very short period of time. Time is very essential in this method to avoid distortion.

Vacuum thermal drying - In this method, a vacuum thermal drying chamber is used. In this method, paper products stay wet as they are dried, unlike freezer drying which brings the wet materials to a freeze. This method might be more cost-effective than air drying, but it doesn't prevent the problem of having distorted documents.

Vacuum freezing - This is easily the most expensive document drying method as it makes use of very sophisticated equipment. In this technique, wet materials are brought into a vacuum chamber in the frozen state. Usually, freezing documents is used as an interim step prior to implementation of a reliable recovery procedure, since it allows the paper to be in a relatively more stable state. When the frozen documents are inside the chamber, the equipment then generates the necessary conditions for sublimation to take place. Sublimation is the process by which water in solid form is changed to vapor form without having to pass through the liquid phase.

Knowing these document drying methods might help you in choosing the most suitable option for your own water damage problem.