Fast, professional water damage restoration and mold remediation for San Rafael homes and businesses.
San Rafael gives us two completely different kinds of water calls.
Down in the Canal, the problem is the bay. King tides push water back up through the storm drains, and when a big tide lands on top of a wet week, that water has nowhere to go but up into ground floors and garages. It is also not clean. Anything that comes up through a drain gets treated as contaminated, and that changes what we can dry and save versus what has to come out.
Up in Terra Linda it is a different animal. Those Eichlers sit on concrete slabs with hot water lines running through them for heat, and when one of those lines lets go, the leak is under four inches of concrete. You will usually feel a warm spot on the floor before you ever see water. We locate it before anyone breaks concrete, because guessing wrong on a slab leak is an expensive hole in your living room.
Either way, we log the moisture readings as we go so your insurance claim has something behind it. The same aging plumbing turns up a few miles west in San Anselmo.
The restoration industry splits water into three categories, and which one you're dealing with changes almost everything about the job. Category 1 is a clean water source, like a supply line, and materials that only touched that water can often be dried and kept. Category 2 has some contamination in it, water from a washing machine or a dishwasher overflow, for example. Category 3 is grossly contaminated: sewage, floodwater, or anything that's picked up groundwater or backed up through a drain. Water that comes up through a Canal district storm drain during a king tide is treated as Category 3 by default, because it's traveled through a public storm system before it ever reached your floor. That distinction decides what gets dried in place and what has to be removed and replaced, and it's not something we guess at. We test and treat accordingly rather than assuming the best case.
Terra Linda's Eichlers run radiant heat through copper lines embedded in the slab, and when one of those lines fails, the water is under several inches of concrete with nowhere obvious to show itself. We don't start by guessing where to cut. Thermal imaging shows the warm patch where heated water is escaping into the slab, and moisture meters confirm it against the surrounding dry concrete before anyone commits to opening the floor. On a harder read, we'll bring in acoustic listening equipment tuned to the sound of water moving under pressure through the leak point itself. Cutting concrete on the wrong guess means a second hole and a second repair, so the extra time spent locating it precisely is what keeps the job to one opening instead of three. Larkspur has a fair number of the same radiant-slab homes from the same era.
