Fire & Smoke Damage Chemicals

Fire work is not heavy cleaning with a shorter deadline. It is a sequence, and the order you work in decides whether the job holds or whether the owner rings you back on the first humid week of summer.

The reason is physical. Heat and humidity expand the pore structure of timber, plaster, masonry and stone. Smoke particles — most of them under a micron — enter those open pores, and as the substrate cools the pores contract and trap them. That mechanism explains shadowing, deep odour that survives a thorough wash down, and odour that lifts again on a humid day. It is also the honest test for sealing: if you have cleaned properly and odour still returns with the weather, a stain-block sealer is warranted.

Work the four stages in order. Dry removal first — shut down ventilation, establish containment, strip debris, clean the air-handling system so it stops recirculating particulate, then HEPA vacuum every surface. Deep clean second, airborne particles and odour third, seal last. Wet cleaning over un-removed soot grinds residue deeper into the substrate.

The range covers all four stages. Soot sponges handle dry removal. Actichem Fire Fix is the solvent-free, caustic-free detergent for soft and delicate surfaces — carpet, fabric, finished timber, plasterboard. Actichem Fire Restore is the alkaline cleaner for tile, concrete, masonry and stone. Actichem OxyBoost Plus goes into either where soot staining or shadowing persists. Alongside those sit Bridgepoint Smoke & More (Original, Lemon, Vission), Bridgepoint Fire Power, ODORx Smoke Wash, OmniPro Soot Wash and Benefect Atomic. For odour: ODORx 9-D-9, Double-O, Tabac-Attack, the Bad Odour Blocks, Unsmoke Air Neutraliser, Actichem Deostor Fire, the Odourtak W and SV fogging fluids and the ODORx Thermo-55 range. Unsmoke Unsoot #1 and the Fiberlock RECON smoke odour sealers cover sealing.

How to choose

• Identify the soot type first. Every other decision follows from this one. Synthetic soot comes from plastics, synthetic textiles and hydrocarbon liquids — black to very dark, it smears readily under a cloth, the particles carry a strong charge and it often throws smoke webs. Protein soot is almost always a cooking event — light yellow to tan, greasy, usually localised to the kitchen but capable of migrating well beyond it, and strongly pungent. Natural or cellulosic soot from paper, timber and natural textiles is powdery, grey to black, and lifts far more readily when dry-removed properly. Test-smear an inconspicuous area before you commit to a chemical.
• Match the detergent to the substrate, not to the price. Fire Fix for soft and delicate surfaces, Fire Restore for hard resilient ones. On carpet and soft furnishings, vacuum thoroughly dry first and apply as a carpet prespray before extraction. Allow a minimum ten minutes dwell on any fire detergent — this chemistry works on contact time, not on pressure.
• Match the scent to the fuel. This is the part most people get backwards. Citrus for protein, paper and timber fires. Floral for plastics and synthetics. The counteractant chemistry has to sit convincingly against the residual odour character; a floral over a burnt-toast kitchen fire reads as a cover-up to the occupant, and it will be treated as one.
• Decide inhabited or uninhabited before you buy fogging fluid. Odourtak W is the water-based fluid for inhabited spaces; Odourtak SV is solvent-based and intended for uninhabited spaces only — roof cavities, sub-floors and stripped-out buildings. Both are dosed undiluted at roughly 5–15 mL per 10 m³ of air space, then the area is closed up for 30 to 60 minutes. Size the job by air volume, not floor area, and buy the right one first — they are not interchangeable.
• Treat sealing as the last stage, never a shortcut. A stain-block sealer over residue you have not removed buys a few months and then fails, and it fails in a way that is expensive to correct. Seal only after dry removal, wet cleaning and airborne odour control are complete and the surface has been given a chance to prove itself.

One technique point, because it is where most wall work goes wrong: work bottom-up to avoid run marks and maintain a wet edge. If you stop mid-wall, leave roughly 100 mm unrinsed and restart into that band. A start-stop line is close to impossible to remove.

For odour work beyond fire jobs, see the deodorisers and odour and freshening ranges. For HEPA scrubbers, foggers and drying gear, see water and fire damage restoration equipment.

What we see in the field

The first objective on a serious fire job is often knockdown and suppression — getting the smoke odour under enough control for the restoration team to work effectively. Thermal fogging can be extremely effective here because it follows many of the same pathways as the smoke, but it leaves a residue that must subsequently be cleaned, so it isn't a final-treatment shortcut. The other lesson experience teaches you is to identify what actually burned: protein, timber and paper smoke behave differently from plastics and synthetics, and the restoration process needs to reflect that.