How Long Should Drying Equipment Run, and Who Decides?

How long should drying equipment run on a water loss? Until the wet materials reach a drying goal measured against an unaffected part of the same building, which is usually a matter of days rather than weeks. While the equipment is on site it runs continuously, around the clock. A dehumidifier switched off overnight has not shortened the job. It has lengthened it.

That is worth saying plainly, because the two most common assumptions about drying are both wrong. The first is that there is a standard number of days. There is not. The second is that a dehumidifier on a water loss should run on some daily schedule, the way a dehumidifier runs in a damp basement in July. A drying project is not humidity control. It is a deliberate attempt to pull water back out of building materials faster than those materials want to give it up, and it ends when they are dry.

This guide covers the duration question and what happens when an equipment day is later struck from an estimate. Restoration Doctor is a restoration contractor, not a public adjuster and not a law firm, so nothing here is legal or insurance advice and nothing here interprets your policy. What follows is what the published rules say, what the drying record has to show, and what to ask for in writing.

Drying is a continuous transfer, not a task performed in shifts. Air movers push a fast, dry layer of air across a wet surface so that moisture leaves the material and enters the room air. The dehumidifier then pulls that moisture out of the room air and sends it down a drain. Stop either half and the other half stops mattering.

Switching the equipment off resets the work. Within an hour or two of the fans stopping, moisture inside a wall cavity redistributes back toward the surface that was drying, and the air in the room climbs toward the moisture level of the wet material again. The next morning a crew is not continuing where it left off. It is recovering ground. That is why a technician will ask you not to unplug a machine because it is loud, and will move or swap it instead.

It is also why a drying project is measured in equipment days rather than in labor hours. The machines do the work between visits. A person is there to read the building, adjust the setup, and decide whether the trend is good enough to keep the current plan or bad enough to change it.

A drying goal, set before the equipment goes in. The crew finds material of the same kind in a part of the building the water never reached, measures it, and that reading becomes the target for the wet material. A wet oak floor is not compared against a number from a textbook. It is compared against the same oak floor in the next room.

Two things follow. The goal is specific to your building, so two houses with losses of the same size can finish days apart depending on what they are built from, how the cavities are ventilated, and how long the water sat. The goal is also verifiable after the fact, because the unaffected reading is written down next to the wet ones.

The standard this work is written against, ANSI/IICRC S500, describes the procedures to be followed and the precautions to be taken when performing water damage restoration in residential, commercial and institutional buildings. Its published component list includes psychrometry and drying technology, equipment, instruments and tools, and administrative procedures, project documentation and risk management. The current edition is sold rather than published, so this post quotes no clause number and no figure out of it. Anyone who does quote one should be asked where they read it.

For the mechanics of the readings themselves, how to read a drying log walks through grain depression, dew point and what a dry standard actually is. This post does not rebuild any of that.

The count comes from the affected area and the class of the loss, not from a habit. How much of the room got wet, which materials got wet, and how far the water traveled into the assembly all change the number. A room where only the carpet and pad took water is a different setup from the same room with water a foot up the drywall and wet insulation behind it.

You will find per-square-foot air mover ratios quoted all over the internet. They are drawn from calculations inside a standard that is sold rather than published, and we will not reproduce them here, because we have not read the clause we would be citing. Treat a page that quotes those ratios precisely as a page that may be quoting a page that quoted a page.

Can an air mover be left on too long? Running one past the point where the material has reached goal wastes electricity and achieves nothing, which is exactly why equipment should come out on the day the readings say so rather than on the day the paperwork is convenient. Running the setup too few days is the more expensive mistake. Material closed up damp can become a mold problem weeks later, and a second claim after that.

Class matters more than square footage here, and water damage class 1, 2, 3 and 4 explained is the plain-words version of what class means. In short: it describes how much of the room can hold water, which is what the equipment has to overcome.

Drying is the first of two schedules and it is the short one. Extraction and drying end when the building reaches its goal. Rebuilding, meaning the drywall, the paint, the flooring and the trim, is a separate scope that begins after that and runs on the availability of materials and trades and, where the work needs one, on a permit.

Across the projects we have run, a typical structural dry-out takes about 4.5 days. That is a company average, not a prediction for your house. A small clean-water loss caught the same morning can finish sooner than that. A loss that sat through a weekend, or one with saturated hardwood, plaster, or a finished ceiling below it, can run well past it, and there is nothing irregular about a job that does.

Ask for the goal at the beginning rather than for a finish date. A crew that tells you the target reading and names the areas being monitored is telling you something you can check. A crew that promises a number of days before it has measured anything is guessing, and a guess made to reassure you tends to be optimistic.

Because that is what was supplied. A drying setup is priced as a unit-day: one machine, in place for one day, on one line. Six machines across four days is twenty-four unit-days, and the count on the invoice should match the equipment that was on the floor and the days it was actually there.

That structure is what makes the bill auditable, and it cuts both ways. It lets somebody check whether a machine picked up on a Thursday was charged through Friday. It also means a struck day is a specific, answerable allegation rather than a general complaint that the invoice looks high. How to read a water mitigation invoice takes the invoice apart line by line. This post is about defending the days on it.

One practice statement while the subject is the invoice: Restoration Doctor does not add overhead and profit to the emergency service call line. That is a statement about how we write an invoice, not a price. A second, because the struck-day question turns on it: we invoice the property owner rather than the carrier, so a day a reviewer declines is still a day owed under the contract, and reimbursement for it is between the owner and the insurer.

Four things, recorded each day, in a form a stranger can reconstruct months later. This is what a record needs to answer a question about a specific day. The published component list for the standard names project documentation as part of the work, but the current edition is sold rather than published, so the list below is stated as practice, not as a quoted requirement. The goal taken from the unaffected area. The readings from each monitored material and location. The psychrometric conditions in the space, which means the temperature and humidity the equipment was working in. And the equipment itself: what was placed, where it sat, and the dates it went in and came out.

Those in-and-out dates are the part property owners never think to ask for and the part a struck day turns on. A reading proves the building was still wet. Only the equipment log proves that a particular machine was there on the day being questioned. Dated photographs are the third leg, because they show the machine standing in the room rather than listed on a page.

Read across the table for what each part of the record actually proves, and for what its absence costs you when somebody questions a day.

A mitigation estimate can pass through more than one set of hands before payment. The field adjuster sees the building. A later reviewer may never see it and works from the paperwork alone. Two review passes on the same file can produce two different numbers, and an equipment day is among the easiest lines to remove from a desk, because nothing in a summary total shows that a wall was still wet. Who actually cut your estimate covers how a desk review works and what Virginia requires when a reviewer alters an adjuster's own estimate; this post stays on the drying days themselves.

What answers it is the record, not the argument. A day carrying a goal, a reading above that goal, and a machine with in-and-out dates covering it is a day with an evidentiary answer. A day supported only by a line on an invoice will keep being struck, however reasonable it was.

Virginia's claims rules do not set a number of drying days. We read the whole of 14VAC5-400, the Bureau of Insurance's rules governing unfair claim settlement practices, and could locate no Virginia statute or regulation that sets one; we did not run a case-law search for this article. What they govern is the explanation and the file. Where a carrier prepares an estimate of the cost of repairs to property, 14VAC5-400-90 requires that estimate to be an amount for which the damage may reasonably be expected to be satisfactorily repaired, and requires a copy to be given to the claimant.

Two further rules are worth knowing by name. 14VAC5-400-70 requires a denial to be given in writing and requires a reasonable written explanation of its basis, with a specific reference to a policy provision, condition or exclusion, if any. The same section says that where there is no dispute as to coverage or liability, the insurer shall offer a first party claimant an amount that is fair and reasonable as shown by the investigation of the claim, provided that amount is within policy limits and in accordance with policy provisions.

The third is about the file itself. 14VAC5-400-30 requires detailed documentation in each claim file sufficient to permit reconstruction of the insurer's activities on the claim, and requires each document to be noted as to the date it was received, processed or mailed. That documentation duty runs to the Bureau of Insurance, whose examiners can review the file, rather than to you; what the rules give you directly is the written explanation described above. It is still the reason a date and a basis for a reduction exist somewhere to be asked about.

Ask in writing and keep the answers. A question asked on the phone is a question you will have to ask again when the file moves to somebody new. These are questions about documentation and about the basis for a change. They are not questions about what your policy covers, which is for your carrier to answer and, if it stays disputed, for a licensed public adjuster or an attorney.

Keep the wording short and factual. You are asking for a record, not making an argument, and a short request tends to come back answered. Nothing on this list asks the carrier to interpret anything for you, and nothing on it commits you to a position you may want to change once you have the answers.

From there the route is the ordinary one. Ask for a re-inspection. Send the additional documentation the reviewer says is missing. For a disagreement about the amount, where your policy contains an appraisal provision that is the mechanism written for exactly that kind of dispute, and your carrier can point you to the paragraph. For a disagreement about coverage, that is ground for a licensed public adjuster or an attorney, and a complaint can be filed with the Bureau of Insurance.

Four of them, and ask while the crew is still working rather than after the final invoice lands. A contractor documenting the job as it runs can hand these over the same week you ask. A contractor who has to reconstruct them afterward is telling you something about how the job was run.

Keep your own copies in your own folder. Claim files move between adjusters, and the file that survives a handoff is usually the one the property owner kept. If the rebuild half of the work is still ahead of you, what a carrier-ready drying file contains sets out the full package in the order a reviewer reads it.

One closing point that cuts against our own interest. A complete drying record sometimes shows that a day was not needed, and when it does, that is the measurement doing its job. A record kept honestly will not always agree with the invoice. A contractor who produces documentation only when it helps is not documenting anything, they are arguing.