The Restoration Revolution Podcast

Battling the Beast: Why Commercial Water Damage Requires a Different Approach

• Chad Mallonee • Episode 18

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What Makes Commercial Water Damage Different Than Residential Water Damage?

Water damage restoration takes on entirely new dimensions when tackling commercial properties. Chad Mallonee, owner of Hazard Clean Restoration, pulls back the curtain on the complex world of business restoration in this eye-opening conversation.

The structural differences alone create significant challenges. Unlike residential properties with their wood frames and limited square footage, commercial buildings feature steel framing, concrete walls, and multiple floors—meaning water doesn't just affect one room, but can cascade through an entire building. Add in specialized areas like data centers, mechanical rooms, and sophisticated electronics, and you've got an entirely different restoration puzzle.

Perhaps most challenging is balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders. While residential jobs typically involve working with a single homeowner who might temporarily relocate, commercial restoration requires coordination with building owners, property managers, business operators, and sometimes government officials—all while keeping businesses operational. This demands creative solutions like after-hours work schedules, phased restoration approaches, and alternative access routes for customers and employees.

The stakes couldn't be higher. As Chad explains, rapid response to commercial water damage doesn't just save thousands of dollars—it saves hundreds of thousands or even millions. He shares a powerful example of arriving at a building to find water flowing out of the lobby and down the exterior stairs. Through immediate action and specialized equipment like trailer-mounted desiccant dehumidifiers, his team prevented catastrophic damage that would have threatened the building's very operations.

Whether you're a business owner, property manager, or restoration professional, this episode delivers crucial insights into the high-stakes world of commercial restoration. Subscribe to the Restoration Revolution podcast for more expert guidance on navigating property disasters and putting your family or business on the road to recovery.

To learn more about Hazard Clean Restoration visit:
https://hazardclean.net/
Hazard Clean Restoration
772-259-5018

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Restoration Revolution podcast, where we help restore hope and put your family on the road to recovery, one episode at a time. Here's your host and owner of Hazard Clean Restoration, chad Melody.

Speaker 2:

Water damage is never welcome. Welcome, but commercial properties bring a different level of complexity. Let's explore the challenges unique to business environments and how professionals rise to meet them. Welcome back everyone. I'm sophia yvette, co-host and producer, back in the studio with Chad Maloney, owner of Hazard Clean Restoration. Hi, chad, how have you been?

Speaker 3:

I'm doing good. Doing good Slammed but I'm doing good. I'm glad I was able to make it today.

Speaker 2:

Definitely Now. Chad always fired up to dig into real world restoration with you. Nobody tackles tough damage with more heart and precision. So what makes commercial water damage different than residential water damage?

Speaker 3:

I mean there's a lot that goes into that. So first, when you know you think residential people are thinking you know maybe a a pipe that that goes or whichever has a leak, or, and it's usually affecting one room, it's not usually affecting the whole house, where that it does happen to uh, especially if you get backups and everything. But in in commercial you're dealing with a whole nother kind of animal because you're dealing with the entire building. And if it's multi-floored, you know something that affects. You know, if you have a pipe that springs a leak on one floor and it's the top floor of a you know 10 story building, five story building, now more than likely that water is going to go somewhere and usually it's going to go down, you know. And so now you're going to have multiple, you know floors that are impacted. Instead of just like one room or maybe two rooms in an area, you're going to have rooms and floors and everything impacted in commercial you. Also, in commercial buildings they're built differently. In most residential homes you're not going to have mechanical rooms and all these sprinklers and fire suppression systems and all these things that you have to be aware of when you think about all the electronics in a commercial building, you got data closets, you got all this going on, and yet you have to be aware of that. And in residential you don't have as much of that that you're really dealing with. So commercial can be a lot more complex.

Speaker 3:

When you think about even how they build the buildings, commercial versus residential it's usually a lot different. In residential, you may, you know, you may have wood frame, you may have a CBS block, but when you get to commercial, you know you're dealing with, you know, steel framing a lot of times, concrete walls. You're dealing with a lot of different types of building and the inside of the building may be different A lot of times. In commercial you have the glued down carpets and everything. In residential, you're going to have, a lot of times, different types of flooring and everything. And that can sometimes be the same depending on how that commercial building was built and what kind of how the owner, what they want to do as far as the inside of it. But it does change Every time you go into a commercial building with. You know you think steel framing and that how it was built, uh, you get data rooms, all these, all these different things, all these complexities. It's going to affect your drying strategy, you know. So you know your drying strategy is going to be a lot simpler if you're just drying out a couple bedrooms in a home. Even if you're drying out a residential home, it's a lot smaller, so it's less complexities. Usually they're one to two stories.

Speaker 3:

You're not dealing with the additional complexities that commercial brings. You know the the additional complexities that commercial brings. You're also usually with residential. You're just working with you know one-on-one with that that homeowner.

Speaker 3:

On commercial, you're working with a lot more than that. You know you're working with maybe the building owner, property manager. You may have some city involved or anything, depending on where that commercial building is operating, so you could have another manager. But maybe there's different businesses and different floors. You may have that company or that manager of that business or owner of that business that is in that floor that you're dealing with. So you're dealing with a lot of different complexities as well.

Speaker 3:

And then with commercial, of course you've got to make sure that everything's compliant and the same with residential.

Speaker 3:

But you've got OSHA, you've got ADA standards.

Speaker 3:

You have a lot of different things that you have to be aware of when you're in a commercial building and our strategies have to be different and our strategies have to be different. So in residential, that homeowner could have the choice of do they just want to get a hotel while we're trying out the building and they can just go get a hotel. And in commercial, that business owner usually is going to want to stay open. So we got to find ways to either have different access corridors so clients or customers can enter the building. We have to phase our work. We maybe have to do some parts of it during off work hours. We're going to try to make sure that that business can still operate in that commercial setting when in residential, like I said, homeowner can just say, hey, we're just going to go stay in a hotel, for while this project's going on, they can obviously stay there, you know, depending on what the scope of the project. But yeah, there's just a lot more logistics and everything you know that goes into a commercial, you know building.

Speaker 2:

Now are there legal or insurance complexities that make commercial jobs more intense things that it's covering and the higher dollar amount on.

Speaker 3:

You know what the building's insured for. You know sometimes there's multiple you know policies or whichever that you're working with, and you know it's not always. You know as cut and dry as it might be in a typical little townhome or something that someone has a you know a policy on. So, yeah, there can be added complexities to that as well.

Speaker 2:

Now, what kind of equipment or techniques do you deploy in commercial settings that you wouldn't normally use in residential, specifically, it's a great question.

Speaker 3:

It really depends on the type of commercial setting that we're focused on. But with equipment, you think, if let's just talk basic water damage, in a residential we're usually going to use what's called portable dehumidifiers, lgrs, those type of things. So we're going to use these portable dehumidifiers to make sure that we can help dry out the building. And in a commercial setting it's going to be think big dehumidifiers that are going to be on a trailer and they're what's called a desiccant type dehumidifier. We're going to use those to dry out that building and we're going to be basically ducting in the dry air throughout the building so that way they don't have all these portables throughout the building and everything. They do a really good job, you know.

Speaker 3:

And we can also bring in portable air conditioning and there's lots of things that we can do. But you're you know we're taking what you would normally think of. If you were in your bedroom and it was hot and you got a little window unit portable window unit and you wanted to bring the temperature down, we would bring in a trailer mounted air conditioning unit in order to bring the temperature down in the building, or multiple of them, and the same thing with the desiccant trailer mount dehumidifiers. We're going to bring in sometimes a couple of them or more for really large buildings or high rises, in order to make sure that we can accomplish what we're trying to accomplish, depending on, obviously, the scope of the project and the amount of water damage that was involved.

Speaker 2:

Now Chad. Final question for you today Can you share an example of a commercial job where rapid response truly saved a business?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean there's a bunch of times rapid response makes a difference.

Speaker 3:

I can tell you that we had one where we got called to a commercial building and when we got there and the trucks pulled up there was water just flowing out the lobby, flowing down the stairs to where we had pulled up. It was a lot and it ended up flooding out. Let's just say, multiple floors, multiple areas, and our rapid response really helped minimize the damage that had occurred there. If we had shown up hours later, that water would have continued to build up and it would have impacted way more than it actually did. By the time we got there and set up and started extracting it and working with the building owners and the property managers on that building, we really saved them a lot of money. And when you think about commercial, you know in commercial projects you're not just saving a couple thousand dollars, a couple hundred dollars or anything like that. You're usually saving hundreds of thousands or, you know, millions of dollars with when you get there fast and you start making sure you can now reverse that water damage and start drying out that building.

Speaker 2:

Wow, appreciate the clarity. Chad, your team turns pressure into precision and it's inspiring to hear how you keep your business afloat. Catch you on the next one.

Speaker 3:

Thanks, catch you then too. Bye everyone.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Restoration Revolution podcast, where recovery starts here. Let us help put your family on the road to recovery. Go to hazardcleannet or call 772-259-5018. That's 772-259-5018.