Electrical Fire Cleanup in Salt Lake County

An electrical fire is usually small. An outlet arcs and scorches the wall around it, a power strip melts under a desk, a space heater cord fails, a panel breaker overheats, a dryer or dishwasher motor burns out, a phone battery flares on a nightstand. Most are out within minutes, with a burn mark the size of a dinner plate. And then the smell hits — and does not leave.

The reason is that nothing natural burned. Wire insulation, outlet housings, cord jackets, and appliance casings are plastics, and a fire that starts inside a wall or behind an appliance smolders them slowly with very little oxygen. That produces wet smoke: a sticky, oily, acrid residue that is the hardest type to clean, the worst to breathe, and the one that smears into a permanent stain the moment it is wiped with water. A dinner-plate burn can leave a film through the whole room and a smell through the whole floor.

Safety first: the circuit stays dead

Before cleanup, the electrical fault has to be found and fixed. The breaker (or the main, if the panel burned) stays off, nothing gets reset, and a licensed electrician inspects and repairs the circuit. Heat damage to wiring typically runs back into the wall well past the visible burn. We schedule around that inspection so the cleanup and the repair happen as one sequence instead of two visits.

Opening the fire-damaged area

Around the point of origin, the charred drywall and any scorched framing or insulation are removed, not cleaned. That lets the cavity be inspected for hidden fire travel, cleaned, and deodorized before it is closed. The rebuild of that section — drywall, texture, paint, a new device and cover plate once the electrician is done — is handled by our sister company Keystone BuildWorks as part of the same job.

Cleaning synthetic smoke without smearing it

Wet smoke needs solvent-based cleaning on hard surfaces, applied after dry removal, with no water-based wiping first. Plastics in the room — switch plates, blinds, electronics housings, appliance fronts — yellow and absorb odor quickly and are assessed individually. Electronics that were in the smoke are not powered on until they have been evaluated; the residue is conductive and corrosive. How each residue type is cleaned is covered on our soot cleanup page.

A recent job

On a recent loss in the Holladay–Millcreek area of Salt Lake County, a space heater left on a wood floor started a fire that burned through the floor. The bedroom door happened to be shut, so the smoke stayed mostly contained to that room — which is the best-case version of this loss, and the reason we tell people to close doors behind them when they evacuate. The burned floor section comes out, the room is cleaned and deodorized, and the floor is rebuilt as one coordinated job.

Seth Saxton holds the IICRC FSRT (Fire and Smoke Restoration Technician) and OCT (Odor Control Technician) certifications, and Keystone Restoration is an IICRC Certified Firm (#70266523).