Soot, residue & odor · 24/7
Smoke Damage Repair
Smoke goes everywhere the air went, and soot keeps damaging surfaces long after the fire is out. We remove the residue in the order that keeps walls cleanable, decontaminate the ductwork, and treat the odor at its source instead of covering it.
- Rapid response teams
- On standby
- Phones answered
- 24/7
- Counties & boroughs
- 7
Certified & licensed · Fully insured · We handle your insurance
Our certifications and credentials
IICRC Certified Technicians
Industry standard certification
OSHA Certified
Safety trained crews
25+ Years Experience
Ownership, in restoration
Licensed & Insured
Certificate on request
What it is
What smoke damage actually is
Smoke damage is the residue, staining and odor left behind by combustion, and it spreads far past whatever burned.Smoke is a suspension of unburned carbon and vapourised chemicals moving with hot air. It travels wherever the air travelled — up stairwells, through return vents, into closets, along the underside of shelves, into rooms nobody opened that week — and then it cools and settles as soot on every surface affected.
That is why the room that burned is rarely the whole job. A pan fire in a kitchen routinely puts protein residue on cabinets two floors up. A smouldering couch coats a whole apartment. And in an attached house or a multifamily building, the fire does not have to have been yours at all: smoke crosses party walls, shared chases and common hallways, and the neighbour’s loss becomes your smoke and soot damage.
Why soot keeps causing damage after the fire is out
Soot is acidic. It is not inert dust sitting on a surface waiting to be swept up — it is actively reacting with whatever it landed on, and the high temperatures of the event leave finishes primed to take the stain. The sequence is predictable enough to plan around:
- Within hours: plastics, vinyl and grout discolour permanently, and unsealed marble and alabaster stain.
- Within days: painted walls yellow, metal tarnishes, and fibreglass and appliance finishes take on a cast that will not clean out.
- Within a week or two: chrome, brass and aluminium corrode, glass etches, and wood finishes and textiles need refinishing rather than cleaning.
- Left indefinitely: porous materials hold the residue and the odor for as long as they are in the building.
None of that is a scare tactic; it is why the smoke damage restoration process is priced as urgent work, and why soot removal is the first item on the schedule rather than the last. A house cleaned in the first week usually comes back completely. The same house cleaned in the second month is a refinishing job with a repaint attached, and the difference on the invoice is not marginal.
One line worth being blunt about, because it decides which page you want: if there was a structural fire — charred framing, a collapsed ceiling, a roof or windows open to the weather — that is fire damage restoration, and the board-up and rebuild side of fire restoration is a bigger job than this page covers. Start at fire and smoke damage restoration instead. This page is for the smoke, the soot and the smell — the part that is left when the structure itself is sound, and the part most property owners actually end up calling about.
Residue types
Four residues, and why one cleaner cannot handle all of them
Different fuels burning at different temperatures leave chemically different residues, and each one responds to a different method. This is the whole reason smoke damage cleanup is not just washing walls, and the reason the first pass matters more than any later one.
| Residue | Where it comes from | What it looks like | How it has to be cleaned |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dry smoke | Fast-burning, high-oxygen fires. Paper, wood, most house fires that got air. | Fine, powdery, dry. Sits on top of the surface rather than in it. | The most forgiving of the four. Dry vacuuming and chemical sponges lift most of it. It does hide in cracks, grout lines and outlet boxes, and it gets driven in permanently by anyone who reaches for a wet cloth first. |
| Wet smoke | Slow, smouldering, low-oxygen fires. Plastics, rubber, synthetic upholstery, foam. | Thick, sticky, smeary and black. A strong odor that outlasts the visible mess by months. | The hardest of the four. Wet smoke damage bonds to the surface and it webs — long strands of residue hanging off corners and ceiling fixtures. Needs solvent-based chemistry, a lot of labour, and a realistic conversation about which surfaces are not coming back. |
| Protein smoke | Cooking fires. A pan of meat or oil left on a burner, usually with no flame damage at all. | Nearly invisible. A thin amber-yellow varnish that lacquers cabinets, paint and appliance faces, with a rancid smell that gets worse with warmth and humidity. | The one homeowners most often try to clean themselves, because there is nothing to see. Degreasing chemistry and full structural cleaning of the affected areas, then sealing. Ordinary kitchen cleaner spreads the film rather than removing it. |
| Fuel-oil soot | An oil burner or boiler misfire — a puff back. No fire at all. | Greasy, heavy, strongly staining, and it smells of fuel oil rather than of smoke. | Dry removal only on the first pass, then chemistry matched to oil. Different enough from fire-origin soot that it gets its own page: see puff back cleanup. |
Most real losses are a mixture. An electrical fire in a wall cavity — faulty wiring behind the drywall, usually — produces wet smoke from the insulation and dry smoke from the framing in the same room, and the two need opposite handling on the same wall. That is what a thorough inspection is actually for — not to count the rooms, but to work out which residue is on which surface before anyone opens a bottle of anything.
It is also why smoke restoration runs on specialized equipment rather than on a bucket and a ladder. HEPA air scrubbers, chemical sponges, ultrasonic tanks and hydroxyl generators each solve a different part of it, and which of them come off the truck is decided by the affected materials, not by a standard package.
If the residue is greasy, smells of fuel oil and appeared without any fire at all, that is a burner misfire rather than a fire loss. Puff back cleanup covers it, and the insurance conversation is a different one.
Odor
Why the smell comes back on humid days
Because the residues smoke leaves behind are hygroscopic: they pull moisture out of the air. When humidity rises, or the heat comes on for the first time in autumn, that moisture re-mobilises the odor compounds sitting in the material and releases them all over again.
This is the single most common complaint after a cheap cleanup, and it is not bad luck. It means the visible residue was removed and the reservoir was not. A wall can look perfect and the wall cavity behind it can still be loaded. Lingering odors are a reliable signal that something porous was left in the building.
The ductwork is usually the reason
If the air handler ran at any point during or after the event, the smoke went through it, and both the supply and return sides are now coated. Every heating or cooling cycle after that redistributes residue into rooms that were never directly affected. A house that has been cleaned room by room but not had its HVAC system decontaminated will smell of smoke again within one cold morning, and the homeowner will reasonably conclude the cleaning failed.
So the ducts, coil, blower and filters are part of the scope, not an upsell after the fact. You cannot remove smoke odor from a room while its own air supply is still coated. In a multifamily building the same logic applies to shared risers and corridor pressurisation, which is why the conversation there usually involves the managing agent as well as the resident.
What actually removes smoke odor, and what only masks it
Source removal. Not a technique so much as the whole answer. Every gram of residue taken out of the building is odor that cannot come back. Nothing below works reliably until this is done.
Sealing. Shellac-based stain-blocking primer on framing, subfloor and structural components that cannot be removed. This is what stops odor bleeding back out of wood, and it is what people skip before painting.
Hydroxyl generators. Run safely in an occupied space, so work can continue around them. Slower than ozone, and they will not overcome residue that is still present.
Ozone. Effective on stubborn residual odor, but it is not safe to breathe. The space has to be unoccupied — no people, no pets, no plants — and aired out before anyone returns. Anybody offering to ozone a house you are living in is telling you something about their standards.
Thermal fogging. A deodorising compound heated so it penetrates the same cracks the hot smoke did. Genuinely useful, and genuinely useless as a substitute for cleaning.
Air fresheners and masking agents. These do nothing except add a second smell. If a restoration company leads with one, that is the whole review.
The dry pass, mid-stroke. The clean stripe is a chemical sponge lifting residue — nothing wet touches the wall until the dry work is finished, because water turns fine soot into a stain.
Before we arrive
What to do, and not do, in the first 24 hours
The don’t list is longer than the do list, and that is not an accident. Most of the avoidable further damage on a smoke loss happens in the first hour, done by someone helpful with a wet cloth.
Do
- Photograph every room before anything moves, wide shots then close-ups. Your adjuster wants the before, and it costs nothing to take too many.
- Open windows if the weather allows, and let the building air out passively.
- Empty the fridge and freezer if the power was off, and throw out any food that was exposed to smoke, including sealed packaging that absorbed odor.
- Change the HVAC filter and then leave the system switched off entirely.
- Cover carpeted traffic areas with clean sheets or plastic if you have to walk through them.
- Call your insurance agent to open the claim, and call us to start the clock on the cleaning.
Do not
- Do not wash walls, ceilings or carpet. Water on fine soot drives it into the paint film and turns a cleanable surface into a repaint.
- Do not run the HVAC system, the air handler or a ceiling fan. Every cycle moves residue into rooms that are still clean.
- Do not use a household vacuum. Without a HEPA filter it exhausts the fine fraction straight back into the room.
- Do not turn on appliances or reset electrical systems that were in the smoke until they have been checked. Residue inside a housing is conductive, and burning plastics leave toxic chemicals behind in it.
- Do not send smoke-affected clothing to an ordinary dry cleaning service without telling them what happened — the wrong process sets the odor in.
- Do not throw anything away before it is inventoried, however ruined it looks. Discarded items are the hardest line to argue on a claim.
Our process
How smoke damage repair actually runs
No step here is optional and none of them can be reordered. If a contractor skips one, ask which.
01
Get in before the residue sets
Soot is acidic and it keeps working. Within hours it discolours grout, plastics and finishes; within days it etches glass, chrome and appliance faces. The first visit is a thorough inspection of every room, not just the one that smells, because smoke does not stop at a doorway.
02
Identify the residue before touching it
Dry smoke, wet smoke, protein smoke and fuel-oil soot are four different residues that need four different chemistries. Guessing here is what turns a cleanable wall into a repaint, so the residue gets identified first and the method follows from it.
03
Contain, filter and stabilise
Containment goes up around the affected areas and HEPA air scrubbers run before any surface is touched, because disturbing settled soot puts it straight back into the air. If firefighting efforts left standing water, water removal and the drying process come first — wet drywall and soot together is a mold problem on a clock.
04
Structural cleaning, dry pass first
Chemical sponges and HEPA vacuums lift dry residue off walls, ceilings and ceiling fixtures before anything wet is introduced. Wet cleaning follows only where the residue calls for it, matched to the surface affected. Porous building materials that will not release the residue are marked for removal rather than scrubbed pointlessly.
05
Contents cleaning and the salvage list
Personal property is inventoried and photographed where it sits, then cleaned by method: ultrasonic for hard goods, dry cleaning and ozone chambers for textiles, hand work for anything fragile. You get a salvage-versus-replace list before a single item is discarded.
06
Ductwork, then odor at the source
The HVAC system is cleaned and the filters replaced, because a spotless house on a sooted duct run smells of smoke again the first cold morning. Only once the source is gone do hydroxyl generators, thermal fogging or sealing get used, and only on what is left. Then the space goes back to its pre loss condition.
Call us
Soot is staining while you decide
Call whichever line matches the property. A person answers, day or night, and you will get a straight answer about whether this needs a crew today or an inspection tomorrow.
Answered 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
What cleans up, and what has to be replaced
More recovers than most people expect, and the split is mostly about porosity rather than about how bad it looks. Hard, sealed, non-porous things come back with thorough cleaning. Soft, open, absorbent things hold residue in a way no cleaning reaches, and treating them is a way of paying twice.
Usually cleans
- Painted walls and ceilings, caught early
- Hardwood, tile, sealed stone and cabinetry
- Glass, metal fixtures and ceiling fixtures
- Hard-goods contents, by ultrasonic cleaning
- Most clothing and household textiles
- Books and documents, by specialist process
Usually replaced
- Carpet pad, and carpet after heavy wet smoke
- Upholstery foam and mattresses
- Batt insulation in an affected wall or attic
- Unsealed masonry and popcorn ceilings
- HVAC filters, and flex duct in a bad run
- Any exposed food, cosmetics or medication
The list is a starting point, not a verdict. Which side of it a particular item lands on depends on the residue and on how long it sat, and that call gets made in front of you with the item in hand, not on a spreadsheet afterwards.
What it costs, and the claims process
We do not publish a price for smoke damage repair and we will not quote one over the phone, because the number is driven by things nobody can see remotely: which residue, how many rooms, whether the ductwork is contaminated, how much personal property needs cleaning rather than replacing, and how long it sat. Anyone who gives you a figure sight unseen is guessing, and the guess is usually low on purpose.
On the insurance side, smoke is a named peril on most homeowners policies, and coverage is rarely the argument. Scope is. An insurance company will price the room that burned; the actual loss includes contents cleaning, the HVAC system, and the rooms upstairs that nobody opened. Extensive damage that never gets written down does not get paid for.
So the documentation is the job. We photograph and inventory before anything moves, keep a salvage-versus-replace list instead of discarding quietly, record the residue type room by room, and write the estimate in the line-item format adjusters expect. We bill most carriers directly. The claim stays yours — you should not have to project-manage it from a house you cannot touch. More on how that works on our insurance claims page.
The same applies on a commercial property, with one addition: the number that matters there is usually days closed rather than dollars cleaned, so the sequencing gets built around reopening.
NYC & Long Island
Smoke that started in someone else’s apartment
In a region built on attached and multifamily stock, a large share of the smoke damage calls we take are from people who never had a fire. Smoke moves through party walls, shared plumbing chases, common stairwells and pressurised corridors, and it settles in units three floors above a kitchen fire that the fire department put out in ten minutes.
That changes the paperwork more than it changes the cleaning. There are usually two carriers involved, sometimes a building policy as well, and a managing agent or co-op board who wants the corridor protected, the certificates of insurance filed and the work done inside approved hours. We deal with that routinely and it is part of the scope rather than a surprise halfway through.
Two other patterns show up often enough here to name. Cooking fires in small kitchens are the most common single source of protein residue we see, and they almost never involve flame damage — the caller usually says nothing happened, the house just smells. And every autumn, first-fire week brings a run of calls from houses where an older heating system put smoke or soot through the building on start-up. Both are smoke jobs, and neither is a fire job.
Contents cleaning. Everything is inventoried and photographed where it stood before it leaves the property, because the list is what the claim is settled against.
Where we work
Seven markets we cover
Response time is a function of where the truck starts, not where the office is. We keep crews close to every market we cover.
- Suffolk County
Suffolk runs from the Nassau line to Montauk, which means one crew can be pumping out a slab-on-grade ranch in Brentwood while another is tarping a roof on the East End.
- Rapid response teams on standby
- Licensed and insured
- Nassau County
Nassau is dense post-war housing stock with finished basements almost everywhere, which turns an ordinary supply-line failure into a full-floor loss.
- Rapid response teams on standby
- Licensed and insured
- Queens
Queens combines attached single-family stock with a very large stock of below-grade apartments, and Hurricane Ida made the consequences of that unmistakable.
- Rapid response teams on standby
- Licensed and insured
- Brooklyn
Brooklyn is party-wall territory — attached brownstones and row houses — and that changes the job.
- Rapid response teams on standby
- Licensed and insured
- Manhattan
Manhattan losses are vertical.
- Rapid response teams on standby
- Licensed and insured
- Staten Island
The East Shore between Midland Beach, New Dorp Beach, and Oakwood Beach took the worst residential losses of Hurricane Sandy anywhere in the city, and the recovery reshaped the housing stock.
- Rapid response teams on standby
- Licensed and insured
- Berkshire County
Berkshire County is a cold inland upland in western Massachusetts, and that inverts the loss pattern the rest of this company is built around: Pittsfield averages 22°F in January and roughly 150 days a year drop below freezing, so frozen and burst pipes rather than surge are what fills the winter schedule.
- Rapid response teams on standby
- Licensed and insured
FAQ
Smoke damage questions, answered straight
If yours is not here, call and ask. You will get a straight answer, not a callback from a sales team.
How much does it cost to repair smoke damage?
Can you just paint over smoke damage?
How long does it take to fix smoke damage?
Why does the smoke smell keep coming back?
Is smoke damage covered by homeowners insurance?
Can smoke damage be permanent?
What should I not do before the crew arrives?
Do I need a restoration company, or can I clean it myself?
Related fire and smoke damage restoration services
This page is the smoke, the soot and the smell. These cover the fire itself, the version with no fire at all, and the water that firefighting leaves behind.
- Fire & smoke damage restorationThe whole-fire job: board-up, structural cleaning, contents and rebuild as one contract.
- Puff back cleanupGreasy soot through the whole house from an oil burner misfire, with no fire at all.
- Water damage restorationFirefighting water is its own loss, and it has to be dried before soot work starts.
- Fire & smoke damage, BrooklynAttached and multifamily stock, where smoke rarely stays in one property.
- How the claim worksWhat adjusters ask for, and the documentation that decides the scope.
- Talk to a personTwo lines, both answered 24 hours a day, including holidays.
Do not wipe the walls. Call first.
Soot etches and stains by the hour, and the first wipe is usually the expensive one. Tell us what burned, how far the smoke went and how long it has been, and we will tell you honestly what this needs.
Answered by a person, 24/7· Rapid response teams on standby· We handle your insurance