Extraction, moisture mapping, structural drying and cleanup for Cape Coral and Lee County homes, condos and small businesses.
Fastest: call (833) 490-5225. Or send this and we call you back.
Water damage restoration is the work of finding every wet material, pulling the water out, drying the structure down to a measured dry reading and cleaning what the water touched. Cape Coral Water Damage Restoration covers homes, condos and businesses across Cape Coral and Lee County. Calls are answered 24/7 and a crew is dispatched as fast as one is available.
Shut the water off first. The main valve is usually at the meter box near the front of the lot or where the supply line enters the house, and it closes clockwise. Keep out of standing water anywhere near outlets, power strips, a plugged-in appliance or the air handler, and only touch breakers if the panel is dry and you can reach it without stepping into water.
A water loss in Cape Coral rarely arrives as a flood. A supply line behind a washer weeps for a week. A condensate drain backs up in the air handler closet and the ceiling below it goes soft. An afternoon storm in the wet season drives rain under a ridge or through a wind-lifted edge of roofing, and nothing shows until a brown ring appears over the hallway. By then the drywall, the baseboard and the material under the floor have been wet for hours or days.
Restoration follows that water instead of guessing at it. It starts with moisture readings and photographs, moves through extraction and controlled drying with air movers and dehumidifiers, and ends with cleaning and a final set of readings. Fixing the pipe, appliance, roof or AC that let the water in is a licensed trade's job. The crew handles everything the water reached, and you approve the price before any work begins.
Do not walk into standing water in a garage or a ground-floor room if outlets, cords, a pool pump or an appliance are sitting in it. Call first and stay out until the power to that area is off. Treat any water that came in from outside the house as contaminated, and keep children and pets away from it. Skip the household vacuum, which is not built to pull water, and do not run box fans across a sewage or flood loss, because that spreads what is in the water around the room.
Water from a sanitary source, such as a split supply line, a failed fitting or a tub left running. It is the most forgiving category, and carpet, cabinets and drywall can often be saved if drying starts early. Clean water does not stay clean, though. Sitting in a warm room, in contact with dirt, adhesive and building materials, it slides into the next category.
Water carrying some contamination: washer or dishwasher discharge, a condensate pan that has been standing, a toilet overflow without solids. Carpet pad is usually discarded, and surfaces get cleaned before the drying equipment goes in. Soft goods that were soaked rather than splashed tend not to be worth saving.
Grossly contaminated water. Sewage, a toilet backflow with solids, and any water that came in from outside the house all belong here, which includes canal water, surge and street flooding. Porous materials it touched are removed rather than dried. The storm surge and flood cleanup page covers what that means after a storm, and sewage backup cleanup covers a backed-up line.
A slow leak found weeks later is a different job from a burst line found in an hour. The water has had time to wick up wall cavities, get under cabinet toe kicks and feed growth in places nobody can see. These jobs usually start with mapping rather than extraction, and they more often cross into mold remediation.
Tell us what's happening and we'll tell you honestly whether it's a quick fix, and what water damage restoration should cost.
Extraction is usually a matter of hours. Drying a room commonly takes several days with equipment running, and dense materials such as tile over a slab, hardwood and plaster take longer. Repairs start only after readings confirm the materials are dry, so the whole job runs longer than the drying alone.
Warm, humid outside air is the complication here. Open windows during the wet season and you are inviting more moisture into a room you are trying to dry, so the house stays closed and the dehumidifiers do the work. If the power is out after a storm, drying cannot really begin, which is why generators and fuel shape storm-season timelines more than anything the crew does.
Generally, a standard homeowners policy responds to sudden and accidental water damage, such as a failed supply line or an appliance hose. It generally excludes flood, meaning surface water and storm surge, and long-term leaks. Your policy and your insurer decide, so read the policy and ask your agent or carrier.
Flood is a separate policy, written through FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program or a private insurer, and a new flood policy generally carries a 30-day wait before it takes effect. That gap is why so many Cape Coral owners found out after a storm rather than before it. The water damage insurance claims guide sets out the general pattern and where to go for free help with a property claim.
Area, water category, materials, time and equipment days. A hundred square feet of tile wet with clean water for two hours is a small job. Several wet rooms of carpet, cabinets and drywall after days of standing canal water is not. The price is explained and approved before work starts.
The things that move a quote on this coast are mostly the ones a reader can check for themselves. How much floor and wall is wet, and across how many rooms. Which category the water is, because contamination decides what gets cleaned and what gets carried out. What the materials are, since tile, laminate, carpet with pad, drywall and cabinetry all dry at different rates and some do not dry at all. How long the water sat before anyone found it.
Because warm, damp air slows evaporation and mold needs only moisture, warmth and something organic to feed on. EPA guidance is to dry water-damaged materials within 24 to 48 hours. Paper-faced drywall, carpet pad and cabinet backs hold water well past the point a surface feels dry.
Mold can trigger allergy and asthma symptoms in some people, which is reason enough to take a wet ceiling seriously without any of the scare stories that attach to the subject. If growth has already started, the work changes: see mold inspection and moisture mapping for what an assessment covers and who in Florida is licensed to do it.
A licensed plumber repairs pipes, fixtures and water heaters, and an AC contractor handles the air handler and its drain. The crew handles extraction, drying, cleaning and documentation. Repair and rebuilding after drying generally falls under Florida contractor licensing through DBPR, where you can look up any contractor's license.
Keeping those lanes separate saves days. The crew can stop the spread, cap what needs capping and start drying while your plumber or AC contractor schedules the permanent repair. Roof work is the same arrangement: tarping or board-up is an emergency measure to keep the weather out, not roof repair, and a roofer takes it from there.
The crew confirms the water is off and checks the wet area for electrical hazards before anything else. Then the source is identified: a supply line, a drain, an appliance, the air handler, the roof, or water that came in from outside. That last answer changes the whole job, because water from the ground or a canal is treated as contaminated.
Pin and pinless moisture meters and a thermal camera trace how far water travelled, which is almost always further than the stain. Readings get written down room by room, along with photographs taken before anything is moved. A dry reading from an unaffected wall in your own house becomes the target the drying has to reach.
Extractors pull water out of carpet, tile and the gaps around the floor perimeter. Soaked carpet pad, swollen particleboard, wet insulation and drywall that wicked water may need to come out so air can reach the framing behind it. Every cut is explained and photographed first, and nothing is removed without your say.
Air movers push air across wet surfaces while dehumidifiers pull the moisture out of the room instead of letting it move into the next one. In warm, humid air that balance matters, so the house is kept closed up with the AC working alongside the equipment. Readings are taken again each visit and logged.
Surfaces the water touched are cleaned and, where the category calls for it, treated. Equipment comes out when the wet materials match the dry reference reading, not when they feel dry. You get the photographs, the readings and the list of removed materials, which is what an insurer and any contractor doing the repair will ask for.
Cape Coral was laid out from the late 1950s onward as a canal subdivision cut into drained wetland, and the water is never far from the house. Many lots run back to a canal with boat access to the Gulf by way of the Caloosahatchee, which puts finished floors, garages and ground-level utility rooms close to a water surface that rises in a storm. Flood-risk researchers reported in recent years that this city has more properties at risk of flooding than any other in Florida.
The calendar runs the trade here. The wet season starts around May 25 and ends around October 10, with near-daily afternoon thunderstorms, lightning and flash flooding, and the stretch from mid-September into early October carries the added risk of a tropical system. Hurricane season itself runs June 1 to November 30. The dry season from roughly November to May is quieter outside, not inside: plumbing, appliance and AC condensate failures keep coming, and air conditioning runs most of the year.
City utilities are still changing. The Utilities Extension Project is bringing water, sewer and irrigation to parts of the city that have been on wells and septic tanks, and treated wastewater comes back to customers as irrigation water. Where that work has arrived, a crew looks at a different set of plumbing than in a street still on a septic tank, and owners connecting to sewer are required to use a city-licensed plumber for the connection.
Not sure if you're covered? Check your ZIP code.
Standing water pulled out of floors, garages and ground-floor rooms around the clock, then drying with measured readings.
Measured drying of framing, slab, drywall and flooring in Cape Coral buildings, with daily readings deciding when the equipment leaves.
Contained mold removal and drying for Cape Coral properties, with the moisture source found before anything is cleaned.
Stain, sag or drip on a Cape Coral ceiling traced to its source, made safe, opened where it must be and dried above the board.
A restoration price is assembled from the category of the water, how much floor and wall absorbed it, how many days drying equipment has to run, which materials are involved, how reachable the wet area is, and whether cleanup is followed by repairs.
A standard homeowners policy generally responds to sudden and accidental water damage and generally excludes flood and long-term leaks.
For a building in the mapped special flood hazard area, the National Flood Insurance Program requires that repairs or improvements costing at least 50 percent of the structure's value bring the whole building into compliance with current flood rules.
Mold follows water damage when wet materials stay wet.
A slab leak is a water line or drain line leaking beneath a concrete floor slab.
Cape Coral is extending city water, sewer and irrigation service into areas that have relied on wells and septic tanks.
Often, yes. A small clean-water spill on tile caught within the hour usually only needs mopping, a fan and a dehumidifier. Pull a short piece of baseboard or the toe kick and look behind it before you call it done. Once carpet pad, drywall or a cabinet base is involved, a moisture meter is the only honest way to tell whether the material is dry.
Not necessarily. Tile itself is not harmed by water, but what sits under and around it can be, and water travels along that layer out to the walls. A crew can sometimes dry under a tile floor without lifting it. If grout and perimeter readings stay wet after days of drying, lifting a section is usually cheaper than the damage that comes from closing the room up wet.
Only when readings show water inside it or trapped behind it. Wet drywall over insulation on an exterior wall is often cut back a foot or two so the cavity can dry, and that cut is far less disruptive than it sounds. Nothing is opened before photographs are taken and the reason is explained to you.
The crew documents the loss with photographs, dated moisture readings and a list of materials removed, and you are free to pass all of it to your insurer. The coverage decision is your insurer's under your policy, so keep your agent or carrier informed from the first day and ask them what else they want recorded before anything is thrown out.
The Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification is an industry body, not a government agency. It publishes the ANSI/IICRC S500 standard for water damage work and S520 for mold remediation, and it certifies individual technicians in areas such as water damage restoration and applied structural drying. You are welcome to ask a crew which certifications its technicians hold.
Yes. Service runs across Lee County, from Fort Myers and North Fort Myers to the islands and the Pine Island side. Call (833) 490-5225 with your address and you will be told straight away whether a crew can be sent to you.