Disaster


While I am in the hospital recovering from a hip operation, my wife tells there was a fire in my music room and all the components are covered in soot.
Does anyone know if equipment is recoverable after being covered by soot?
This is a vintage system with many modifications and can't be replaced

rvpiano
The insurance company is working on it and there is a company that restores electrical equipment with smoke damage on it too.
thanks for your good wishes.
We had a house fire in 1984, and I recovered my NAD receiver, but it was covered in soot. The soot didn't affect the operation (in this case, anyway - soot can be conductive), but the receiver smelled badly of smoke - something also to consider when reusing/restoring smoke-damaged equipment.
Thank you for your post.
 I'ts been over a month since the fire and I still have not seen my equipment. It was taken by an electrical restorer and not yet returned.  He's removing the soot and placing the stuff in an isobaric chamber for five days to get rid of the odor.

The music room was gutted by the contractor and is in the process of being rebuilt. The silver lining is that the contractor is installing built in the wall shelves for my 1000's of CDs and records which also were contaminated and had to be treated.

So, after a total of two months, hopefully, I can be back to normal.

Well best of luck with your recovery and getting your life back to normal again..

testpilot
63 posts
01-25-2017 6:20pm
But how do you replace thousands of LP's or a vintage stereo system?
Who cares, especially when you factor in the fact that no one was hurt or killed in the fire. LPs and stereo equipment are just "stuff" that can be replaced. Consider yourself lucky.


No, he is unlucky that this happened to him, we are lucky that it didn't happen to us, so we care for his damaged collection that is irreplaceable as well as any risk of life!
I didn't realize it at the time, but we since found out that it was very close to life-threatening.  The furnace that caught fire is on the other side of an adjacent wall, inches away from where my wife was sleeping. If it had gone on longer the fire would have reached her.
As it turns out, the records and CDs have been treated and are probably playable.  The jury's still out as to whether the equipment is salvageable. It, too,  is being treated to see if it still works.

the only silver lining is that they are rebuilding the music room and are customizing it for in-wall media storage.