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First General Services Cleans Up with New Technology
FARRELL, Pa. -- A $250,000 investment in state-of-the-art cleaning technology has helped a fire repair and restoration company attract new business and provide its customers with additional services.
"We've already had an increase in contents restoration over what we did before," reports Ted Koppel, president and CEO of First General Services of Western Pennsylvania. "We're also going a little bit further, as far as distance goes, for content restoration."
First General Services, established in 1984, hosted a ribbon-cutting at its offices Monday.
Three months ago, the company installed high-end equipment such as an Esporta wash system, a Fire Line Ultrasonic hard content cleaning assembly line, and an O'Dell electronics cleaning system designed to restore soft and hard merchandise damaged by fire, mold or vandalism, Koppel says.
"We added this to improve our contents restoration process," Koppel notes. The new system is capable of cleaning, through an environmentally safe process, equipment, merchandise, personal property, clothing and other soft and hard contents that are damaged and would otherwise be discarded or thrown out.
"We just finished a job that was the result of vandalism, where someone sprayed diesel fuel over all their clothing and curtains," Koppel reports. "We were very successful in cleaning that up."
Textiles and other "soft" contents are cleaned through a new Esporta washing system where a computer calibrates the chemicals to tackle various fabrics tainted by smoke, mold and other contamination, he says. "This does an excellent job with sporting goods," eradicating all of the germs that may be prevalent in locker rooms and transferred from person to person.
The new wash system is capable of cleaning a tarnished fabric to "food-grade cleanliness," he relates, preventing the item from being thrown out and trucked to a landfill. This process, he adds, reduces on average soft content losses from $26,000 to $5,200, while at the same time restoring items that might be of sentimental value.
The Esporta can hold 160 pounds of laundry, uses 140 gallons of water, and takes about two hours to do an average load, he reports.
"All of the chemicals we use are plant-based, specialized just for this machine," Koppel says, gesturing to six buckets -- each holding different chemicals -- feeding the machine.
Once the clothes are cleaned, they're transferred to large industrial-size gas dryers that are computerized to dry to a pre-selected moisture content, he explains. Larger quantities that can't fit into the system are dried in a room kept at about 100 degrees and 15% humidity.
Koppel reports that the O'Dell system is specifically designed to clean electronics. "It uses de-ionized water that leaves no sediment and is nonconductive," he relates.
To demonstrate, Koppel sprays a small hose fed with a special de-greasing solution to clean a computer keyboard and monitor that rests inside a metallic wash bay. After the component is washed, it's placed in an oven to dry at 115 degrees for eight to 10 hours. "The exhaust pulls the moisture out," he explains.
A third operation is the Fire Line cleaning system, which cleans hard items such as pots, pans or tools, Koppel notes. Items are placed in a pre-rinse bath at a specified pH level at about 135 degrees. Then, the merchandise is moved to an ultrasonic pH bath.
By changing the solution in such an operation, the process removes rust from objects as well, Koppel adds. Once cleaned, the contents are dried at 150 degrees, packaged, and shipped back to the customer.
First General's focus in on structural fire restoration and replacement projects through a nine-county region, two of which are Mahoning and Trumbull counties in Ohio, Koppel reports. The company employs 36.
Arnold Clebone, president of Mid-American Resource Co., was contracted by the city of Farrell to help arrange financing for the project. "They came to us needing working capital and equipment money," he says. "This puts them ahead of the game."
Clebone says that the city provided between $50,000 and $60,000 in working capital through its revolving loan fund in cooperation with the Gannon University Small Business Development Center and Pittsburgh-based Bridgeway Capital.
"What's unique about Farrell is that we have a large revolving loan fund," Clebone says. "For people willing to locate here, we can do things that other communities can't."
Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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