Charge for drying of documents, not Freeze drying.

[Desk Jockey]

Have any of you dried boxes of documents?
If so what did you charge?

We usually just charge time and material.

Our experience has been that it take a lot of labor and still the finished products are wrinkled. We have a bunch of wet documents, no books, that are not valuable enough to freeze dry but need to be saved any way.

 

[Desk Jockey]

Yea it's very hackish!

We've used milk crates too.

Mostly bread carts with multiple racks, they work good for drying but end product is ugly.

 

[ken horvath]

No way around the wrinkles unless freeze drying. You can minimize the wrinkles by drying in small stacks, 50 sheet together. We place them in our deodorizing chamber and heat the racked documents to 130F plus. We have had very positive results. We just finished a 130 box document job in which the documents needed to be saved, but not preserved perfectly. We billed 25K.

 

[kmdineen]

Ken, how did you arrive at the $25k figure? Did you charge $230 per day per heater and add on labor? Did you charge WRT EQ at $34 per hour for monitoring and moving the documents? Did you charge by the ft2 for using your shop, if so how much?

Richard, same question, did you use your e tes or desiccant dehumidifiers and what was your rate for labor? What was the charge for your shop?

 

[ken horvath]

I charge for everything we do. Packout, vans, labor @$33.03 per hour regular, supervisor is like $47 per hour, boxes, drying chamber has a fixed charge per day, I think it is around $185 (I would have to check for sure), HEPA vac, etc... ELE 6400 @ $230 per day, airmovers @ $25 per day. I put Airmovers in drying chamber. I also use a Drieaz Driforce wall drying system, we set the system outside the drying chamber and suck the air out of the drying chamber and vent out of the building. Many times you cannot get the documents from the loss until mold has started to grow. This one was a fire in which one of the arsonists died in the fire. Mold had started before we recieved the documents. The sucking air out of the building slowly with the Driforce allows us to easily maintain high temperature while venting any potential contamination outside. And then we charge storage fees the whole time the job is going. Most jobs we charge $24 per day storage.

The ELE 6400 is thermostatically controlled. You set the temperature and unit maintains temp, you don't have to use exhaust to control temperature. Makes it easy when dealing with mold or potential mold as I want to heat the materials to a minimum of 110F and keep hot until dry and my people can process the documents. Process means separate, HEPA vac, if mold spray with mold control and finish final drying, packing in labeled folder boxes. Some of the documents were in the drying chamber over 2 weeks. I find as long as we keep the temps up the mold doesn't spread through the drying process.

We also keep documents in their original order. All the documents.