A burst supply line, a failed sump pump or a backed-up drain does not give you a week to decide what to do. Water moves into drywall, under underlay and along the base of framing within hours, and the difference between a dry-out and a rebuild is usually decided on the first day.
Here is the order the work actually happens in, and where most of the damage gets locked in by waiting.
Four causes account for most of these calls
Across Brampton and Peel, the calls that come in are overwhelmingly one of four things: a washing machine water line, a supply line elsewhere in the house, a sump pump that failed, or a drain backing up.
Three of those four are plumbing that gave way without warning. Only the sump pump gives you any chance of noticing ahead of time — which is worth knowing, because it is the one you can check before it fails rather than after.
Standing water comes out first
Nothing else works until the water is gone. An air mover blowing across a flooded floor moves air over a puddle; it does not dry the structure underneath. That is why water extraction is its own stage and not part of "drying" — the two get run together in most people's heads, and it is the reason drying quotes sometimes look inexplicably long.
Extraction is also the stage where carpet is either saved or written off, and the answer depends heavily on where the water came from. Carpet that has been sitting in clean water from a supply line for a few hours is often recoverable. The underlay underneath it usually is not, because it holds water like a sponge and dries from the outside in.
Contaminated water is a different answer entirely, and it is the next section.
When the water is contaminated, the carpet does not get cleaned
One of the four causes above changes the whole job. A drain backing up is not clean water — in the trade it is Category 3, meaning grossly contaminated, and it is handled differently from a burst supply line from the first minute.
After a Category 3 intrusion the carpet and the cushion underneath it both come out. They are not cleaned, dried and kept. They are removed, and the substrate underneath — the subfloor — is then evaluated on its own merits for whether it can be cleaned and dried.
That is not a judgement call made to sell a bigger job. Porous material that has held contaminated water cannot be reliably returned to a safe condition, and a dried-out contaminated carpet is still a contaminated carpet.
Nothing gets thrown out without your say-so
You do not have to stand there while it happens. Most people cannot take the day off, and the removal does not require you to be present.
What it does require is your authorisation before anything is disposed of — yours, or that of someone you have authorised to act for you. Before disposal, the items that cannot be saved are written up as an inventory, and both of us sign and date it.
That paperwork exists for your protection more than ours. It is the record of what left the property and why, which is exactly what an insurer will ask about later, and it is the documentation approach set out in the water damage restoration standard this work follows.
Finding the water you cannot see
Before any equipment goes in, the wet area has to be mapped, because what is visible on the floor is rarely the full extent of it. Water tracks along the bottom of walls, under cabinets and behind baseboards, and a floor that feels dry underfoot can sit over a saturated subfloor.
Two tools do that work: a moisture meter, which reads how much water is actually in a material, and an infrared camera, which shows the temperature differences that reveal where water has travelled inside a wall or under a floor. Between them they define where the drying has to reach — and, later, whether it got there.
Then the building gets opened up and dried
Drying is not a fan in the corner. It is a controlled process, and on a wet wall it starts with getting air to the wet side of the material.
That means cutting the drywall and pulling out the insulation behind it, since wet insulation holds water against the framing and dries slower than anything around it. Where there is no insulation in the cavity, the drywall still gets opened — holes cut to let air move through the space rather than across a sealed surface.
Then the equipment: air movers to push air across and into the wet materials, and a dehumidifier to pull the resulting moisture out of the air so it does not simply resettle somewhere colder in the house. That metered, documented stage is structural drying, and it is where most of the days on a water job actually go.
Moisture readings get taken and written down as the job runs, so there is a record of materials actually reaching dry rather than a guess that they probably have. That documentation matters twice — once for knowing when to stop, and once if there is an insurance claim.
What not to do while you wait
Do not put a household fan on it and leave. Moving air across water without removing the water raises humidity in the rest of the basement and spreads the problem to materials that were dry.
Do not pull up wet carpet yourself before someone has looked at it. Once it is lifted, stretched and folded, re-installing it is a separate trade and a separate cost. Carpet that could have been dried in place often cannot be after it has been moved.
Do not assume clean water stays clean. Water from a supply line starts clean. After it has run across a basement floor, through boxes and into drywall, it does not stay that way, and how long it has been sitting changes what can be salvaged.
Do not wait for the weekend. The single most expensive decision available here is a delay. Mould growth is a real risk when wet materials stay wet — that is precisely why the first day matters — and once it establishes, it becomes specialist remediation work that Complex Cleaning does not take on.
Why the phone is answered at 3am
Complex Cleaning Services runs 24/7 for water damage restoration and flood cleanup, and that is not a marketing line about being available — it is a consequence of how the work behaves. A flood at 11pm that is extracted at midnight is a different job from the same flood extracted at 9am the next morning. Carpet cleaning is not an after-hours service here. Water damage is.
Kharl Reynolds is IICRC-trained in Water Damage Restoration (WRT), which is the training that covers this specific sequence — extraction, controlled drying, documented readings. It is worth being precise about what that means: it is training taken in water damage, not a carpet-cleaning credential, and not the separate mould standard.
What this costs
Water damage is quoted after someone has seen it, not from a rate card. The published room rates for carpet cleaning do not apply, because the work is not comparable — the variables are how much water, how long it sat, what it soaked into, and how many days of drying the readings call for.
That is a deliberate difference from the rest of the site. Everything else Complex Cleaning does has a published number: carpet from $69 an area, a $175 minimum visit, upholstery priced per piece. Water damage does not, because any number published in advance would be invented.
The bottom line
The first day decides most of the cost. Get the standing water out, get the drying started and measured, and do not move anything you might want to save until someone has looked at it.
If you are standing in it right now, call 437-873-3116. It is answered around the clock.