My name's Kevin Harrison,
and I'm the owner and operator of Project Laser,
which is a mobile laser-cleaning service
in Western Australia.
Lasers are really good at cleaning soot
off basically any hard substrate.
So that can be a wooden beam,
a steel beam, a painted wall,
paving stones, bricks, all sorts of surfaces,
whether it's really smooth or porous.
We're sending thousands of light pulses every second
into the surface contamination.
This is getting absorbed into the soot,
and it's basically vaporizing it
or popping it off the surface.
On this day, we were called in to help out
remove smoke damage from a home
that had a Molotov cocktail thrown into it.
There was smoke filled throughout the home
on both stories.
Like, really, really dark black soot,
and we had to remove smoke damage
from every single surface.
So this was within the kitchen,
lounges, bathrooms.
We used our large laser for this job,
because it's got the 15-meter hose.
We parked the vehicle right next to the house
and then just extended the fiber-optic cable
through a door that had been kicked in.
And that gave us access to the majority of the house.
This was a really long process.
Basically worked from left to right.
Once we finished laser cleaning,
we did wipe down the walls just to ensure
there's no vagrant soot on the surface.
We use a pulse laser, which is basically a tool
to remove thin layers of surface contamination.
So, the benefits of a pulse laser,
it has no abrasive power.
So no matter how hard we try,
we can't profile, scratch, or damage a surface.
Porous brick is going to absorb more of the soot.
It's got all the cracks and crevices
where soot will sit, and you may have to
clean at certain different angles,
whereas if you've got a nice,
smooth, painted surface,
it's all even, there's no soot
hiding in different cracks and crevices.
Here we're doing smoke-damage removal
with our small 200-watt mobile laser
on a rammed-earth wall.
If you'd run your fingers over the wall,
it was all crumbly and falling apart.
So if they'd chosen to use high-pressure water,
chemicals, and scrubbing brushes,
they would've removed lots of material.
This was a bush fire that basically
came up to the home and licked the wall
and then caught the trusses on fire.
So there was also some smoke-damage cleaning
inside the house that we had to carry out.
When you're using a laser-cleaning machine,
you need to take safety very seriously.
It is very easy to mitigate the risks.
Firstly, that can be done
by wearing the correct safety glasses.
So for us, that's wearing safety glasses
that protect your eyes from the
1,064 infrared laser pulses.
Secondly, we've spent
an uncomfortable amount of money on respirators.
So everyone who operates the laser
will be wearing a respirator.
The beautiful thing about
using a laser-cleaning machine
is you can really adjust the parameters
depending on what you're cleaning.
If you want to clean a larger area quicker,
you can have a beam that goes,
for example, 100 millimeters wide,
or about 3½ inches.
If you wanted to do large areas,
you could turn the power up and have a large beam.
And at the same time,
you could really wind the power down
if you wanted to remove soot off a chandelier
or a bathtub or the side of a TV.
You really could wind it down enough
to not damage even plastics, if necessary.
With our smaller laser,
it's got a really defined focal zone,
an inch or a couple centimeters.
So if you're not perfectly within that focal zone,
the laser's not going to be effectively cleaning.
The beauty of the laser
is you can just move backwards and forwards slowly,
and you'll hear when the laser is at its loudest,
which is basically when it's chewing through the soot.
You could laser clean with your eyes closed
and just use your ears
once you get used to the sound.
On this job, we're using our 500-watt
laser-cleaning machine to remove smoke damage
from a pool pump that caught on fire.
Once we arrived on site,
we saw that we could easily put
our fiber-optic cable over the fence.
Unfortunately, there was a lot of heat with this fire,
so there was a bit of area where the bricks
were permanently oxidized.
So there was a fair few spots
where there's actually permanent damage on the bricks.
We took off all the old plug points, screws
that were still stuck in the wall.
This just enabled us
to really clean the whole wall properly.
If we need to protect any hoses or cables
when we're laser cleaning,
put blue masking tape over the surface,
or ideally you put aluminium-foil tape.
So aluminium reflects up to 95% of infrared light.
So it's really easy to stop the laser pulses.
And laser cleaning is very different
to traditional cleaning methods for removing soot.
Externally, they would use high-pressure water.
Internally, on painted surfaces,
you're generally using a degreaser,
a bleach, countless rags, chemical gloves.
You'd be spraying the chemical onto the surface,
be wiping it off,
and then you'd be using more cleaning rags
just until that surface was clean enough
that they could apply another paint over the top.
Lasers are basically a single pass.
There's no water, there's no chemicals getting used.
It's definitely the cleanest process
both internally and externally.
Laser cleaning's a brilliant technology.
It's really only getting started,
in the sense of being mobile.
So the technology is really growing rapidly.
Every city in the world is, in the next few years,
going to have a laser-cleaning company
that specifically targets smoke damage.
It's a good feeling to be
one of the first companies doing it
and doing it well.