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How Your Actions Or In-Actions May Be Endangering Your Stored Items

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When keeping items in a self-storage facility, it's not just the facility that has the duty of keeping your items safe. You also have a part to play, and you can easily mess up if you take your items to the storage unit without knowing how to keep them safe. Safe storage practices vary depending on what you are storing, but here are some common acts and omissions that will endanger your stored items:

You Didn't Clean and Dry Them

Almost everything has to be cleaned and dried before storage. Therefore, even if you don't know whether you should clean an item before taking it to long-term storage, go ahead and do it anyway. Here are four reasons for this:

  • Dirt, especially organic dirt, attracts pests such as rodents that may destroy the damaged items
  • Dirt encourages mold growth and mold damages many materials
  • Moisture encourages mold growth
  • Water may cause corrosion and rot on metallic and wooden materials respectively

You Are Over Stacking

How you stack your boxes in storage also has a bearing on their safety. As a rule, you need to start with the heaviest or sturdiest items so that they aren't damaged by the lighter ones on top. This is especially true with fragile items, but there are also items that don't look fragile but can be damaged by heavy weights. For example, a car tire doesn't look fragile, but you can deform it by placing too much weight on it.

You Are Storing Them with Batteries

Anything that is battery operated shouldn't be stored with its batteries. The simple reason for this is that the batteries are likely to leak during long-term storage, and the leakage may damage not only the battery-operated item but also nearby items.

Storing Things on the Floor

Storing items on the floor is almost always a bad idea for one main reason; poor air circulation. Leaving a space between a box and the floor ensures efficient air circulation, which promotes dryness. This is useful for anything that can be damaged by moisture (and its associated effects such as mold) such as wood furniture, metallic objects such as utensils, paper objects such as books, and garments, among many other things.

Therefore, be careful when planning to use a self-storage facility, especially if it is your first time. Talk to the facility manager to understand the security measures they have in place. Otherwise, you may blame the storage facility for your own acts and omissions. You can also click here for more info about this topic.


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