What Is The Best Way To Clean Carpet

Its important to remember that keeping your carpet clean doesn’t start and stop with the stain. It actually starts well before the stain is created. It starts with vacuuming your carpets at least once a week, especially in heavy traffic areas. Remember, when you are trying to get a stain out, if you haven’t vacuumed, its not just the stain you are trying to combat, its also all of the dirt, dust and build up in your carpet. So what is the best way to clean carpet? Here I ‘ll teach you a method to clean the carpet.

The first step in carpet cleaning is to remove as much of the carpet load or dry soil from the carpet fibers as possible. What happens to dry dirt when you add water? It becomes mud and mud is a lot harder to get out than sand. A sq. yard of carpet may contain up to 8 lbs. of dry dirt. A thorough vacuum of the carpet is the best first step to cleaning the carpet yourself. If you need help in choosing a vacuum, see our free choosing a vacuum guide.

Now that the carpets are thoroughly vacuumed, we want to pre spray or precondition the carpet.

This may be the most important step in the carpet cleaning process and it is often overlooked by the “professional carpet cleaning company.” Many carpet cleaning companies will only precondition the spots they see and not the entire carpet. This is akin to taking very dirty jeans and placing detergent on the ketchup spot and ignoring the general grime that the jeans are covered in. After the jeans dried you would have very dirty jeans with a clean spot where the ketchup used to be. To insure that all the carpet gets as clean as possible we must prespray all the carpets before we clean them. We also want the Prespray to sit or dwell in the carpet fibers for at least two to twenty minutes before we clean them. It takes the soap bubbles time to pry the dirt off the carpet fiber. If we heat our Preconditioner before we apply it, the Preconditioner will be more powerful and effective. Once we reach 118 degrees every 18 degrees hotter will double the ability of the detergent to clean. Make sure that you are heating only detergent and non combustible chemicals. This is one reason why you can never get the carpets as clean with a portable cleaner compared to a high heat truck mount carpet cleaner.

After you pre spray a section of carpet you can agitate the carpet with a carpet rake and this will help the detergent break the dirt free from the carpet fiber. You don’t want the prespray to dry before you rinse the carpets with your home cleaner. You can use a fresh water rinse or a slightly acidic rinse to flush the detergent and dirt out of the carpet. If you can create airflow and warm air the carpets will dry faster. It is preferred for the carpets to dry within 24 hours. The faster the carpets dry the less wicking or traveling of dirt from the carpets backing will occur. A quick recap:

Vacuum carpet thoroughly.
Precondition all the carpet to be cleaned
Heat the Prespray if possible and agitate it into the carpet fibers.
Let the Preconditioner sit or dwell for 2- 20 minutes
Rinse the carpet with fresh water
Dry as fast as possible

By Keith Wroblewski

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