subject: What Professional Carpet Cleaners Do [print this page] Weve all been there before: youve been living in a rented flat/house/apartment for the past year, the lease is up and youre about to leave. Youve carefully planned what to do with all your stuff and arranged to have a couple of days worth of cleaning left over. Then you notice the carpet. Suddenly, it seems to be covered with stains. Of course, the stains have probably been there for months, but you just never saw them before. Its funny how easy it is to ignore things.
This simply wont do. Letting agents tend to overcharge for having to clean, and carpet cleaning comes at a particular premium. So, you call a professional carpet cleaning company, they come round the next day. After theyve left, your carpet looks like new. How do they do this?
If there are any noble trades left in the world, carpet cleaning is surely one of them. It manages to retain a certain sense of mystery that most trades are losing in what is becoming an increasingly DIY culture that we live in. Just how do they manage to get the carpet so clean?
You may be a little disappointed to discover the answer. Contrary to popular belief, and contrary to the results that you see before you, carpet cleaning is a science, not magic. Although science does often seem like magic, and I for one refuse to believe there is not a little fairy dust involved in what carpet cleaners achieve.
The most widely used method for carpet cleaning is hot water extraction. The first step is to determine the type of carpet fibre and exactly what those stains youve just discovered are, as well as gauging how bad they are. They then thoroughly vacuum all the carpets using an industrial vacuum cleaner that puts your Dyson to shame. They then treat any particular spots or stains that wont come out during the normal cleaning process (red wine, tar, candle wax, that sort of thing).
This is where the most important bit comes in: pre-spraying the whole area with traffic-lane cleaner and work into the fibres. This is what does most of the work, and where the magic in carpet cleaning comes into play. Its the choice of these chemicals that is the mystical art of the carpet cleaner, as its the chemicals that do all the actual work. The final stage is to use the hot water extractor to do a final rinse. So despite the name of the process (hot water extraction), its really the chemicals that do the work.
So there you have it. Thats what carpet cleaners are doing while you leave them in your house, busy saving you a hefty chunk of your deposit.
