While I was at a customers house quoting to clean some upholstery, she asked if I could help with her kitchen carpet. Floatex is not a common floor covering in my experience and I’m happy about that as it’s a real challenge to clean as my customer found out. She said that she’s has had to clean it every five or six weeks because it gets dirty very quickly. I instantly knew what the problem was but asked her how she cleans it just to confirm the issue. She uses a small domestic carpet cleaning machine which she bought from Argos for a few hundred pounds, you probably know the type of machine I mean. There are a few different makes on the market, they all perform roughly the same but have one thing in common. They don’t work!
This is why. When a homeowner uses this type of machine they fill the ‘clean tank’ with water mixed with whatever cleaning solution is supplied to them. They then pump the solution into the carpet with the machine using slow passes over dirty parts of the carpet. The issue is that the small machine simply isn’t capable of extracting all of the suspended dirt and the cleaning solution back into the ‘dirty water’ tank. Even powerful professional machines struggle on some types of carpet like floatex because of the airflow issue but that’s another article! So a lot of the dirty soap solution is left behind in the carpet where it dries and becomes this sticky dirt attracting residue, ensuring the carpet re-soils very quickly.
The solution is not to clean the carpet more and more as this will exacerbate the problem but to get a professional to simply rinse the carpet clean of the residue using a much more powerful machine and a rinsing agent. For my customers floatex carpet several passes did the trick, the evidence was in the dirty water full of bubbles which came from the dirty tank of my professional machine. I’m sad enough to have taken a video which you can see here.
Conclusion: Get the pros in it’s better in the long run!
THIS IMAGE SHOWS JUST HOW MUCH SOAP RESIDUE CAN STAY IN YOUR CARPET WHEN YOU USE OFF THE SHELF CLEANING PRODUCTS. THESE PRODUCTS WILL DRY IN YOUR CARPET AND ATTRACT DIRT.