Different Cleaning Methods

Posted on February 5, 2012 by lee

I just inspected a commercial carpet in a very popular vacation spot.
The carpet was “wearing” according to the building managers.
I could see from a variety of tests that the carpet was actually hard from soil and severely matted down by the same soil.
I looked at the cleaning equipment and found a vacuum with the bag detached inside and on top of that it was wet.
The carpet was being restoratively cleaned by a machine that is supposed to be an interim cleaning method.
They used no detergent of any kind with their regular cleaning, they clean about every four months.
Now why people would clean a heavily used carpet every four months with water only I don’t know, but thats whats happened here.
On top of this these people are highly educated and skilled, they were just following the procedures outlined by the salesman who sold them the machine.
I will talk about cleaning for the next couple of months in this blog. I hope you come back often.
I will start this talk by presenting what we are actually dealing with when cleaning a carpet.
When you analyze the soils in the carpet about 74-79% of the soil is dry particulate matter that can be vacuumed out.The remaining soils are moisture, food and oily soils. The food based soils can usually be removed with some water and light agitation with light chemistry. However the oily soils are not readily removed by water. Oil and water do not mix. You need some sort of cleaning chemistry to suspend the oily soil off of the fibers and then remove it.
If anybody wants to clean your dirty carpet with water alone I would be very skeptical.
I will continue this talk next week.
If you have any questions or comments you can email me at leesenter@hotmail.com.

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Carpet Maintenance During the Snowy Winter

Posted on January 29, 2012 by admin

The most overlooked part of carpet cleaning is called preventative cleaning.

What this revolves around is the ability of the home or facility to keep the soil outside the building or at least at the entry doorways.

If the soil gets past the front doors then it becomes difficult to keep the place clean. In the winter this may often revolve around the dreaded slush or even worse yet -salt! on the carpets.

It is extremely difficult to remove salt with any true green method of carpet cleaning method except for rinsing with straight water. This method can take dozens of attempts and still may not be successful.

Here are a handful of steps that are vital in maintaining a good appearance to your carpets at the buildings entryways during the winter:

Step 1- keep the salt swept away from the doorways when there is no ice or snow.

Step 2- keep sand, soil and settlement off of tires in parking areas swept up daily.

Step 3- have large capture mats at all entries.

Step 4- keep these capture mats clean. If they get slushy vacuum up the slush immediately with a wet-dry vacuum. If its a bad winter you may have to do this several times a day.

Step 5- clean visibly soiled area frequently. This may mean that the carpet has to be cleaned daily at high traffic entrances.

Step 6- vacuum carpets in all directions. The dry particulate matter comes out much easier when its dry. Vacuuming in strokes north-south, east-west, south-north and then west to east will make a huge difference in the amount of soil removed from the carpet.

Step 7- speed dry carpet matting. A huge percentage of installed carpet matting is made of olefin. This olefin fiber wicks soils quickly. Speed drying will allow for salty moisture to dry and be either vacuumed out or padded out with an acid rinse.

A thoroughly thought out carpet maintenance plan requires constant inspection. This may require looking at the carpet before and after the cleaning. You may need to vary the amounts of water employed and the chemistries used in cleaning. Never forget that salty slush is much easier to remove with a wet/dry vac than after it has hardened.

For a free assessment of carpet cleaning issues at your facility, email info@torontocarpetinspector.com

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