Low Moisture Carpet Cleaning

For the first time in years I had one of my carpet cleaners get angry at the salespeople for specifying steam cleaning a filthy carpet in August.

I have always said to my people that the cleaners will never understand the phone/salespeople and vice versa. Its management’s reponsibility to be able to bridge those gaps and these gaps can be wide.

Anyways the cleaner felt that a low moisture dry crystalline shampoo was the way to go on this commercial job. In many cases I would agree and actually specify this method of cleaning. We can still use safe green chemistries—and we use less water which is part of the green movement. Its a win-win situation and the net result often looks better in humidex weather in August.

This got me thinking about low moisture cleaning or “dry” cleaning of residential carpets in Toronto. I truly have a hard time pushing these methods in our city unless I was the person doing the carpet cleaning myself. What is the reason? It has nothing to do with the chemistries. It has nothing to do with the machines. It has to do with potential damage to the carpet fibers.

I was talking with Aaron Kashn of eFloors the other day over a glass of wine. Aaron sells very high end carpet from all over the world and the usual stuff from Dalton as well. This conversation made me think about the fact that most carpet sold out of Dalton these days is stuff with no texture retention warranty.

Back in the day of my daily carpet cleaning route 15-30 years ago it was rare to see carpet that would have its tufts bloom from a vacuum , traffic or cleaning. We had a name for that junk it was “builder’s grade”. In this day and age I am forever seeing carpet that could not stand up to an aggressive scrubbing from a rotary or dual rotating brush. No really–the junk doesn’t stand up and the “good stuff” can be ruined by improper deployment of spinning brushes or bonnets. Thats why we are careful where we specify low moisture residential carpet cleaning.

It also made me want to point out to consumers that its important to know what kind of warranty your carpet has when you buy it. Don’t be fooled by the famous “wear warranty”. A claim under a wear warranties is almost never honoured. Reason-carpets don’t wear out! Carpets ugly out! The warranty a good carpet needs is a texture retention warranty or a textureguard warranty. I will talk about that more next week.

I had a couple of calls and an email last week about my posts on this blog and my other one at www.TorontoCarpetInspector.com. I was thrilled that I could help people out who were looking to make informed decisions on what to do with their carpet or in one guy’s case how to get it properly installed in this city with the use of a powerstretcher.

If you have any questions or comments email me at leesenter@hotmail.com