Different Cleaning Methods

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 that's 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.