Which cleaning method is best for my carpet?

Carpet cleaning trainer and consultant Colin Nation,  explains how to best look after our carpets and what cleaning methods to use.

Here he goes again. He is going to tell us to put down that sandwich while he tells us gruesome stories about groobely things that live on our carpet or crawl about on our furniture and infect our lungs with horrible microorganisms that inhabit the soiling in our indoor environment.  Maybe , Maybe not.

Before you decide on a carpet cleaner to clean your carpet, or maybe you have your own carpet cleaning equipment and look after it yourself, I will explain some things that will help you keep them looking great and performing well and keeping the look you paid for as long as possible.

In my role as a carpet cleaning trainer and consultant, I often get asked, “Which method of cleaning is best for my carpet?”  Unfortunately there is no clear answer. A lot can depend on the style of carpet, the fibre content of the pile, the method of installation, the soiling type that the carpet is subject to and what you normally do to maintain it.

Let’s start with soiling. What is soil? Soil is pretty much anything unwanted in the carpet that is removable with cleaning. Stains are the colours and dyes that are not removable with normal cleaning. So in effect there are really only 3 types of soils and the rest are stains. (The stains we will consider in a future article.)

Soil type 1. Dry particulate soil. Depending on the building and its location, this generally consists of sand, grit, leaf litter, clothing fibres, loose carpet fibres, human skin flakes and hair. This also  includes mould, bacteria and dust mite and similar microorganisms that feed of the dead plant and animal matter in the soiling and these can make us sick.

How do you remove this dry particulate soil? With a decent vacuum cleaner of course. If you have barrel, bucket or back-pack vacuum cleaners then you will also need a turbo or power agitator head to go with it if you want to get out as much soil as possible. My preference is a duel motor up-right vacuum. They are safer and much easier to use and far more effective than a suction only machine.  Make sure you have HEPA filters on any vacuum cleaner to prevent re-cycling of ultra fine particles.

Soil type 2. Water soluble soils. This generally consists of sugars, salts and starches and other water soluble soils that can include mucous from sneezing and coughing and residues of beverages. If you can drink it then it is most likely water soluble.

How do you remove water soluble soils? One way is to wait for it to dry out and turn to dry soils and vacuum it out. The big problem is that most water soluble soils are also Hygroscopic, which means they will absorb moisture from the air. In a humid environment, such as a bar area of a hotel, or anywhere North of the Queensland border, the moisture levels in the air are enough to continually keep the soil moist and sticky. Sticky soils don’t vacuum up. The alternative is to rinse it out with water with the hot water extraction process (Steam Cleaning as many will know it by.)

Soil type 3. Fats and oils. Oils from car parks, pollution and cooking fumes are the three main sources of oils, but sweaty bare feet and food spills can also be a contributor. It’s the oily type soils that tend to glue the fine dust particles to the fibres. This is why vacuuming can remove some soils and still leave the carpet looking grey or dull because the dust sticks to the sticky soils. .

How do you remove oily soils? This is where you need a detergent. A detergent dissolves the oils and turns them into a soluble state which can then be removed by a variety of cleaning methods. We will explore those shortly.

I have been in the carpet cleaning industry for over thirty years and have seen lots of changes to carpet and upholstery manufacture, cleaning methods and believe it or not, even the types of soiling that we are finding. As an example, if we wanted to eat something exotic 30 years ago we went to a Chinese restaurant, but nowadays these are hard to find among the rows of restaurants with wonderful cuisines from all corners of the world. With the exception of some liqueurs, soft drinks were the only beverages that come in colours other than red, green, brown or amber.  Thirty years ago the pollution in our air contained lead and other things that have all but disappeared and modern cars don’t tend to drip as much oil all over the road. Soiling has changed and so has the cleaning chemistry and methods.

In the Australian / New Zealand Standard 3733 Textile Floor Coverings – Cleaning and Maintenance of Residential and Commercial Carpeting, there are 5 basic methods of carpet cleaning recognised. I thought it might help to explain these and how they work.

Thirty years ago Hot Water Extraction was the newest and greatest cleaning method available for carpet. It was erroneously called “Steam cleaning” but it did not use steam. It was merely hot water sprayed under pressure and vacuumed out. When the hot water hit the air it created some water vapour which people thought looked like steam, hence the name. Steam is actually invisible and it is also dry, so it is not great at cleaning, so hot water is used to flush out the soiling after detergent is pre-applied to the carpet to dissolve the soiling. This method has the potential to remove most soiling from a carpet, if the operator is good enough, and has been well trained, and has a lot of experience, and uses the right detergents, in the right quantities, and is given sufficient time to thoroughly extract the rinse water. It is a great method for cleaning a heavily soiled carpet, but can take longer to dry than other methods.

Then along came so called “Carpet Dry Cleaning”. This method is not dry. It uses water in the cleaning process so cannot truly be called “Dry Cleaning”. True dry cleaning uses petrochemical solvents (Perchlorethelene) and this must be contained within a sealed environment otherwise probably  no one in a building would survive the release of the volatile solvents.  It is now referred to as Rotary Bonnet Cleaning. There are still some franchises that promote this method. A detergent is applied to the carpet and then an absorbent bonnet is placed under a floor polishing machine and spun over the surface of the carpet to absorb the soil. The advantage of this system is that the carpet dries fairly quickly to get a room back in service in a hurry, the disadvantage is that it is limited in the amount of soil it can remove, so you usually have to do it more often.

There are a number of ‘dry powder’ cleaning systems available and these can provide some solutions where a very fast dry is required.  A detergent or solvent saturated powder is sprinkled on to the carpet with a fertiliser spreader or the like and it is brushed in with a scrubbing machine and allowed to dry and absorb soils into the powder which is then vacuumed away. The advantage is that it dries very quickly, but it struggles to achieve a result on very heavily soiled carpet. It is great as a maintenance system to keep a carpet looking good if you apply the system very frequently.

There is also a “Dry Foam” method.  A machine whips up a detergent foam and this foam is brushed through the carpet and immediately picked up in the vacuum container. A de-foaming chemical is used to kill off the foam in the collection tank. It has fairly limited soil removal ability and tended to cause a lot of re-soiling due to the nature of the old detergents and so it had to be used frequently to achieve a constant good appearance. It was not great in a high humid environment.  I haven’t even seen a dry foam machine in the last 20 years or so.

The oldest method of cleaning carpet was the ‘wet foam’ Shampoo method. A floor scrubber is used to apply detergent through a drip feed system from a tank mounted on the machine. The detergent is then whipped up into a foam in the carpet and the foam is then vacuumed off using a wet pick up vacuum cleaner. This was a fairly messy system and again, many of the old detergents caused rapid re-soiling. This is because the detergents dried out to a dried out detergent. When there was any humidity around, the detergent residue simply remoistened and became sticky and attracted even more soiling. The foaming detergents were difficult to remove from the carpet. Thirty years down the track and I still hear some people say “Don’t get your carpets cleaned because they will only get dirty more quickly”.

But how times have changed. We now have Workplace Health and Safety issues to consider along with ‘Sustainability’. I believe these have been a good thing. Most cleaning product manufacturers have eliminated the nasty solvents from their formulas and have replaced them with more environmentally friendly and safer alternatives making them safer to use for the operator and the environment.

Some have made significant advances in the surfactant technology and have come up with ‘Encapsulation’ technology for the cleaning agents.  This has meant resurgence in the popularity of the old wet foam method. We now call this “Encapsulation cleaning” and it is revolutionising the cleaning of carpet.

Essentially “Encap” cleaning,  as it is known, is similar to the old wet foam method, but only in the type of machine required to apply the cleaning solution. The liquid encapsulation solution is applied through a drip feed into the brush or pad system and is agitated into the pile of the carpet. The soil is released into the foam and within seconds it seems to disappear leaving the carpet looking clean. You need less solution and they dry much faster than the older formulas. “But where does the dirt go?”I hear you ask. Good question. The soil is actually still there, you just don’t see it any more. Oily soils and fats are dissolved in the cleaning solution which then dries into a microscopic brittle crystal. Over the next few regular vacuums, the soil filled crystals are easily removed. It’s like turning sticky soils into dry particle soils that no longer stick to the fibres.

A true encapsulation product is non-hygroscopic and won’t pick up moisture from the air like the old shampoos do. This eliminates the re-soiling. It’s funny, but when I first heard of this Encapsulation system I thought “What a load of rot. Nothing will beat the hot water extraction method for cleaning”. But now I am convinced that it is a viable alternative that has many advantages. There is very little noise which is great for hotels and motels where we don’t want to disturb guests. There is much less water and chemical use than other methods. There is no liquid waste to dispose of so it’s great for the environment. It’s fast, easy to use and easy to learn, it makes the carpet look great and there is no rapid re-soiling. It dries quickly so you can get the rooms back in use quickly. Another advantage is the machinery is relatively inexpensive.

If your carpets are fairly heavily soiled, you still can’t beat a good thorough clean with the hot water extraction by an experienced professional carpet cleaner, especially a WoolSafe Approved Service Provider. You can find one at www.woolsafe.com.au .  The WoolSafe Organisation is an independent testing body for chemistry for use on wool carpet and the WoolSafe technicians are especially trained , experienced operators who have years of experience.

If you have your own staff who do carpet cleaning, why not consider contacting Col Nation info@nationtraining.com.au and have your cleaning staff learn the best way to care for your carpet and fine furnishings.

This article was first published in The Executive Housekeeper Magazine Vol 16 No3

About Colin Nation:
Col Nation is a 30 year veteran in the carpet maintenance industry. He operates ABBsolve Services, a specialty stain removal and carpet cleaning consulting service on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland Australia. As a WoolSafe Registered Inspector, Colin helps carpet owners and manufacturers solve many types of issues relating to carpet maintenance. With this experience behind him he passes on this information and experience through the Daniels Associates of Australasia a Registered Training Organisation that specialises in the cleaning, healthcare and hospitality industries. Colin also operates Nation Training that trains carpet cleaners for the WoolSafe Organisation in Australia and New Zealand that. Colin can be contacted through info@nationtraining.com.au or colnation@abbsolve.com.au