Steam Carpet Cleaning
Steam carpet cleaning is a great way to enhance the look and smell of your carpets no matter where it’s located. Your home, your business and even your car can benefit from a good steam cleaning, leaving your carpets cleaner than they’ve ever looked before. Stains and general use can wear down on carpet fibers, leaving them heavy, matted, and grungy looking. With the application of a steam cleaner, all of that can change within hours.
A steam clean can take longer to dry than the dry cleaning method, however it will often penetrate deeper into the carpet fiber for an overall cleaner look. Steam cleaners are great for high traffic areas and for newer, synthetic carpets. It’s important to know that because of the wet process, older rugs could potentially tear apart of shrink, so it’s a question you may want to ask the company who will be applying the treatment.
Choosing a Steam Carpet Cleaning Company
There are a few key questions that you can ask a company to avoid rookie mistakes on your carpets. These mistakes could lead to damaged carpet, bigger stains or mold.
- How long does it take to dry?
- What is applied to the carpet?
- Are there additional products applied afterwards?
Asking about the drying process is important because many inexperienced companies over-saturate the carpet. This can lead to bigger stains because of it soaking in too long and also mold because all the water doesn’t get out. A typical drying time should be 3 to 4 hours if it’s done correctly. If the company tells you longer than this, they may be guilty of applying too much liquid to the carpets.
Ask what is applied to the carpet. They should be applying some sort of alkaline agent to start and an acidic agent afterwards to neutralize it. Some companies will even use a carbonated cleaning agent to help with deep-rooted stains. Finding out what they apply to the carpets will allow you to understand what’s going on the floor and what you can expect.
Finally, ask the steam carpet cleaning company if they’ll apply any additional products afterwards. Many will add a stain protection agent to the carpet to help avoid stains in the future and give an overall gloss to the carpet. This can be applied by the home or business owner or by the cleaning company.
Hot Water Extraction Or Steam Carpet Cleaning
Steam carpet cleaning will use hot water extraction to ultimately get the stains from the carpet. The drying process may take a little longer than other methods, but the carpet will be left feeling softer than ever. It’s a great way to improve the visual perception of the carpet and make it look good as new. Steam carpet cleaning should always be considered before making the decision to re-carpet an entire location. Carpet cleaning can be inexpensive and get many more years out of the carpet before it needs to be replaced. Even if it’s really soiled, there’s still hope, so calling a company to come out and look could prove to be just what you needed.
