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The Stains Came Back – Preventing Re-occuring Carpet Stains

September 13, 2014

I was recently called out to see if there was anything I could do to clean a section of carpet where some hand moisturising cream had fallen into the carpet. As a second generation carpet cleaner with many years experience, I recognise these types of jobs as being potentially problematic – for the simple fact that hand cream is oil based, therefore working its way into the nooks and crannies of the fibre – and is difficult to rinse.

The problem won’t be when I clean it. It will be sometime between a few days and two weeks after I clean it, when the spot re-emerges, because I haven’t successfully rinsed it all out. And there is no way to really know if it’s all out – we can only see what’s happening in the visible top section of the pile.

So what’s the solution?

The first step is to use a good quality, water rinseable grease and oil emulsifier. This helps breakdown the oils in the cremam, and create a water miscible solution. This is then steam cleaned out of the carpet with long, deliberate, low pressure passes.

The second step is to have a way of capturing any hand cream residue that the cleaning process misses (and it will always miss some)! I use a concentrated, new generation encapsulating polymer. These work by coating the carpet fibre, and crystalising as they dry – thus locking any remaining oils into the dried up polymer. You don’t see the polymer, and it comes out with subsequent vacuuming. By taking these measures, Mighty Clean Carpet can give satisifaction guarantee’s on our stain removal work.

Pictures of situation below.

Before:

before

After:

after