Cleaning carpets is a tricky thing. Different carpets have different needs, and the same goes for stains. All in all, it’s hard to know what you’re supposed to do while cleaning your carpet, and there are a lot of easy mistakes to make.
If you plan to clean your carpets yourself, many things can go wrong. A carpet cleaner can ruin your carpet if used incorrectly. If you want to avoid making these mistakes, use this list of the most common errors.
Here’s an overview of the most common carpet cleaning mistakes:
- Over-Scrubbing
- Waiting Too Long
- Wrong Product
- Too Much Solution
- Bad Equipment
1. Over-Scrubbing
Carpets are delicate, and vigorously scrubbing stains out of them can cause damage. Your carpet is not as sturdy as you think. Blotting is a much better idea than scrubbing.
That said, make sure you blot with a white, colorless cloth. A colored one might end up bleeding into your carpet, and then you’d have two stains to clean up.
Over-cleaning, in general, is just a bad idea. If you get overzealous, you may find that a carpet cleaner ruined your carpet. Be careful while you clean.
2. Waiting Too Long
Stains continue to set little by little over time. It’s possible that you’ve waited too long to clean your spot, and now it won’t come out without extreme amounts of effort. Fibers are good at absorbing stains, and the truth is you need to act fast.
You can also get long-lasting stains by not cleaning regularly. Vacuum at least once a week. You should also be hiring a carpet cleaning service at least once a year. Not doing either of these things will result in much tougher stains. A carpet cleaner on a ruined carpet isn’t going to help much.
3. Wrong Product
The products used to clean carpets are tricky. You might accidentally use a product that’s too strong and discover that the carpet cleaner ruined your carpet. You could irreversibly damage the fibers by using the wrong product.
Similarly, sometimes people use deodorizing powder or spray instead of cleaning products. A deodorizer is almost always the wrong product to use. These don’t strictly clean anything. They only pile on chemicals to get rid of a smell.
To avoid using the wrong product, you need to test it first. Find a small, inconspicuous section of carpet and use a tiny amount of cleaning product to check if it causes any damage.
4. Too Much Solution
You can easily accidentally use too much cleaning solution while cleaning your carpet. Solutions use strong chemicals, and the wrong balance can cause a ton of damage.
You might also use too much water. Water can soak deep into the carpet and begin growing mold and mildew, which is even harder to get out than stains. Be very careful and stingy with water use.
Generally, use very sparing amounts of solutions while cleaning your carpets. If a carpet cleaner ruined your carpet, ask yourself how much cleaner you used.
5. Bad Equipment
If you rented a steam cleaner or something from a grocery store, be careful with it. You don’t know what kind of damage it has or where it’s been. You might end up hurting your carpet.
You also need to know how to use these machines effectively, or you may quickly find that a carpet cleaner ruined your carpet instead of cleaning it. They can be tricky, and if you’re not a trained technician, you can use them wrong and end up damaging either your carpet or the machine. Generally, doing this yourself is a bad idea.
Conclusion
Cleaning a carpet yourself is tricky and can go wrong in many ways. It’s best to call a trusted professional carpet cleaning service.
Although, calling one can also be tricky, as some carpet cleaning services are unreliable or made up of people that don’t know what they’re doing. Make sure that you call a service like United Carpet Cleaning, with trained technicians that know how to get your carpet cleaned.
Sometimes people come home and find a carpet cleaner ruined their carpet, so you need to be careful which service you employ.
Our technicians in Carson can fulfill these tasks for you. Our technicians are all experienced and ready to help you with your cleaning problems. You don’t need to risk doing it yourself.