Asphalt driveway=Dark, soiled, traffic areas.

Does this hallway to the left look familiar?  This post is about traffic areas and how we clean traffic areas here at Restore Your Carpet.  You can see that this carpet was freshly vacuumed using our Sanitaire Commercial Vacuum prior to snapping this photo.  I received a call from a local customer that had clipped our ad out of the local paper and wanted to give us a try for the first time.  This job was ~700 SQ. FT of really nice, white frieze carpet, that had about 6 years of traffic on it.  This home has an asphalt driveway which is really popular in this part of the country.  Although this is a cheaper alternative to a concrete driveway, this can and will create the condition that if not properly maintained, could ruin your carpet.  Especially a white carpet like this one.  Luckily, this customer had a higher-end brand of carpet installed in their home.  If I had to guess, this was a Mohawk Frieze, probably the Beale Street line. 

I decided to use a different approach to cleaning this place than I have been doing lately.  I have been doing a lot of low moisture cleaning that I have been having some fun with, but due to the severity of these stains and the fact that I had not used my Rotovac 360 with my truckmount machine in a while I decided to perform the following steps:
1) Pre-vacuum all the carpet.
2) Pre-spray the really bad traffic areas with a special high alkaline mix that I will not divulge here.
3) Pre-spray the entire house with FLEX.  This is a Bridgepoint product that does really well with oily restaurant carpet.  I have had lots of success with this product in other residential jobs so I used it here too.
4) Agitate both pre-sprays with the bonnet attachment for my Rotovac 360 to really scrub it in to make sure that I "tried everything."
5) Steam/hot water extract all of the carpet with my Rotovac 360 and my Amtex truckmount machine.
6) Apply carpet protector to reduce the possibility of the severity of the asphalt soils from happening again.
The following are some more before shots as well as some after shots of this job...  Enjoy!

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This was in front of the couch. The customer pulled the couch back so that we could clean as much carpet as possible. Of course this is the before shot.

This is where the living room and the dining room meet. you can see the tile transition into the kitchen in the top left. There was a gas stove to the left of this traffic area.

This is a close-up of the hallway picture at the beginning of this post, where the kitchen transitions into the hall into the bathroom.

This is a shot of my Rotovac 360 floor machine while I was bonnet-agitating the pre-sprays into the carpet fibers.

This is the "Money-Shot." You can see on the left where all of the stains have been extracted out of the carpet with my Rotovac 360 and my Amtex truckmount. It does not get any better than this!

This is the transition area i mentioned before where the dining room and living room meet. I was really happy with how this turned out.

This is the same area from the money shot mentioned earlier. Needless to say, ALL of the asphalt stained traffic areas now are totally white and clean and the customer is happy.

This job was performed on Star Valley Ranch, Wyoming.

If you or anyone you know has this kind of problem in the high traffic areas of your/their carpet, give us a call, we can Restore Your Carpet.

Star Valley, WY-307.887.0223
Jackson Hole, WY-307.774.0223

RYC, out.