If you are a carpet cleaner, you have seen this picture to the left before.  If you are a client looking for a carpet cleaner, you may have moved out of a place that looked like this after you had moved all your belongings to your new place and looked at the carpet and thought..."I am not getting my deposit back..."

This post is an in depth look at the role that physics and chemistry play in the carpet cleaning process that Restore Your Carpet implements in the jobs that we complete for our clients.  When we get the initial phone call, most of the time it is not for a maintenance cleaning, people have a problem that they want us to solve.  I always approach these types of jobs with a chip on my shoulder and take them as a challenge.  There have been jobs in the past where the cost of cleaning the carpet exceeds the current value of the carpet, or else the cost of cleaning it exceeds 65% of the cost to buy new carpet.  We always inform the client if this is the case and allow them to make an informed decision.  The carpet we are discussing today is not in as bad of shape as at first glance.

You may be wondering what is up with the square shaped area in the picture to the left.  This is a living room, and the folks that moved out had an area rug with some furniture around it.  A lot of people do not get their carpets cleaned because they simply do not want to move their furniture out of the rooms.  We provide our clients with the option to either move their furniture on their own, or for a nominal add-on we can move it out and back for them.  Obviously this carpet is dirty.  What is it going to take in order to get this carpet into a 'restored' condition?  Understanding how carpet is made, and the material that it is made of is a great place to start.  In short, carpet is recycled plastic bottles...  Weird huh?  You are walking around on extruded recycled material that has been melted down into liquid and twisted into fiber strands.  If you could view carpet through a microscope, you would see that it has a uniform shape, its shiny, and mostly transparent.  It just happens that I brought along my microscope today with me on this job with the intention of writing this blog...

This picture to the left is an actual photo that I took today on this job of the very carpet in the picture at the beginning of this post.    The carpet is not manufactured with all those flecks and spots.  That is dirt, and soils and etc...  In order to diagnose and properly inspect your carpet before it is cleaned, we get a good idea of what (if any) the problem is before we get started.  One way to do this, is to look at the carpet fibers really closely like you see here with this shot through our microscope camera.  You can see that this carpet is really heavily soiled.  I took this picture after I had vacuumed with our super special vacuum cleaner.  On second thought, I should have taken one before to compare, oh well, next time.  This shot was in the middle of the room in the major traffic area where the soiling was apparent with the naked eye, but I wanted you all to get a closer look...

This little device that I am holding in my hand in this shot is called a PH pen.  It measures the PH(percentage of Hydrogen) level of anything that you can get the little electrode to touch.  It also gives a temperature reading.  Here I have filled up a 2.5 gallon solution bottle with water.  I rinsed it out a couple times and the reading I got was a 7.36.  Water is close to neutral, which is a 7.  7 is neutral.  Most soils are slightly acidic, so less than 7, somewhere north of a 6.  Why does this all matter to the client?  It all depends on how the carpet is used really.  If you have a cleaner that uses really high alkaline cleaners and does not neutralize their detergents or the carpet after cleaning them, your carpet will soils really rapidly following the cleaning process.  Also, high alkaline or high acid concentrate can irritate skin, mostly in kids and infants, and that is not good for anybody.

This is a shot of the reading that I took after mixing up a high alkaline cleaning solution.  Due to the soil level of the carpet, I made a choice of which detergent to use and how much, added it to some hot water, mixed it up, and took a measurement.  This reading shows 11.52 @ 95.3 degrees F.  The PH scale goes from 0-14 so if 7 is neutral, This solution mix is 5,000 times more alkaline than neutral.  For each increment whole number above or below 7, it is measured by ten times.  Head spinning yet?  Read on...

The bottom line is this.  In order to get carpet REALLY clean and safe.  You really need to choose a professional with the proper know-how and tooling to get the job done safely and efficiently.  Restore Your Carpet is a full-service flooring company that is committed to education in the industry, certification, and the latest technology to ensure that we can continue to not just clean your carpet, but to RESTORE it.

RYC, out.

For professional carpet cleaning in the Jackson Hole, WY areas call-
307.774.0223

For professional carpet cleaning in the Star Valley, WY areas call-
307.887.0223

  We have cleaned a lot of berber carpet lately.  Berber is one of those carpet types that everyone thinks they will love until they have it, then they move on to other types.  It really is a pain in the back side in this part of the country.  Berber cannot take on soil and live for very long.  It gets saturated with dirt, the friction from walking and normal foot traffic cuts and damages the fiber loops and then it lays down flat and looks dirty, but it just in reality fiber crush.  I always like to show a client the carpet after it has been cleaned from the angle that the sun hits it directly, so that they can see that it is clean, then take them to the other side of the room so that they can see the shadow.  They are always perplexed.  Either way, back to berber.  The new very low moisture carpet cleaning process that we are implementing here in Wyoming at Restore Your Carpet is continuing to amaze me.  At first when I bought this machine, I would only use it on a carpet that looked clean, just needed a maintenance cleaning.  I would use my truckmount on the real rat nasties.  However as time has gone on and I have become more comfortable with the chemicals, and the process in general, I must admit that the truckmount has sat in the driveway in the other company truck collecting dust...  Sorry Amtex.

The carpet that we cleaned today in Afton, WY at first glance was ruined.  There were multiple pet stains(urine, vomit), and of course the black puddle of ground-in grease in front of the couch.  You can see in the picture above the grease puddle near the top just below the really clean spot where the couch had been.  Down to the bottom left, you can see the urine spots, they look salty in the middle.  The upstairs carpet along with the stairs looked equally bad, but I failed to take pictures of them today.  The very low moisture carpet cleaning process that we are doing here in Wyoming does a fabulous job at cleaning berber.  Here are some pictures to prove it...

There are a lot of carpet cleaning companies in Wyoming, but how many of them could do this with only 1.5 gallons of water?  This new very low moisture cleaning process from Restore Your Carpet is a game changer in this industry, and we are excited to offer it to all of our current and future clients.  If you or anyone else you know is considering replacing your carpet, whether it is berber, or any other fiber type, give us a call, we may have another option for you(that sentence had a lot of commas).

RYC, out.

Carpet cleaning services in Star Valley, WY
307.887.0223
Carpet cleaning services in Jackson, WY
307.774.0223

You may be wondering why I am posting a picture of a piece of clean looking carpet that is lying on a driveway.  I wanted to shake things up a bit and post the after picture first in order to be well, dramatic.  This carpet has had about 6 months of use on it, and judging from this picture, one would have to agree that it looks like lightly used, yet clean looking carpet.  The story behind this carpet in a nutshell is that this is out of a rental town home in Alpine, Wyoming.  This rental had renters in it for about 6 months and these renters allowed some pets to totally trash the place.  There was cat and dog feces, urine, and vomit.  Not to mention the traffic areas that were ground into the fibers with greasy foot soils to boot!  Now that I have painted the picture of what it looked like, let me describe how it smelled.  When you walked into this town home rental, the smell was so pungent and sour that there was no mistaking that is was cat damage.  There were some doggy deposits too, but somehow cats really take the cake when it comes to pet odors in carpet.  It really took your breath away when you walked through the front door.  It is hard to describe the smell, but it was in the top three of nasty odors for me the first time I went in.

Here is another angle of this piece of pet damaged carpet.  Keep in mind that this carpet has only had about 6 months of use on it.  Now the obvious question is why is it out on the driveway?  This piece is out of the living/dining/hallway area on the main level.  The urine damage was so severe that the carpet padding was saturated and had to be thrown out.  We even took steps to seal the wooden sub-floor with a special pet barrier odor coating that is applied to the floor.  This barrier is the most effective product that I have found for blocking the smell of urine thus saving the additional cost of tearing out the wood.  It works better than KILZ, although that would be better than nothing at all.  I always tell our clients that have pet damage that if we can clean/restore the carpet at less than 65% of the cost of replacing it then it is cost-effective.  After measuring the place and doing the math, the client decided to let us try it.  I told her that if at anytime during this process we felt that it was a lost cause I would only charge her for the cost of the chemical and I would eat the labor.  With that in mind, I wanted to pull out all the stops on this one.  After inspecting the carpet and determining that it was sound structurally(meaning that the carpet material could withstand being put through the gauntlet), I decided that I would not just clean it in place, I washed it like it were a wool rug on a wash floor.  Since the pad and subfloor had to be taken out anyway, this is the method I chose.  Here is what the process basically looked like....

This was just the pics of the Living room carpet.  We performed the same process on the master bedroom carpet.  The rest of the house did not require new pad so we cleaned it in place like normal, but used the same chemical cocktail mentioned earlier.  Removing pet stains and odors from carpets is not a job for any old carpet cleaning company.  We are called Restore Your Carpet for a reason.  As long as there is sound material there to clean and it can make it through the gauntlet that we will put it through, we can Restore Your Carpet.

If you or anyone else you know is in need of our services regarding pet damage stains and odors, give us a call.

RYC, out.

Carpet cleaning/restoration services in Jackson Hole, WY
307.774.0223

Carpet cleaning/restoration services in Star Valley, WY
307.887.0223