Carpet Cleaning Services – Nashville

Our Carpet Cleaning Services

The Process

When considering the fundamentals of cleaning most anything in our environment, the same rules apply over and over.

Ask anyone the process by which they wash their clothes, dishes or even hair. The process goes the same; first wash, then rinse and let dry. It’s often overlooked but one will first remove large mud deposits on clothes or scrape off large food stuff left on a plate before washing it. The same process for cleaning everyday objects is also fundamentally the same for carpet cleaning. Dry soil removal is an important part of our carpet cleaning process.

In carpet the most soil is in dry particulate form. This soil is easier to remove when dry as opposed to once it’s wet. Therefore vacuuming, the most effective way to remove this dry soil, is as essential to carpet cleaning as removing that caked on mud from those jeans or leftover food from that plate before washing. Once that soil is allowed to turn to mud it’s more difficult to remove.

The next step in the cleaning process concerns the wash cycle. The purpose of the wash cycle is to separate the soil from the carpet fibers so that it can be removed. There are four fundamentals in the was cycle that must take place for maximum soil removal: Chemical action, heat, agitation and time.

1. Chemical Action: Water is essential to the equation of carpet cleaning, but by itself isn’t a good cleaner and will do little more than remove a small amount of soiling. The chemicals provide emulsification, wetting and sequestering (separation of soil from the fiber) needed to clean carpet. The next step in cleaning carpet after vacuuming is precondition with a quality traffic lane cleaner/detergent. This cleaner should be aggressive enough to separate the oils and resins from the soil that’s bound to the carpet fibers. This is a necessary step in a professional carpet clean.

2. Agitation: Consider a washing machine agitating clothes. The agitator or tumbler continually agitates the clothes into themselves and water loosening soil from them for up to 30 minutes. Carpet, which is usually much more dirty than your clothes, does not get this opportunity for your once or twice a year carpet cleaning. The carpet will receive by proxy jet and wand agitation by anyone using hot water extraction. But an often overlooked piece of the pie is brush or machine agitation. At the very least brush agitation should be implemented and machine agitation in cases of extreme soiling. The brush or machine agitation is very helpful in separating matted fibers as well as separating oil and soil from the carpet fibers. It also helps distribute the preconditioner to all sides of the carpet pile.

3. Temperature: This part of the equation is twofold. One, the higher temperatures clean better. The chemical activity of our preconditioners increase as the temperature of the rinse increases. This results in more emulsification and suspension of soils. Higher temps soften, melt and cut through oils and grease making removal of other soils much easier. Raising the temp also lowers surface tension of the water allowing cleaning agents to penetrate deeper into the carpet fiber releasing soil that’s embedded deep. Secondly, studies on the relation between carpet cleaning and indoor environmental quality performed on behalf of the US EPA in 1991 and 1994 concluded that hotter cleaning solutions have a positive effect on indoor air quality by reducing the levels of biological contamination in soiled carpets by 43-83%. Should you be worried about too much heat?…yes. There are heat sensitive fibers. All synthetics have a threshold but it’s usually high. Wool is of most concern, it will not tolerate water at the tip above 150 degrees.

4. Time: No matter how powerful the extraction or hot the rinse water, without adequate dwell time of the preconditioner a quality job cannot be performed. Starches, sugars, oxidized and dried oils take time to re-dissolve. These materials turn to resins over time that bind to the carpet fiber, attract and hold onto soil like glue. Our preconditioners are designed to break down these resins but only with sufficient time (usually 5 to 15 minutes depending on severity).

The next step in the cleaning process concerns the rinse cycle. The rinsing actually removes (extracts) the soils separated by the wash cycle. In most cases we advocate hot water extraction, often referred to as steam cleaning. Steam is a misnomer and would be devastating to use to clean carpet. Steam is water in its hottest form and would melt most synthetic carpet fibers. Our process looks like steam cleaning but is actually atomized water at no more than 190 degrees as the wand tip. Our truck-mounted process puts all the separated oils and soil into a suspension of hot water and immediately extracted outside into our vans waste tank. After this process the carpet is cleaner, healthier and in general appears much better.

The final step is finishing and drying. Again, often an overlooked step that we deem necessary. Once a carpet has been extracted, we’ll finish groom the pile. This separates the fibers allowing for a faster drying time. At this point a sealer can be applied and also air dryers that speed the drying process.