| 12 November 2014 |
The Risks In DIY Carpet Cleaning |
If your home is heavily carpeted throughout, you probably have to do a lot of carpet cleaning. High traffic areas such as living rooms and dining halls receive a lot of foot fall which means that it gets dirty quickly. The carpet near your entrance way must have accumulated a lot of dirt and moisture from being treaded upon by boots that have freshly experienced the outdoors dust and ice. If you have kids, or in general, clumsy adults in the house, there are chances that you have dropped more than just drinks on the carpet. Cleaning a house full of carpets can be a tedious task, especially when you have to do the deep clean routine. While hiring professional carpet cleaners will take the bulk of the work off you, it will probably cost you a lot of money. As such, the various adverts on doing DIY carpet cleaning using the company’s ‘professional’ cleaning machines may seem like a promising buy that offers good cleaning and saves money, but there are risks to doing it yourself that you might not be aware of. And it might be too late to redeem the situation after you find it out yourself later. Here are some dangers to DIY carpet cleaning that you might ignore at your own peril.1. Poor resultsThe reason that professional cleaning companies do not use these suggestively ‘professional’ machines that are advertised is because they lack the power that a bigger, bulkier, probably gas or petrol driven machine provides. As such the results they give are seldom equivalent to that provided by professional cleaners. If they did, cleaning contractors would rather opt for these less expensive, lighter machines than the ones they normally use. But they don’t, because these machines do not have the same pressure, heat or vacuum capacity as the bigger machines do. Everyone knows that more vacuum, more heat and more pressure will leave the carpets cleaner and dryer. 2. Mould build upSince the smaller machines do not do a good work of removing moisture from the carpets, the carpet may stay damp for a few days, especially if you have wetted it intensely. Such damp carpets may lead to mould growth in them, which are not only hard to remove but also put the heath of the family, especially the children, in jeopardy. Mould growth may also cause damage to the carpets which can only be repaired by completely replacing it.3. Discolouration and shrinkageIf the carpet retains moisture after cleaning, chances are that it will cause the fabric to shrink and change colour. As such browning patches may appear at sections on the carpet which might make it look ugly and unclean. Too much water retention in the carpet will also damage the protective layer on the carpet fibres, thereby leaving it more susceptible to stains and spills. If the problem of damping is consistently ignored, the moisture may even begin to seep through the fabric and affect the flooring underneath. The floorboards may become distorted and the laminate or finish might be spoiled. Using cleaning products that have harsh chemicals may also cause colour loss and deteriorate the texture of the carpet.4. Accumulation of dirtMost carpet cleaners have a detergent component that makes foam which should be wiped dry off the carpet. If the cleaning technique is not done correctly, it leaves behind soapy and sticky residues on the fibres, which only gets dirty with time. If you can’t rinse your carpet in the machine, adding more cleaning product on it will only worsen the situation.If your cleaning methods do any or all of the following to the carpet, you might want to consider hiring a domestic cleaning service that can rescue your carpets before the damage becomes permanent.
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