Carpet cleaning

[Bruce]

I can see why people hire them!

[Huge]

Me too...

[Martin Bonner]

It depends. Some steam cleaners just blow steam at the carpet - which obviously has the problem that the dirt doesn't go anywhere.

However, some of them have a vacuum cleaner as well, and that sucks the condensed steam + dirt up (so your carpet is slightly damp rather wet). We have a Polti Vaporreto L'ecoaspira which does get the carpet (and hard floor) really clean.

I would hesitate before fully recommending the Polti though. The last one we had seem badly engineered, and had to be replaced after a few years. The new one seems better, but we have only had it a few months, so it may yet be unreliable. (Personally, the poor engineering would have put me off a buying a replacement from the same firm, but my opinion got given the same weight as Rod's.)

[Dave]

I have to agree here having used a rug doctor a short time ago. I managed to clean the carpets 3 times before returning it back to the sheds. Well, you do get to keep it for 24 hours, so what's a little sleep loss?

Dave

[The Medway Handyman]

Yes. If the backing is jute or hessian it can shrink, polpropylene can't. All are used on wool & wool blend carpets. Assuming the backing were jute or hessian, the water would first have to penetrate the very dense pile, which if wool, is also highly absorbant.

You would literally have to soak such a carpet (as in flood) to shrink it badly.

The wool fibres in a carpet are either punched ('tufted') or woven through a backing material and could only shrink along their length, different to a jumper.

[Rod]

So how does this happen?

"If you really over wet a wool carpet it will shrink by 30% along the length..."

I thought the extreme shinkage would only occur if it were extremely wet

- and that might indeed be doing so by getting through to the jute. (And that it would not happen on a poly backed carpet.)

[The Medway Handyman]

Sorry, what I should have said is;

"if you over wet any carpet with a jute/hessian backing, especially one that has a synthetic pile unable to absorb water, it could shrink by 30%"

Absolutely correct. Sorry, my comments were unclear. I was trying to clear up the myth that "wool carpets shrink". Only carpet backings shrink, not carpet piles.

I have seen flooded carpet shrink by 30% - and I have seen a good carpet fitter put it back again using a power stretcher.

More troublesome is the phenomenon of 'browning' where the vegetable dye in jute/hessian wicks up the pile leaving large patches of brown staining. That can be chemically treated.

Worse scenario is dye run, rare these days, but common in the past with wool, less of a problem with modern dyes.

[Rod]

OK - thanks - same song book after all. :-)

I didn't know the term 'browning' - nor that it could be treated. Had assumed if that happened it was a dead carpet.

Power stretchers muct be something else. Fitters seem to manage amazing stretch with just the, umm, ones.