Carpets are maintained in a number of helpful ways, but only professionally scheduled carpet cleaning will get the job done completely. No matter what an OTC cleaner tells you, it’s not going to get your carpet completely free of pollutants. And while vacuuming your carpets regularly is a great idea, and a necessary one, it’s not going to improve the air quality in your home. Whether we like it or not, liquids and debris seep into our carpets and go all the way to the padding sometimes. A surface vacuum job isn’t going to take care of that. As the debris and liquids begin to build on the carpet, your carpet might begin to smell. Deodorizers can mask the smell, but they don’t get rid of the source. If you want some great advice about making your carpets like new again, here are a few pointers to help you achieve cleaner carpets and better air quality throughout your house.
1. Regular Steam Only Carpet Cleaning Every 12-24 Months
A lot of people don’t know this, but vacuuming alone won’t help your carpet stay clean. Pollutants are carried in on carpets due to foot traffic. Even if you don’t spill anything on your carpet, chances are that mud and water are tracked onto your carpets everyday by you or beloved children in the household. Some carpet warranties aren’t even honored if you don’t have your carpet cleaned every 12-24 months by a professional. There are a lot of good reasons that only professionals are considered competent to clean your carpets. If you simply vacuum and expect a warranty to be honored at a later date, you might be shocked to find out that you should have the carpet professionally cleaned. Experts recommend that you do this every year or two, depending on the amount of traffic you have throughout your home. If you have a lot of pets, smoke, or have many children, it’s almost a certainty that a yearly cleaning will help everyone in the home breathe easier.
2. Professional Steam Cleaning Improved Air Quality
Pollutants in carpet can drastically affect air quality. That’s one reason why the American Lung Association recommends professionally cleaning carpets. This isn’t just a vanity issue. Having dirty, soiled carpet can be detrimental to indoor air quality and introduce health hazards into the home. For example, mildew and mold can grow underneath carpeting and usher in a true health problem for the residents of any household. When you have a carpet steam cleaned, you gently have those pollutants eliminated without all of the harsh elements of chemical cleaning.
3. Blot Instead Of Rub Stains
When a stain is introduced to your carpet, you probably do what anyone else does and panic. The stain itself can seep into carpeting, get down to the padding layer, and eventually cause you a lot of grief. It’s natural to want to clean up that spill as fast as possible, especially if you’re not due for a professional carpet cleaning for awhile. Experts recommend using water very sparingly and then blotting the stain instead of rubbing in a wide area. Gently blotting is always preferable to rubbing because when you rub too hard, you’re actually encouraging the stain to go deeper into the carpet and spread over a wider area. That’s the opposite of what you want to do.
When you get a bad stain, assess the situation and always blot at first before you move onto the next solution. If blotting doesn’t work, it might be time to call a professional cleaner to help you safely remove the stain without damaging your carpeting and leaving it worse than before.
4. Vacuum Regularly
Vacuuming regularly doesn’t hurt much of anything, but how often should you actually vacuum your carpeting? Experts recommend vacuuming your carpets once a week. While vacuuming is no substitute for professional cleaning, it does serve a purpose in the household. When you vacuum, you get rid of nasty skin sells, unseen bacteria, and dirt that loves to gather on the top of your carpet. If you don’t vacuum, these can quickly reduce the air quality in your home and can even cause massive allergies. Pet hair is a huge allergen in households, so if you have a pet you may need to vacuum even more often than once a week. Smokers need to vacuum more often, too, because the smoke that’s gathering on your carpet can cause true breathing problems if you leave it undisturbed.
5. Steam Cleaning Gets Carpets Deep Down Clean
What human beings see of their carpet is usually just the top layer. There’s a lot of flooring underneath that service, and steam cleaning is the ideal and healthy way to get to that layer of grime, dirt, hair, and other unpleasantries. Professional steam cleaners know just how effective this is for removing the grime underneath your top layer of carpet. Water jet nozzles inject the cleaning solution and make use of the power of steam to loosen and then power out all of that mess. The result of steam cleaning is a carpet that will look and feel like new. And that’s always a great, fresh feeling to know that you’ve done your job, kept those carpets looking fresh, and given everyone in your home better air quality.
As you’ve seen, vacuuming your carpet isn’t enough. If you haven’t had a professional cleaning in a few years, it’s likely that vacuuming alone is going to stir up that mess underneath your top layer of carpeting. The best solution is to give a professional steam cleaning service a call. The certified workers who perform these services know exactly how to get your carpet as clean as it’s ever been before in your life. The positives are just too big to ignore. You’ll have fresher, cleaner carpet, a warranty that’s honored if you ever need it, and you’ll also have better air quality in the home.