Generally speaking, office carpet, cleaning, commercial carpet cleaning and domestic carpet cleaning need different approaches and methods. Commercial such as pubs and restaurants will probably need the hot water extraction method. This is due to the presence of sugars and organic grease (more about this later).
Offices will almost certainly have low profile carpet tiles that need to be cleaned in a totally different way to “normal” carpets.
If you get too much moisture near these you are heading for trouble.
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How to wreck your office carpets.
Office carpet tiles are normally low-profile carpeting with an impervious backing (often bitumen based).
If you get too much cleaning solution on to them, it creates two major problems.
1/ Water seeps under the tiles and cannot dry out.
2/ It is virtually impossible to suck the dirty water back out with a hot water extraction machine.
1/ If water / cleaning solution seeps under a tile, it will be trapped. This becomes a great breeding ground for bacteria which then causes a vile smell. The only way to deal with this is to lift all the tiles, clean / sanitise the floor underneath and eventually re fit the tiles underneath.
This costly, disruptive and a danger to health if not done properly. This is the last thing that a client needs in their offices
2/ If using hot water extraction machines, it is really easy to put too much cleaning solution down. This then pushes the dirt down to the bottom of the tile. Your problem is that no matter how powerful your machine’s vacuum system is, it cannot get an airflow through the dense low pile to suck it back out.
This means the dirt and cleaning solution festers down at the base of the pile, creating the perfect conditions for bacteria to run wild.
After a few days, this will dry out naturally (if the ventilation is good enough). As it does, it dries from below, bringing all that dirt back up to the top where it looks terrible (worse than before the “cleaning” work was carried out.
If the offices have poor ventilation, the smell can be horrible and the risk of staff infection raised.
Again. Not what the client was expecting!
So, how do we deal with this?
Enter, Minimum Moisture Carpet Cleaning.
Developed specifically to deal with the above problems this system is superb for getting great results on low profile tiles.
This uses just enough moisture to clean the carpets but not enough to soak them.
This also means that they dry really quickly. Usually about an hour but often even half an hour if we speed dry them.
The most important thing here is to get as much dust and dirt out as possible by dry vacuuming first. This is done with a huge industrial vacuum cleaner called a pile lifter. It looks like a lawnmower and is brilliant at getting the bulk of the dry soil out.
This is important. If we don’t get the dust and dirt out first, it gets mixed with the solution and we make our own version of mud pies!
This is what happens when people try to wet clean tiles (remember the dirt getting pushed down the fibres, rather than being removed?).
Here’s an image that shows what happens when this dirt dries out and comes back up to the surface (called “wick back”).