Hot Water Extraction
Posted on Mon, Jan 09, 2012 @ 09:19 AM
Hot water extraction, or "steam cleaning" as it is commonly referred to, is the most popular method of carpet cleaning today. It is recognized as the preferred method of cleaning by just about every major carpet manufacturer. It has also been recognized as the most effective cleaning system by the IICRC for removing the most amount of soil from carpeting and keeping carpets from resoiling. It is actually a rinsing step in a multi-step carpet cleaning process that has been around since the 1960's. Invented exclusively for that purpose, it has been misused for decades as a one step cleaning process by many cut rate cleaners as well as franshise cleaners with big advertising budgets and little ethics. When used this way, a consumer is often misled into believing that just because a company employs expensive equiptment that is powerful, that it is being utilized correctly. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.
Think of a soiled carpet this way. There are 2 types of soil in your carpet and on your carpet. The soil in your carpet is dust, sand, tracked in dry stuff from the traffic in your home from family and friends, kids, pets, pollen, soot, pet hair, etc.. The carpet is like a big filter, and over time these dry soils build up. Regular vacuuming is often times not enough to keep the levels of these dry soils low enough that they do not keep from adding to the overall soiled condition of a carpet.
The other type of soil on a carpet are the soils that have been ground into the fibers of your carpet. The constant traffic and environmental conditions such as cooking oils, heating oils, foot traffic, bare foot traffic, pet hair oils, spills of all sorts, settled pollen and dust, wet shoes, all add to the ground in soils that take away from your carpets fresh appearance.
Imagine for a moment what a brand new white tee shirt would look like if you took it out of its wrapper and stapled it to the traffic area of your family room? Think it would still be clean after a couple weeks? How abougt a couple months? Its pretty amazing how great a carpet looks when you think about it.
When you clean your shirt you would put it in the wash where it would go through a wash and rinse cycle. Separate cycles. A carpet cleaning performed correctly employs these steps as well as a thorough vacuuming first to remove all the previously mentioned dry soils. Hot water extraction uses a hot rinsing solution under controlled water pressure to rinse loosened and emulsified soils from the fibers with the help of powerful extraction usually from a truck mounted cleaning system. When done correctly, utilizing all of the necessary procedures identified by the IICRC, there is no better cleaning system available. Just make sure that all the necessary steps are taken so that you are not!