Best Carpet Cleaning Solutions

The good news: Rug beating has gone the way of the buggy whip. Even if you have old-fashioned throw rugs or space rugs, nobody really wants to rip them out, hang them on the line, and beat them senseless. They want carpet cleaning solutions, not dunking their elbows and wrists into anti-inflammatory solutions.

Now, for the bad news: If you are not one of those people who likes to kick off their shoes when coming in from a long or hard day, you may want to think about changing. Because the first and most important carpet cleaning solution is keeping your shoes off the carpets. It only begins with the oil, dirt, and bacteria that your shoes are tracking in from the outside.

You have decided to start kicking off your shoes? Excellent, but there is that little matter of everything that got embedded in your carpets until you made that change, even if you vacuum your carpets regularly. No vacuum cleaner gets every last one of it alone. Therefore, you need a special carpet cleaning compound.

Compound, not shampoo is important for clean carpets.  People spend a small fortune on commercial carpet cleaning solutions that include it. However, there is a big problem with liquid carpet shampooing: it reveals what your carpet has in common with your hair if you do not rinse it all out—the shampoo stays in there. In addition, what stays in gets very sticky.

If you want to do it yourself, your best option is the dry carpet cleaner. But if you insist on doing it the way the pros do, with the liquid stuff, it’s better (and cheaper, in the long run) to rent a machine that cleans with water. (If you have to get the old shampoo out, mix in about a cup of vinegar per two and a half gallons of water.)

However, you have a clean carpet with just a nasty stain here and there. That is a simpler problem to solve than you thought. If it is a food stain, well, most food stains come out with . . . shaving cream. Let the shaving cream sit, do not rub, and then rinse with a water-vinegar solution. If it is red wine, mix yourself a spritzer and put some club soda on the stain. Red dye stain? Peroxide and water in a 30/70 mixture will clean up red dye. Add a teaspoon of baking soda and it will clean up the carpet and the air if Rover just cannot wait to get outside.

Nobody loves to clean their carpet. However, all of us have to. In addition, it is an awful lot easier to do than you thought. Throw, space, or wall-to-wall, your days of climbing the wall over cleaning your carpets are hereby numbered.