CARPET RESOILING

Updated: Jul 22, 2019

If you have your carpet cleaned, does it get dirty quicker afterwards? This is a question asked by potential customers all the time. Well, this could actually be true, but often not for the reasons you’d imagine. When cleaning a carpet, it is almost a certainty that it has been exposed to foot traffic and other means of soiling and wear and tear. The carpet is now, therefore, part worn. Let’s say that ten percent of the face yarn has worn away, this means that there is now ten percent less pile to absorb and hide soil. Following the cleaning process, this carpet, due to its part-worn pile, would then appear to soil more quickly than it did when it was new and had fuller pile. This is no fault of the cleaning process, just normal wear and tear. So... what about the detergents used to clean carpets? Do these cause resoiling? Well, certainly with the early generations of carpet cleaning solutions, sticky, residual shampoos did promote resoiling. However, modern cleaning chemistry is formulated differently. The residues are typically hard and crystalline. When dry, they do not attract soil and most will vacuum away. But this is, of course, dependent upon the correct product being used for the purpose and the manufacturer’s instructions being properly followed. All too often we come across cases whereby an untrained or unskilled technician has incorrectly used an aggressive, high alkaline rinse agent “because it's effective and works quickly”. Problems frequently come to light in a typically short time when accelerated resoiling occurs. A customer who has experienced rapid resoiling may never return to the offending company and may even be put off the idea of carpet cleaning altogether. But it is worth remembering that if you employ a cleaning company who is fully trained, follows industry accepted best-practice and uses high-quality cleaning solutions in the way recommended by the manufacturer, rapid re-soiling WILL NOT be an issue.