Why rug cleaning is important
Why rug cleaning is especially important is for two reasons: Initially for keeping the rug looking great and then also for ensuring the life span of the rug by slowing down the wearing out of the face fibres. Rugs can be made of wool, silk, cotton, linen and man-made fibres such as viscose or polypropylene. All these fibres get walked on every day, even if we take our shoes off before we walk into our homes, so there will be damage.
Rugs are collecting all the sand, grit, hair, skin and many other pollens from the outside environment deep in the pile. These particles are very sharp and abrasive and can cut the fibres of the rug. This also happens in carpets, which is why your vacuum cleaner will get filled up with little pieces of these fibres. The pile of the rug also gets filled up with spillages of liquids or foods found in the home. Tough products like make-up and children’s paint or glitter are easily spread and can get trapped in the pile. Liquids and foods can also contain dyes that can stain the wool of the rug or carpet.
A lot of people will try to clean rugs themselves and use many different cheap cleaning products bought from the supermarket. These products make the problem of getting the stains out worse and can sometimes permanently damage the fibre and dyes of the rug. This is why rug cleaning is important when done correctly by a professional rug and carpet cleaner such as Captain Rug Wash. With rug cleaning, you need to flush all this dirt out of the rug using many hundreds of litres of cold water and specialist rug cleaning tools. Once the rugs are clean it is especially important to get the rugs dry as quickly as possible, which is why every professional rug cleaning facility will have a temperature-controlled drying room.
When a rug comes into our rug cleaning facility, the first thing we do is do a full inspection of the rug. This includes noting any wear and tear, rips, holes or damages. During the inspection, we are also looking for evidence of dye bleed and finding out if the rug has been cleaned before. If it has been cleaned before, and not by a professional rug cleaner, it will most certainly have lots of soap left in the rug. We then use a machine on the rug to vibrate out all the dry, abrasive soil from deep in the pile of the rug.
All the dyes are tested before we clean the rug, to make sure they won’t bleed. If they do bleed, we know to add a dye stabilising solution to the cleaning process to ensure these dyes don’t bleed into the lighter colours of the rug. The fringes of the rug are then cleaned before the rug is flushed out with lots of clean cold water, which rinses out all of the dirt and cleaning solutions used to clean it. All the rug cleaning solutions we use are designed for and only used on wool rugs.
Once it has been cleaned it gets hung up in our drying room with dehumidifiers, blowers and heaters on to help dry it out as quickly as possible. When the rug is taken down from the drying rack it then goes through another detailed inspection to make sure all stains and odours have been removed. Once we are happy it is as clean as it will get, we then trim the fringes and add any post-treatments it needs. For example; securing the fringe, white knot removal, dye bleed removal, fibre protection, moth treatment and adding a rug pad. It is very important rug owners get their rugs cleaned professionally. A professional rug cleaning company will know how to get stains and odours out of their rug without causing further damage.
Call Captain Rug Wash if you have a dirty rung that needs saving.