Originally Posted By: HTSS_TR
Originally Posted By: Drew99GT
Here's the secret. Vacuum first so pet hair won't get lodged in the carpet cleaning machine. Then, go buy yourself a pump up sprayer for weeds and such, only use it to pre spray your carpet with cleaning solution. Then, map out your carpet like a professional would do. Clean the carpet from the exterior areas and work towards an exit point. Pre spray small areas with cleaning solution, and rinse it out with nothing but water with your carpet cleaning machine. And dry stroke (let the machine suck up as much water after you've rinsed). it's not rocket science. It's hard work, but you'll get crystal clean carpet!
Are these the steps you are recommending ? Thanks.
1)Pre-spray carpet with cleaning solution, let it soaks for 10-15 minutes.
2)Clean it out with water with carpet cleaning machine.
3)Rinse it out with water again with carpet cleaning machine.
4)Suck up as much water as possible after rinsed.
5)Open all windows and have fans running at high speed for faster drying.
Yup. Just did my parents carpet that way with an old beater Hoover carpet cleaning machine and it came out wonderful. You don't need step 3 though and you don't really need to let the prespray cleaning solution sit in the carpet that long. Your goal is to leave the carpet "wet" for as short a time period as possible and to not over saturate it to the point water and or prespray gets into the padding underneath, because, like Steve indicated, professional guys use machines that have as much as 40 or 50 hp gasoline engines. They can suck the water out of the pad. So you map out small areas, prespray a small quadrant, then use the carpet cleaning machine to rinse it out. Use slow passes and after you've made a line of rinse passes, make 2 dry stroke passes to suck out as much water as possible. And when you fill the machine, fill it with hot tap water. If you boil the water, you could melt parts in the machine. Using this technique, areas you clean will be dry in an hour. It might take all day and you'll be sweating cause it's hard work, but it works brilliantly. In fact, most new machines apply cleaning solution and rinse it with clean water on each pass. Some of them have heaters as well to keep the rinse water and cleaning solution hot. If you've used your cleaning machine several times previously and haven't rinsed out the solution, you don't even have to prespray because so much soap is already built up in the carpet. When I used to clean carpet professionally, I could always tell when carpets had been cleaned with a small personal cleaning machine because the carpet had so much soap built up in it. That makes it sticky, it attracts dirt, and it gets dirtier faster. the goal is to clean out all the dirt and leave behind no soap or cleaning solution.
