Is It Worth Hiring a Carpet Cleaner?
With the economy the way it is, many people are wondering if it’s better to save money by cleaning their own carpets or whether they should hire a professional carpet cleaning service.
In this article we’ll talk about the benefits of hiring a carpet cleaner and how it compares to cleaning your own carpets.
Four Qualities of Professional Carpet Cleaners
There’s a number of distinctions that separate carpet cleaning services from renting a machine and trying to do it on your own:
1. Insurance coverage
One client many years ago told how they had rented a carpet cleaner and bought some products from the store to do it herself. After she finished, to her horror the carpet went from the original tan to a noticeable white. The carpet product she bought was a heavy duty synthetic stain remover with a higher level of alkaline and it bleached her carpet!
Because the job wasn’t insured, she ended up having to pay out of pocket to replace her carpet.
A professional carpet cleaner will carry a special insurance to cover damages that may occur, which leads us to the next quality in a professional cleaner:
2. Knowledge of Carpet Chemistry
Had this customer called us before, we could have let her know that a heavy duty synthetic stain remover wasn’t necessary for her carpet cleaning. Her carpet was dirty from mostly soil and foot traffic, which wouldn’t call for a synthetic treatment.
On the flip side, most super market carpet cleaning products carry a lower pH based product for carpet cleaning, such as RugDoctor or Bissell. While these are meant to help remove soil or oils from the fibers, they don’t remove synthetic stains or tougher acid stains from coffee or wine.
When we assess your carpets, we can evaluate each area to determine whether you’ll need additional special treatment.
(By the way, this isn’t an upselling tactic). A few clients have asked us why we charge more for extra treatments. This is because the majority of carpet cleaning focuses on removing common soil and debris, and not everyone has acidic or synthetic stains that need to be removed. We actually remove the cost of extra treatment to help save our clients money instead of forcing them to pay for something they may not need.
3. More Agitation and Suction Power
For a normal vacuum that’s just agitating and sucking up dirt, this isn’t an issue, but once you apply water to the carpet, this creates more weight for the machine to remove and the performance decreases.
Soil not only locks in with your carpet fibers, but it settles deep at the base, which requires powerful agitation to resurface it.
The issue with most super market machine rentals is that they don’t have enough voltage power to both thoroughly agitate the soil and suck it out along with the water out of your carpet. This is because the brush power is competing with the pump power which we call a “power split”. The machine can only handle so many volts and can’t distribute 100% power to both your brush and pump, which causes a decrease in agitation and suction.
A professional carpet cleaner will apply the following techniques:
- Vacuum first
A good thorough vacuuming first helps agitate the carpet and removes a lot of the loose soil which makes less work for the carpet extractor. Because no water has been applied yet in this first phase, the power split effect is not an issue in removing the loose soil. - Steam extractor
After that, the carpet is ready to have steam applied and extracted using a separate carpet cleaning machine.
Our Ninja industrial has about 10x more power than a typical Rug doctor machine, and can remove water from the carpet much more effectively, which leads us into the fourth quality of using a professional carpet cleaner:
4. Pounds per square inch capacity (PSI)
When you’re cleaning carpets effectively, you need to be able to release enough heated water to help lift the soil to extract it. To monitor the power of water release, we use a scale to measure this called Pounds per Square Inc (or the PSI). Lower grade rental machines that claim to be industrial grade only have a PSI of 20-30, and the amount of water lift is extremely low too (meaning they have a hard time removing large amounts of water from your carpet). Whereas true industrial grade extractors like ours have the ability to use a PSI of 250+ and our water lift ability is much more powerful.
Which has more value for the money?
Renting a carpet cleaner from the store will definitely save you money in the short run, but the results will be significantly lower than hiring a professional carpet cleaning service.
Hiring a professional carpet cleaner on the other hand will cost a little more up front, but the long term benefits far out way those of trying to clean the carpet yourself.
If you’ve never hired a carpet cleaning service before, give Always Green Carpet Cleaning a call and we can provide a free consultation to see what type of cleaning and treatment will be best for your carpet, and will include a no-obligation quote.
