I’m going to be shampooing my carpet on Wednesday when the temperature is expected to be in the low 30’s (celsius), but to help with the drying process, I have a ceiling fan that has both a summer and a winter setting option.
Simple question, which one would be the most efficacious to speed up the drying?
Blowing down, at the ground, would technically be best, but I’m guessing the room is small enough that it won’t make a real big difference one way or the other.
For a single ceiling fan in a large room there’s probably negligible difference; the air velocity once it gets to floor level is roughly zero.
But as a general rule blow directly on whatever you’re trying to dry. So set the fan to blow downwards. Which is probably the summer setting. Maybe you can feel the air stream directly. But if not, check to see which way the fan is turning and which way the blades are angled to see which way it’s really blowing.
Keeping air exchanging to move the moisture out of the room, whether by an HVAC system or open windows if it’s not humid outdoors are your best bets to speed the drying process. And whatever shampooing machinery you use has some sort of water vac to remove most of the water. The more diligently you run that over the carpet the better. A minute’s sucking eliminates an hour’s evaporating.
Thanks folks for the info. 
Don’t forget @kambuckta is in Australia and so things might be labeled differently. [Insert stupid southern hemisphere joke here]. Or not - it’d be more polite not to; they’re real tired of those cliches.
And gosh only knows what a Chinese manufacturer might do.
But for sure your cite is how fans ought to be used seasonally and hence how they ought to be labeled.
Of course that diagram assumes the blades are angled one way and some fans might have them set opposite. So the “down in summer / up in winter” is part is surely right, but the clockwise counterclockwise part might be backwards for any given fan.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a label on one. IIRC every one that I’ve changed relied on the switch being vertical and pushing the switch pushed the air in the same direction.
Well…this makes me think harder about how the drains allegedly flow backwards. 
Ouch. This hurts my brain.
Seriously a box fan on the floor would be faster.
I too have never seen “summer” & “winter” settings on a ceiling fan. But the OP says they have them, so we need to work w that.
Every fan I’ve ever owned (~15 total) had a remote control & no slide switches. The remote had a button w either left/right arrows or clockwise/counterclockwise arrows. Pushing which button reversed the direction of rotation. Figuring out whether that resulted in airflow up or down was the user’s problem.
A regular fan is also good. Set it on the floor so it blows across the carpet and put it on high speed. The airflow will help lift the water out of the carpet.
You can also take a few extra passes with the shampooer vacuum to pull out more water. Shampooers typically have a way to put it in vacuum only mode so it doesn’t squirt water
Eventually the problem comes down to keeping the air next to the carpet as dry as possible. Which is why exchange of air with the outside is critical.
There is an equilibrium of water molecules at the surface of the carpet. In perfectly still air you are limited by the very slow diffusion of them out into the rest of the room. Stripping those molecules away from the interface with air containing fewer water molecules means new ones from within the carpet will replace them. Recirculating moist air won’t work. So a combination of in room and room to outside circulation is the key. A box fan in a window can be terrific.
Well of course, the setup for “counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere…”
I wonder if a few minutes with a shop vac not long after cleaning might aid in sucking up some water, especically from deep in the carpet. Depends how good the carpet cleaner is at sucking up the water…
I used a rent-a-carpet cleaner once.
Total failure. The cleaner machine was not good at sucking. The liquid cleaner left a sticky residue feeling and made my dog sneezy. And would not dry.
Had to have a pro come in and clean up the mess I’d made. They complained and griped and charged me a premium to get the crud out of my rug.
It was probably all my fault. YMMV
I too used one once. Something I noticed was the matching cleaning solution they sold was concentrated and had to be diluted IIRC 4:1 before being put into the machine.
Skipping that step would probably have made a sticky mess. Just sayin’.
It was still a lot of work for OK not great results. But good enough to sell the house that had the room I cleaned.
You never owned a pre-remote control ceiling fan? The kind with a pull chain to turn it on and cycle through speeds? With the little slide switch on the cylindrical box on the bottom where the lights attach if you had them (they had their own pull chain? That switch set the rotation direction, one way for summer (cooling season) and the other for winter (heating season. Not labelled on the fan, but clearly spelled out in the instructions.
These were the standard ceiling fan until sometime in the aughts when the remote fans became the default. We know you’re no spring chicken, you’re not fooling anybody.
Missed a piece of low-hanging fruit here. “The cleaner machine sucked at sucking.”
Did I ever mention when I worked at Generous Electric and an interviewee asked why GE didn’t make vacuum cleaners? A co-worker said it was because GE already made enough products that sucked.
I don’t know what candy-ass ceiling fans you have in the US but here in Queensland our ceiling fans blowing downward produce quite a breeze right down to the floor
yes, the pushed moving air has momentum in one direction.. the winter setting, pushing air at the ceiling, has air from below come from all angles, including just circulating the air around near the fan.
anyway, the stronger flow onto the carpet the better. the air moving all around the room helps keep the humidity down by allowing the humid air to find more gaps to exit..
If you have a central HVAC, you can cause more air to flow through the room by turning on the HVAC fan. That will circulate the air throughout the whole house and push the humid air out of the room.
Hey, I read the instructions. 
If you have HVAC, and forced ventilation to the outside isn’t easy (or is just as humid) turn on cold air.
That will condense out the moisture inside the air handler. Something that will make a huge difference. This is why air handler units of HVAC systems have a drain line.
The whole problem with drying something as large as an area of carpet is that all the water has to go somewhere. Lack of ventilation to the outside (or forced dehumidification) means it just condenses somewhere else inside. Which you really don’t want. In humid climates things get grim. Then green.
A nice warm day with low humidity is your friend.