I am talking about a garden variety washing machine overflow here, not Katrina. Basically I used a wet/dry vac as best I could. The rug is still squishy. Any ideas?
Space heaters. Set them on high and keep an eye on them.
Dehumidifiers.
Fans.
If you’re talking a large area of seriously squishy carpet, I’d call a carpet cleaning company or disaster restoration company. They’ve got powerful truck mounted extractors made for getting water out of carpet.
Excessive moisture is a very bad thing in flooring.
If you don’t want to spend the money to have the pros fix it, you should pull up the carpet right away. There’s usually a pad underneath which will disintegrate if it remains soaked for too long before drying out. Most shop vacs aren’t strong enough to suck water out of the pad under the carpet.
If we’re talking about a large amount of carpet, you might want to call on your home insurance company. They deal with this all the time. If you don’t fix it quickly you’ll probably end up having to replace the carpet.
Rent a carpet steam cleaner, but don’t steam - just use it to suck the excess out. That’s what my mom did when she had a basement flood. That and dehumidifiers and fans, but she extracted all she could first.
It was time for new carpet anyhow, wasn’t it?
Agreed… suck the water out/off with a steam cleaner, and use one of these to circulate air under the carpet… pull up two corners (one to insert and one to allow air out)
The cleaning folks removed the padding and then had floor fans running underneath the carpeting. But mine was a larger area.
Brian