Your Advice on Shampooing Carpets

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m taking a break. I just spent two hours shampooing the carpet in the office. I have a Bissel PowerSteamer. While I was doint ig, questions popper int my head which I thought I would ask you, my fellow Dopers.

  1. How often do you shampoo your carpets? I have three dogs, so I really ought to do it more than I do. My mother, the family’s Neat Freak does hers once a week. (About as frequently as I vaccuum, I’m ashamed to admit.)

  2. When do you decide they’re “clean enough?” I used two buckets of water in the shampoo mode and one to rinse a 14X14 room. The last bucket of rinse water still had a brown tinge to it, but my back is killing me. Would you do more?

  3. What soap do you use? I’ve always used Bissel Pet Odor and Soil Formula (sold at Wal-Mart) but if there’s a better formula, I’d be all for it.

  4. What do you think went wrong last time? We were going to have a party, and I decided the living room carpet needed shampooed, but was very busy with preparations. Hubby offered to do it for me. I showed him how to use the machine, which is very simple, and being a very careful fella, I betcha he read the manual after I left the room. However, after he was done, there was a god-awful stink. (Usually, after I’m done, there’s just the smell of the formula.) I couldn’t understand it. The living room gets very little traffic in the way of spills and the like, nor had we had any leaks or moisture in the room which would cause it. Could it have been leftover water in the machine?

  5. What do you do about the drip-back factor? When I turn off the machine, the water it was sucking pools back down onto the carpet wherever the machine sits. Is this just a design flaw, or is there something wrong with my machine?

Thanks for any advice. I’m off to do the library-- God help me.

2

I used to do my own, but I’ve found that Stanley Steemer gets it cleaner, and my back doesn’t hurt nearly as much when THEY do it!

I dunno…it never seems clean enough when I do it and I used a good home machine. Plus, it really beats the shit out of the carpet.

3

Yeah, I was picking up warm, damp “carpet balls.” (I got a notion of what it must be like to have a cat.)

I prefer to do it myself, because I’m intensely private about my home.

4

I hear ya there. My Stanley Steemer guy was kinda creepy. I will definitely ask for someone else the next time.

5

I worked as a janitor, and I learned about carpet cleaning in janitor school. Frankly, I didn’t do much carpet work; I don’t like it.

Here are some preliminary steps, before you fire up the machine. Run your regular vacuum first. Then prowl around with a spot cleaner. Put some of the cleaner solution (mixed properly) in a trigger sprayer, and lightly mist the traffic patterns. Then start the machine.

6

My house is kid central, so after paying various companies to clean the carpet, I broke down and just bought a machine. It cost about the same as two to three service calls.

I use the carpet cleaner about every three months on average and vacuum about every two days ( the most used rooms, anyway).

I don’t worry about ‘clean enough’. I just do all the area once. Sometimes I hit an area twice, but don’t like to make the carpet ‘wet’.

I use “Mr. Clean”, lemon scent. Sometimes it gets a little foamy, but I just deal with it. The carpet cleaning liquids smell weird and plastic-y to me.

For the drippyness, I usually suck that up after the clean tank refill and dirty tank dump. I always finish cleaning near the kitchen so the last drips can be cleaned up off the hard floor. I also only clean the carpets when I know it will have time to dry before the herd starts stampeding though the house again.