Many clients ask us to clean their area rugs in place – in their homes. This is a common request, because a lot of carpet cleaners will do it, and do it cheap. They use the same machine they used on your wall to wall carpet, and call it clean.

This is simply not the right way to clean an area rug. Carpets and rugs are made from textiles – fabric – like your clothes. They are all different in type and construction. There are terms like density, weave, tuft, loop, twist, pile, nylon, polypropylene, wool, viscose, silk, art silk, olefin – used to describe types of carpets/rugs. They are infinite in their variety and differences – like your clothes.

Would you wash your wool dress pants the same way you wash your cotton gym shirt? What about your cashmere sweater or your silk underwear? No. If you wash your cashmere sweater in the same load – with the same detergent, at the same heat – as your cotton shirt, one will come out ruined. Same goes for rugs. They are constructed differently and should be treated differently.Bag Of Dirt 2

Did you know that we can remove almost a full Ziploc (sandwich size) bag of dust and dirt from a 5×7 tufted area rug before we even put any detergent on it? This process, called tamping, cannot be done in your home. We basically vibrate all of the dirt out of your rug using large and fancy equipment. This is an actual bag of dirt from 35 square feet of carpet (5ft x 7ft)

What happens if we skip this step? You are just turning that dirt and dust into mud and pushing it further into the fabric. What would happen if you put a cup full of sand into the dryer with your wool sweater and air tumbled it for a couple hours? This is what you do every time you walk on a dirty rug.

Point – vacuum regularly and get your rugs cleaned once a year. Then, instead of replacing them, they will last and last and last….