Carpet cleaning tips by Cedar Rapids' and Iowa City's best carpet & rug cleaners,
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Des Moines Carpet cleaning tips from a pro.

Man-oh-man is good carpet expensive in Des Moines! How bad are you going to feel in a little while if you are like most home-owners and you unknowingly cause the premature demise of a major investment? But with just a couple minutes worth of tips you can more than double the life expectancy of your carpet.

Carpet fiber is very smooth, relatively soft and somewhat shiny.

Carpet materials are much softer than most of the gritty dirt, dust and soil that very quickly coat most of the fiber. When we walk we put all of our weight on just a few square inches and then grind that gritty dirt against that nice soft, smooth and formerly shiny carpet. Any time you grind a softer surface against a harder one the softer one will gets scraped up. Surprisingly, in just a few passes that nice smooth and shiny surface is now rough and dull because the incoming light gets refracted in many different directions and less of it comes back to your eye. It may not show on this video but try it yourself. Now this rough surface will trap and hold so much more dirt which speeds up the process even more.

Also most carpet manufacturers require you to have your carpets professionally steam cleaned (also known as “hot water extraction”) once every 6 to 12 months in order to keep your warranty valid. That's due to the factors above. They understand all these factors will ruin your carpet and the only solution is to properly clean your carpets on a very regular basis.

The good news is that if you remove the gritty dirt then you remove the problem.

The best way to do that is a thorough attack against the gritty dirt.

* Regular vacuuming. Daily in high traffic areas is best. Lower traffic areas can be done weekly. Use a good vacuum with the beater bar set at the recommended height. We like Dyson and Oreck. Maintain them properly and they will do a great job. Do two to three cleaning passes for light soil and six to eight or heavily soiled areas. Empty the bag often. Vacuums lose as much as 75% of their power when the bag is only 25% full.

* Walk off mats or rugs! Studies have shown that you will remove 80% of tracked in soil if you will cover the first six steps you make with walk off mats or rugs.

* Professional carpet cleaning is still required. A lot of dirt and dust particles are ionic ally charged. Only professional truck mounted systems are strong enough to break these bonds and remove these particles.

* Protect you carpet with re-application of Scotch Gard or Teflon. Even though your carpet probably came with protectant 85% to 95% will be removed within 2-5 years with average wear or just one carpet cleaning. It is unbelievably inexpensive (we charge 12 cents per square foot) vs. replacing carpet (3 to 5 DOLLARS per square foot.)

* Rearrange your furniture often. (Sorry men, but as always, your wife is correct.) Otherwise you will very quickly develop an uncorrectable wear pattern in front of each piece. You don’t have to totally rearrange everything every week, just nudge it back a few inches every three to seven days to spread out the wear area. Then move it to a totally new area once a month or so. If you can’t do that then just move it back to where it started and repeat, at least this not cause all of the damage to one area.

by Bill Harris