No one ever expects that there is going to be a stain on their carpeting. Perhaps you purchased brand new carpeting and told everyone in your family that they need to be extra careful whenever they are walking on it or planning to eat food in the room. No matter how much you admonish people or how careful they are, accidents can and will happen.
It doesn’t matter whether it was a piece of barbecue chicken falling to the floor, a glass of wine getting knocked over, or a pet having an accident on that new carpeting. Whenever there is a stain, many homeowners get into a bit of a panic and that is when they make some significant mistakes.
Below are three of the most common mistakes people make when they try to clean carpet stains.
1. Pressing the stain into the carpet.
The moment you spill something on the carpeting, you are thinking the worst. Your heart races, especially if the carpeting is brand new. The last thing you want is to stand around and wait for the liquid or other material to soak into the fibers of the carpeting.
So you run to the kitchen and grab a whole wad of paper towels and press on the stain. What you are doing at this point is actually driving the stain deeper down into the carpet pile. This makes it much more difficult to get the entire stain out.
Most carpeting today is treated with stain resistant chemicals. That will generally keep the staining material at the surface. So when you are pushing down and scrubbing the stain, you are driving it deeper into the carpeting.
2. Scrubbing.
As we just noted, pushing down to try to absorb all of the liquid or other material that is staining carpet is a mistake. So is scrubbing. When you use a scrubbing motion back and forth, you were just driving the stain deeper and deeper into the carpeting. You will actually drive it all the way down to the undercoating.
Just stop and take a deep breath and know that it is going to be fine.
3. Using chemicals before testing.
If you grab a carpet cleaning chemical and pour it on the stain, you don’t really know how it is going to react with your particular carpeting if you’ve never used it before. This can cause bleaching and other issues with the carpeting that no amount of cleaning is going to fix.
Before using any type of chemical on carpeting, test it in and out of the way, obscure place on the carpeting where no but we’ll see. If you notice that the carpeting gets bleached or damaged in any way, at least you know before you apply it to a high profile part of the carpeting.
The best thing to do if you are concerned about carpet stains is to call a professional carpet cleaning service.
