Is Winter a Good Time for Getting your Carpets Cleaned?
Is there a “best” time of year to clean your carpets or is any time good? That could largely depend on what method you use. A fun story – some fiction based on fact – will help you learn some of the differences!
It was great to have the family home over Christmas, but this time more than just memories were left behind.
The tray of goodies that little Jimmy carried into the living room ended up face down on the carpet and the red dye from the icing didn’t come out so well. Then there was the time when Annie trudged into the house with her boots caked in mud because the snow in the backyard had melted a bit, but nobody caught her before she left a trail clear across the living room and down the hallway.
Add to those incidents all the food crumbs plus all the stuff that wasn’t seen – like the microscopic dirt and dust from all the extra people and activity – and the carpets weren’t looking so good after all the festivities were over with.
As the last carload leaves, the thought in the back of your mind is wanting to get those carpets cleaned before you head south for a few weeks to escape the cold. You remember an ad that you had seen for carpet cleaning and decide that you’ll phone a little into the new year.
Early January arrives and you decide that you’d better get on that because you’re leaving for Arizona in 10 days. You don’t want the worst of those stains to linger for that long.
A few days later, a van rolls up and a smartly dressed man introduces himself and tells you that he’ll give you an estimate of how much it will cost to clean your carpets using hot-water extraction, or HWE. You don’t argue. He’s the pro – a certified CCT (Carpet Cleaning Technician) who’s been at this for nearly 20 years and you always see his van all over town. You also decide that you might as well just clean the whole upper level: the living room, dining room, hallway, and three bedrooms.
After a little while, he presents an estimate and tells you that he can start the next day since business is slow at that time of year. Without wondering why that is, you sign it and after he leaves you start to get things moved out of the way for the next day.
The next morning, you’re really wishing that you were already down south because it’s a biting -10 outside with a bit of a stiff breeze. The van rolls up along the front sidewalk, and the cleaning technician quickly heads to the front door and you let him in. He explains that he’ll need to keep the front door open a bit for his water and pressure hoses, but no worries, he assures you, the fabric shroud contraption he uses will keep out most of the cold.
He first gets to work doing what all reputable carpet cleaners do, a thorough vacuuming with a commercial vacuum cleaner. Next, he applies a chemical pre-spray to the whole carpet, extra heavy where there’s soiling, then he finishes his prep with the individual spot and stain treatments.
Now it’s time for the big stuff. He drags in the long hose that’s tethered to his van with the big, shiny, silver wand at the end and begins to blast the carpet in the farthest bedroom with hot, high-pressure water. The wand then slurps up the grimy solution with each backward pass. You look on impressed as, with each pass of the wand, you hadn’t realized just how badly your carpet needed a cleaning.
However, you notice the windows start to quickly fog up as the humidity in the bedroom gets rather uncomfortable.
“No problem,” he assures you, “I’ll get the fans moving as soon as I’m done this room and before I move onto the next.”
Using hot-water extraction to clean your carpets can get the air rather humid! And the carpets rather wet, which means long dry times.
As he heads back out to the van to grab a couple of air movers – powerful fans designed to quickly dry carpets – the house gets even cooler than it was before. Your wife was only moderately bothered by the noise of the cleaning wand, but now with the humidity and extra coolness, she decides to head downstairs before she gets even more distracted by the noise of the fans. She’s also not fond of the chemical odor, plus she’s grown tired of stepping over and around the hoses.
As the cleaning technician moves from room to room, the air gets both cooler and more humid at the same time. He brings in a couple more air movers and the air gets noisier.
When all is said and done, the carpets sure look nice and you’re glad you finally got them done, but you’re told that the air movers need to stay on for a few more hours and then he’ll pick them up later in the day. The tech also tells you that the carpets likely won’t be fully dry until sometime the next day since you can’t crack open windows in the dead of winter to improve the air flow.
For the rest of that day, you and your wife go about your business, although you can tell that she’s still mildly irritated with having to put up with several more hours of fan noise plus not being able to walk wherever she wants.
A couple of days later you’re out and about, and in the hardware store you run into a friend and you start comparing stories about the joys and stresses of having the family home for Christmas. You mention how you had your carpets cleaned and then he tells you the same.
As you continue by telling him the things you weren’t so glad about, you mention how you are glad that they don’t need to be cleaned again for a while. Well, the cleaning technician told you that you should get it done again in another year, but your wife replied that she certainly doesn’t want it done again that soon and certainly not in the winter. Although impressed with the final results, she was less than impressed with the experience of hot-water extraction.
Expecting your friend to share a similar carpet cleaning saga, you’re surprised when he mentions that he experienced nothing of the sort.
“The guy we hired came in with a vacuum cleaner and a carpet cleaning machine not much larger, plus only a few other supplies. In fact, the vacuum was louder than the machine and the vacuum wasn’t even that loud to begin with!”
Your friend then explains how his carpet cleaning guy called it a very low moisture carpet cleaning system, or VLM. He said that his cleaning technician only used about 1 gallon of water and cleaning solution to clean about 1,000 square feet.
“Holy cow!” you exclaim. “My guy used more than that for even one bedroom!!”
Your friend also explains that, because of the low amount of water, his VLM cleaning technician didn’t have to run any fans afterward since there was barely any water condensation on their windows. He also didn’t have to crack a door open because his cleaning unit was self-contained.
“We were walking on our carpets again in about two hours. Our guy said that on commercial carpets, that really short stuff, people are walking on those in only about a half hour!”
You’re almost incredulous that his experience seemed so pleasant compared to yours. After you compare costs, you realize that you paid more, but that’s because your cleaning guy was also in your house for longer to clean roughly the same amount of area since his process was slower and more labor-intensive. He also used a lot more cleaning product.
But then you conclude that your friend’s job couldn’t have been that good because the VLM guy used hardly any water.
“Come see for yourself,” your friend replies. “You’re welcome to check out how clean our carpets are at any time.”
Using very low moisture carpet cleaning means way less humidity and also much shorter dry times.
You and he both have some down time that afternoon and so you head to your friend’s place. To your surprise, his carpets look every bit as good as yours. He also points out the places where his family also left more than just memories on the surface of his carpets. Like your carpets, you see almost no trace of even the worst stains.
When you ask about the odors of the cleaning product, he mentions that they were only slight, barely noticeable in fact. That’s a good thing, seeing how his wife is extra-sensitive to chemical smells. He and his wife were also able to go about their business without much distraction the whole time.
You decide to get your basement carpets cleaned using the VLM encapsulation method after you get back from your time in Arizona, even though it will still be winter.
I know that I used a rather long story to try to answer the question posed at the beginning, but it couldn’t be answered without first teaching you about the method used by nearly all carpet cleaning technicians to clean residential carpets, namely hot-water extraction (or HWE), more commonly – and incorrectly – referred to as “steam” cleaning, sometimes also truck mount cleaning.
So what is the answer? Should you wait until nicer weather to get your carpets cleaned?
If you’re fortunate enough to live where the winters don’t get very cold, then the HWE experience won’t be as mildly to moderately inconvenient and stressful as I’ve portrayed. However, you’ll still have to wait several hours for your carpets to dry and the tech will have made more noise, dragged around more equipment, used more cleaning product, and stayed longer than a tech using a VLM carpet cleaning method. The net result is also likely paying more for HWE.
VLM carpet cleaning is your best choice not just for winter, but year-round – not just because of the low humidity, but also because of the minimal use of cleaning products. (And companies like Neat Freak Cleaning use ones with no VOCs and no added dyes or fragrances.)
Now I do need to clarify one thing in support of the HWE carpet cleaning method. There are HWE techs who use a stand-alone machine called a carpet extractor or carpet extraction machine. There are some different names for it. It doesn’t require dragging hoses in the front door because the pressure pump and vacuum motor(s) are housed inside the machine instead of out in the van. However, for these reasons it’s a lot noisier inside your house/business than the guy with the big van parked outside! And you’ll still have to deal with rather long dry times.
So should you search for just any carpet cleaning technician or company that advertises a low moisture or very low moisture method of carpet cleaning? Well, that’s where you need to be educated about proper VLM technique, equipment, and products, which is the subject of another post. For now, you can learn about the VLM encapsulation process by clicking here.
Let me just state for now that the proper VLM technique and equipment are gentle on your carpet and clean just as deeply as HWE cleaning, whereas the wrong ones actually harm the fibers in your carpet and only clean the upper surface, leaving stains to wick to the surface even though at first they seem to be removed.
But again, more about all this in another post!
Neat Freak Cleaning uses the industry’s top VLM system, the proper techniques, and the cleaning products designed to work best with them!
Contact me to book a cleaning, get an estimate, or to learn more about very low moisture carpet cleaning!
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