1001 cleans a big, big carpet for less than half a crown

I remember a particularly enthralling episode (no seriously - I was young and enthusiastic) from Advertising Practice that was a part of my business studies course at Bournemouth College. The lecturer sought to explain to us how one of the classic case studies of all time in the annals of British advertising practice was that of the Babycham brand.

The advertising and marketing plan was the brainchild of the inventor of the product who had discovered that he could market fizzy pear juice (or perry) and turn a good profit by selling it as an upmarket champagne-type drink for 'ladies'. He used all his trading profits to buy prime time TV space on ITV and he managed to get a cardboard cut-out of a sexy girl with a small pony (!) and a bottle of his product into the lounge bar of virtually every single pub in the country.

Such was the success of the campaign and so widespread was brand awareness that after five years or so of lavish media spend he stopped advertising altogether and really started to coin it in terms of net profits. He wrote off the cost of this advertising off over many years and reaped the benefit of the position it had established as the class drink for sophisticated female people!

I imagine females stopped asking for Babycham some years ago as it is definitely a product of the past - did it even survive into the 1980s I ask myself? I bet among ladies of a certain age though that brand awareness is still very high - they may not want one (even if they could still get hold of one) but they will definitely not have forgotten the drink. In a way it was the Barcardi Breezer of its time when there was nothing else on the market to compare.

Its the same with 1001 - the generation that grew up thinking Babycham was a great drink also grew up thinking that when it came to cleaning your carpet or rug there was only one name and that name was 1001. The slogan that accompanied the TV adverts was distinctive and memorable but must in the end have been a bit limiting on profits.

It did not matter that people had no other equipment when they set out to clean their carpet, if they had a bottle of 1001 then they could get the job done! The brand awareness of 1001 is incredible - among the group of lets say older people (i.e. 45 plus) who are regular users of carpet cleaning services then I estimate that 9 out of ten have either used the product or have a bottle under the sink.

I have proven this to myself on countless occasions by asking people - and its not as if the product is advertised today - you see it in big supermarkets but its definitely the Babycham of carpet cleaning - the product is very mature or should that be obsolescent? They actually have a huge range of 1001 products but most people just know the brand cleans carpets.

Professional carpet cleaners hate the product with a vengeance. I understand this and feel much the same but I am not sure this is a rational reaction. We (truckmounted operators) can deal with it fairly easily and in truth it is a minor inconvenience in our working day. The product tends to be over-applied and it foams like crazy when we try to extract it - to such an extent that sometimes one has to use a specialised defoamer in the recovery tank to fight the froth.

The experience I have had with this product is that it is invariably used without any reference to the instructions and often it is simply left on or in the dirt/stain/mark - delete where appropriate for your situation!

It is always rubbed into the dirt/stain/mark - an action which usually causes an abrasion of the carpet fibres - so a bad situation has just been made worse. Never rub a carpet - agitate a carpet gently with a clean, white terry towel or use a white paper towel. Terry towels carry water much better than paper towels so if you want to remove the hated 1001 then that is the best option - doing it this way is not a quick job.

Most of the dirt/stain/mark removal jobs we do have been worked on before we get to them but more often than not the DIY carpet cleaner gave up far to early. If you stick at it with white towels or better still you have a wet/dry vacuum then you can remove the hated substance and the tepid water you have applied (with a spray bottle) and hopefully the plain dirt or staining substance will be sucked up as well.

It is undeniable that some (usually but not always wool) carpets will stain when a spill gets into the individual fibres - this is probably the time to get a professional in to deal with the consequences. The key is knowing when a spill is in danger of becoming a stain. Commonsense will tell most people what the chances are of any particular stain becoming permanent.

This risk of a stain increases with the passage of time, allowing the stain to dry out, using googled remedies and half-hearted or heavy-handed treatments also increases this risk. When a stain has 'set' in the fibre due to one of these then with some staining material and some carpets NOTHING will shift it subsequently. You might be able to re-colour the carpet but getting the original stain out may be impossible.

In terms of the use of 1001 specifically though I have found that when it has been used on purely dirt marks (i.e. tracked in and/or greasy soil rather than potential staining materials) that it can act as a catalyst to gather the soil together - what happens next is err... nothing - because that is where the DIY person usually stops.

The soapy 1001 stays in the carpet along with the dirt and it is the application of the 1001 that makes the carpet look cleaner. The dirt may have been rounded up and pointed in the right direction but the final extraction part of the equation is often not achieved. The effect is that the so-called stain (but probably just soil) has been disguised in the form of a sticky residue that acts as a magnet for NEW dirt. Hence the oft heard complaint that "It looked better at first but now it looks dirty again!"

I have found on these occasions that when we come along with very high temperature cleaning solutions and industrial strength vacuum power we can rinse out the 1001 and the dirt and leave the carpets truly clean. In some cases it can actually make the job easier...


http://www.steamcleancarpetservice.co.uk/

Cowboys and the revenge of the small, frail, white-haired senior citizen...

Older ladies still like to control certain aspects of the running of the home - this includes the maintenance of household fabrics such as curtains and carpets - they probably had a big say in what was purchased new and they have a say in how these things are maintained.


I met just such a lady recently in somewhat unusual circumstances as out of the blue we got a call from a small, white-haired (as it turned out) pensioner who wanted our advice. I took the call and discovered that she had had a visit from a 'splash and dash merchant'. She was upset and she wanted to know if there were any good guys out there in planet carpet clean.


I said I thought there were plenty and many of them like us are truck mounted operators. I suggested we could try to fit the bill for her. She asked if we could rectify the mess left by the cowboy operator as she was now faced with no option as the 'rootin-tootin' bunch had declined a re-visit to clear up their own mess.

The Rootin tootin gang

She had got through to the boss who said she had obviously had the wrong sort of carpet clean and she should have had a 'proper job' which (you'll never guess) cost considerably more than the cheap price the girl had offered her on the phone for the basic job.


Apparently (as she told me) the company's telephone sales operation had called her five times in total before they had got her to agree to the visit and when she gave in and invited them in, the cowboy tried to upsell the touted price in a classic case of 'bait and switch'.


She had refused to be upsold and although she had only wanted them to do her stairs and tiny hall - most of the latter covered by a runner - the clown had said he would do three rooms (hall and stairs being two of these rooms - yeah go figure that one) and an upstairs bedroom which she said didn't need doing but he insisted!


Well the upshot was the bedroom was not dirty so he could not make a mess of that but the stairs and hall at the foot of the stairs were left looking worse than before with dirt being drawn somewhat out of the carpet and then left on the surface in a muddy, soapy slurry that was pooled at the foot of the flight and smudged down the risers and nosings on the stairs themselves.


Now she had a surprise for the company in the form of son who is a solicitor and therefore has plenty of free legal advice to offer and to enable her to mount a county court action to recoup her money and claim for the extra costs of putting the problem right.


We went in with the appropriate level of genuinely powerful steam cleaning and remedied the job to a standard that the cowboy/clown could not have achieved in a month of Sundays.


We priced our job properly and charged a resonable price for a good job done. The cowboys wanted her to buy something she had not wanted and she had been tempted by the cheap offer of three rooms for a very low price and then when she refused to play their game had simply done a quick, rubbish job and dashed off to fleece someone else - just the sort of conduct that gives the trade a bad reputation.Thanks guys.


I am sure you are about to see that small, frail ,white-haired lady in court. Yippee ky ay...


www.SteamCleanCarpetService.co.uk

Simples... just remove this here red wine stain

Its one of the calls most professional carpet cleaners least like to get. Its a regular customer who has already given you various solid referrals i.e. she's told all her lunch buddies you can work miracles.

Now she tells you about a large, full maxi glass of red wine that she dropped right in the middle of the carpet last night. After the jokes about not having a drink problem, and it was actually only the first glass of the evening not the last, we turn to the job in hand.

As the boss I have taken this job on because as any carpet cleaner will tell you, red wine can be a bit of a bugger! At best of times stain removal is a risky business and hence can be a no-win situation commercially. If you take on a serious stain removal job that goes wrong you can end up 'owning' the carpet - while all carpet cleaners should be insured for 'treatment risk' they will not want to put that to the test and wise old greybeards may simply 'walk away' from the problem.  Apart from the owner's often dim recollections you have no real knowledge of what it is you are treating.

Dirty carpets we like - stained carpets are something else so although its sounds like splitting carpet fibres they are two separate things! So it can make you a hero or a zero and should be approached with caution and you need to be sure of your routine before you start 'dosing the fibres' with chems - as we say in the trade.

First it depends on the construction of the carpet and the fibre content (this one is mostly wool) and it depends on the wine as well - some seems to come out alot easier than others. It can also be an old stain that has had the sun shining on it through a nearby door or window.

This one happened yesterday when it looks as if the full glass has flown across the floor with wine issuing out in all directions plus there are large concentrations where the glass first fell and where it bounced and worst of all where it ended up - plus many splatter marks! Nice.

Sadly the other problem which often rears its ugly head is DIY treatments - and this lot has had plenty. It has had the ubiquitous 1001 (a full bottle) and a product called Wine Away used on it - neither had worked to any negligible effect and may have made the stain harder to remove in the long run as the stain appeared to have been spread around and rubbed into the carpet.

The valued customer has done their best but has not removed any significant quantity of wine from the carpet. I got to work by starting with our standard first level of attack, rinsing out the chemicals with a mild dilute acidic rinse between courses and working up to the last resort. Some of the stains needed three treatments and several applications were left to dwell on the carpet for short periods.

A small portable wet/dry extractor was used during the rinsing stages and the active chemicals were mostly removed by repeated application of freshly laundered, white cotton terry towels.

Ninety minutes later the result is one pile of 'wine pink' terry towels, one clean, stain free carpet and one very satisfied and relieved customer. My only regret, I did not take any photographs for this blog!

http://www.steamcleancarpetservice.co.uk/

Here's the scientific bit again!

As trailed in a recent post, most truck-mount operators in the UK use high or very high temperature cleaning solutions at the exact point where they are actually steam cleaning the carpet. They set their machines up (at least in most domestic situations) as close to the property as they can reasonably get and when they are ready for the steam/clean extraction part of the operation they dispense steaming water/cleaning solution into the face fibre of the carpet.

And at risk of repeating myself we have to re-iterate (did'nt you just say that? Ed.) the temperature of the cleaning solution is the single most important factor in the effectiveness of carpet cleaning.

Temperature is important in exciting chemicals, causing them to perform more efficiently, and in reducing the surface tension of water. In the HWE cleaning process, a temperature advantage is achieved primarily when hot water is injected into the carpet in the extraction phase which serves to accelerate pre-conditioning chemicals one final time, during the rinse process.1

It is a scientific fact that the hotter the water the better the clean. As like the above reference these figures have come from 'over the pond' I hope you will forgive me if we leave them in Farenheit. The original source of these figures is an American university scientific paper and I want to be as faithful to that source as possible.

What it says though is that for every 18 degrees Fahrenheit rise in temperature above 118 degrees Fahrenheit, chemical activity doubles. This continues until you reach a temperature of approximately 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius). This applies to all the cleaning chemicals we use for carpet cleaning.

This is what steam looks like!

Regardless of whether you are cleaning carpets, washing dishes or doing your weekly laundry! Very hot water offers increased grease-dissolving properties due to entropy. Even without detergent, small amounts of some greases will dissolve in water. In very hot water that grease-dissolving power can be increased by a factor of ten!

You can clean greasy dinner plates solely with scalding hot water, without even using a detergent - it works, give it a try next time you have to do the washing-up!

http://www.steamcleancarpetservice.co.uk/


1 International E-Journal of Flooring SciencesThe Science of Carpet Cleaning by Jeff Bishop



Selling your Home? Here is a home-seller’s guide to steam cleaning your carpets for extra saleability…

When it comes to selling your property as we all know first impressions are vital. As soon as prospective buyers step into a home on a viewing at least one of them will switch to serious adult mode and actually start analysing what they are buying.

They know they are not buying the giant flat screen TV over the fireplace or that ultra-chic glass dining table; but the chances are they are buying the carpets as part of the fixtures and fittings of the house.

As a seller then you need to present this asset in the best possible light – tired, grubby looking carpets (even worse are carpets that smell of pets) can put potential buyers off your whole house – its illogical but it happens!

When asked, people say they are going to change the carpets as soon as they move in, but in fact they know in the back of their minds they will probably still be living with the same floor coverings six months or a year later – and in many cases much longer than that.

When you’ve just moved in, unpacked all the boxes and got all the furniture arranged to your heart’s desire it’s a tough call to suddenly uproot everything again so you can replace all the carpets.

In truth there is no need to go through all this upset and expense, when a day given over to a professional carpet cleaner can restore your carpets as close to their new condition as possible by the removal of the dirt, dust mites, pet dander, grime, grit and grease that naturally accumulates in the carpets in any normal home.

In the great old US of A, people who have carpets and ‘area’ rugs get them steam cleaned on an annual basis by a professional truck-mounted unit. In the States the steam cleaning of carpets is a huge industry. And here in the UK some operators are equipped with the same professional kit as their colleagues in the US.

In the UK there seems to be a general reluctance to treat fitted carpets in the same way as we do our other household fabrics. The truth is that carpets collect alot of residue from everyday life including large concentrations of dead skin, dust mites, pet dander and of course walked in grit, grease and soil, the majority of which of which cannot simply be vacuumed away.

For the best results in a domestic situation your best bet is to engage the services of a local company who use a powerful truck-mounted steam and vacuum extraction system which is driven by a large petrol or diesel powered engine. This system is known as HWE or Hot Water Extraction and is the system recommended by most carpet manufacturers themselves.

In brief, the trained operator will first vacuum your carpets with an industrial strength twin-motor vacuum cleaner and then pre-spray with a soapy substance that will help to separate and emulsify the stubborn soil attached to the pile of the carpet.

After the pre-spray is agitated and left to ‘dwell’ on the carpet the truck mounted system is then employed to spray (at relatively high pressure, say between 300 and 600psi) a detergent in a very hot mixture onto the face fibre of the carpet and then extract that mixture (along with the soil and other pollutants and contaminants) using an industrial-strength vacuum almost as soon as it is forced into the carpet.

Real steam – and NOT water vapour – will be seen jetting from the end of the metal floor tool (or wand) used by the operator. The National Carpet Cleaning Association (NCCA) will tell you (on their website) that the term 'steam-cleaning' is a mis-nomer and that the term mis-represents all kinds of hot water extraction - in fact they and others who repeat this are WRONG and they all need to update their knowledge and their websites.

Most truck-mount operators in the UK do in fact use very high temperature solutions at the 'coal face' i.e. at the exact point where they are actually steam cleaning the carpet they dispense very hot, steaming water/cleaning solution into the face fibre of the carpet.

The temperature of the cleaning solution is the single most important factor in cleaning, regardless of whether you are cleaning carpets, washing dishes or doing your weekly laundry! You can even clean greasy dinner plates solely with scalding hot water without even using a detergent - it works, give it a try!

The fresh water for the steam mixture and the soiled waste hot water that is recovered is serviced by separate large tanks on board the truck-mounted unit.

This vehicle will want to pull up fairly adjacent to your side or front door so that they can trail their large bore vacuum recovery hose and high pressure steam hose into the house. Don’t be put off if you have poor vehicular access to your property as the systems used can operate at a considerable distance away from your home. See the video here that illustrates the lengths our company goes to for our customers!

These machines are extremely efficient and effective and once they are set up they can clean very large areas of carpet very quickly. Drying times vary but can be as short as an hour or as long as three hours. Your carpets should never however be left in a 'wet' condition - if this happens you should be asking some serious questions of your carpet cleaner.

Good carpet cleaning comes at a cost but it will not be excessive if you have a reasonable number of rooms to clean. The old adage about ‘buy cheap – buy twice’ certainly applies to carpet cleaning and it is definitely worth asking if the operator uses a ‘truck-mounted system’.

There are numerous unscrupulous operators about in the UK who are known in our trade as 'splash and dash' merchants who use using glorified DIY hire machines which are usually under-powered electric systems that are woefully short on either true heat-cleaning ability or drying (vacuum) power and leave you carpets no cleaner than when they started.

Sometimes, as highlighted by the recent Watchdog programme, inefficient, low-powered electric carpet cleaning operators can actually make your carpets look dirtier than they were before they started.

Reputable operators are fully insured for unlikely events such as treatment risk and will give you their full company address details.

It may be tempting but please do not get your carpets cleaned by the company who simply push a card through your door with a mobile number and an offer of 'whole house' carpet cleans for very low prices.

When you engage the services of a professional carpet cleaner you should try to establish, during the (free) survey or quotation, if all the marks and stains in your carpets will be removed – it should be acknowledged by you that if you have very long-standing stains caused by (say) ink, blood or shoe polish they may well be permanent and no system or stain remover can remove permanent stains in wool mix carpets. Sunlight and your own scrubbed-in remedies or shop-bought treatments that have not been properly rinsed out may have made the problem worse and/or permanent.

You may also have wear marks in the carpet fibre in high traffic areas and these paths may not clean as well as other less worn areas because of abrasion to those fibres.

If you are serious about getting your carpets into tip-top condition and making that house sale, then do have them deep steam cleaned - they will be dry in 2-3 hours – and remember if you want something doing properly then call in a professional who uses a truck-mounted steam system.

We run a truck-mount steam carpet cleaning company in Hampshire and Dorset and rarely travel outside these counties but we are happy to put you in touch with a reputable operator in your area if you cannot find a suitable local company.

Contact me at BuckClean@aol.com or see our website at: http://www.steamcleancarpetservice.co.uk/

Joining up the clean bits!

This is a blog about carpet cleaning!

Its about the way carpets are cleaned and the way customers/clients/the Great British Public (hereafter GBP) are dealt with by the Great British Carpet Cleaner.

Its a blog that will be of huge interest (the irony is intentional) to other carpet cleaners but also to Mr Joe or Ms Josephine Public who may be thinking about getting their carpets cleaned or have recently had their carpets cleaned.

Within the house the expense of flooring is one of the biggest investments you can make as a homeowner and yet the GBP do not protect that investment by having their carpets cleaned very regularly and for many they NEVER have their carpets cleaned but simply replace them after 5, 7, 10 or more years.

If by some remote chance they have a whim to get them cleaned they are very keen on price shopping regardless of the way that their carpet is going to be cleaned. They (usually) look for a cheap price before they ask other questions about how this cleaning is going to be achieved.

Sometimes they decide to DIY the carpet clean by renting a hire machine from a high street clothes dry cleaner or from a DIY retailer (hey that even makes sense).

Admittedly this is because as an industry we have not educated the public about the various methods of carpet cleaning and the benefits that follow what is in essence a fairly simple procedure.

Yes I am part of that industry so you may hear the feint echo of axes being ground but in a reasonable and very 'fair play' British way.

Recently, carpet cleaning in the UK has had some publicity or at least notoriety by being featured on the BBC consumer programme Watchdog whereby one firm of unscrupulous carpet cleaning cowboys were exposed for their 'Bait and Switch' tactics.

This was a particularly poor piece of consumer journalism, even by the standards of the Watchdog programme - hell it is info-tainment after all. Instead of examining the technical aspects of the carpet clean (which were on this expose by any standards woefully inept) the programme decided to concentrate on the 'Bait and Switch' con and consumer rights.

The expert that is usually called in with this format to examine the whole procedure does so from a secret vantage point and as an expert in that particular industry. However in a departure from this format but in keeping with the dignity of his white-collar profession as a consumer lawyer, the posh, educated bloke in this show watched the events on his smart laptop by video long after it had all happened.

The whole thing was a depressing damp squib really. Nothing was proved apart from the fact that there are dirty rotten scoundrels in the world who will try to take advantage of vulnerable people - so why not tell us something new like how it should be done and have a little inset with a decent CC bloke like the one off Kim and Aggie's show How clean is your house. Then people could actually learn something from the programme, it would only take a couple of minutes and could replace some of the totally pointless shots of Matt and his mate jumping on and off the bike.

I believe that the NCCA (National Carpet Cleaners Association) were consulted about this show and gave their feedback to the producers, but obviously they did not impress them sufficiently to get a place at the table.

This organisation (the NCCA) is the only large body purporting to represent the industry and yet it too has done a woefully inept job over the years in communicating any coherent message about the service industry to the GBP.

So we are left with a situation where the most recent public airing of the industry was so negative as a reflection of the business that not only do the GBP not know what we do but whatever it is we do, we do it very badly and try to get people to pay through the nose for it - thus confirming all the prejudices held by the GBP about our industry.

As an industry we are at Ground Zero!

I hope in this blog to be able to shed some independent light on the industry and provide an entertaining BUT informative commentary that will be useful to all its readers.

And in the spirt of the age all feedback is welcome...

http://www.steamcleancarpetservice.co.uk/