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