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/