Got an empty house? Now get the carpets cleaned...

It seems like (to use that over-used expression) a bit of a 'no-brainer' but if you find you have an empty house at your disposal why would you not get the carpets cleaned when there is nothing else in the house?

In the UK we do not necessarily think of carpet cleaning as a necessity. I don't think I can put it in a more straight forward (or inelegant) way than that.

To anyone in the carpet cleaning industry though it makes perfect sense to us that if a house is being emptied of all its normal furniture, bookcases, sideboards, tables and chairs, beds, wardrobes and other furnishing clutter the carpets should be steam cleaned.

By that I mean properly steam-cleaned - not brushed over with some luke warm water and a load of cheap sudsy carpet shampoo whereupon this un-holy mess is badly hoovered up with a hired carpet cleaner from the DIY shop! Yes you know the brand - worse than useless!

We cleaned what is known in the trade as an 'EOT' the other day - nothing remarkable about that, an End of Tenancy is usually an opportunity for the landlord to get a good look at their investment when the previous tenants have moved out but before they get their deposit back from the letting agent.

We try to encourage our letting agent clients to remind their landlords that after any re-decorating and the general cleaning is done the last thing before new tenants arrive is to have the carpets thoroughly steam-cleaned by one of our truck-mounted units.

 This is usually a great chance for us to do the very best job we can by having access to every square centimetre (or inch if you like) of carpet and to survey and clearly identify all dirty traffic lanes and stains and to really go to town on the clean.

 These are very satisfying jobs for us because we go away feeling we have really earned our corn by getting into every nook and cranny and giving the landlord a report on the state of the carpets as they were at the end of the last tenancy and as they were left  by us at the start of the new tenancy.

So if you rent from a letting agent or own a property that is rented out or are buying a property for your family home then please work out a time when the property will be empty and you can give a reputable carpet cleaning company a window of opportunity to work their magic. You know it makes sense...

Of Moths and Myths…

One of the regular carpet-related consumer problems we get asked to sort is moths. More often than not though, the owners of said carpets are completely unaware that they have a problem.

The tell-tale signs are not that easy to spot. But once you have seen carpet moth damage in a variety of different environments you can quickly tell if the damaged carpets you are looking at have ended up like that because of human (or family pet) action or because you have unwanted flying (and crawling) visitors!

It is also called the clothes moth but that is in fact another species - the webbing clothes moth or Tineola Bisselliella. Our prime suspect for carpet damage however is the case bearing or case making moth and to give it its latin name Tinea Pellionella.

One of the best and simplest ways of coping with carpet moths is to vacuum your wool carpets rigorously and often, especially around the edges and in dark corners and behind curtains.

If you do have a good vacuum regime (!) this actually makes our job a little more difficult because one of the telltale signs is lots of little ‘cases’ scattered around the skirting boards and attached to the inside of curtains and tangled up in cobwebs under furniture.

If you do find one and it looks something like the ones in the picture then you might try ‘popping’ it and hence killing the little bugger – just squeeze it and the mini-beast’s head will shoot out of one end of the ‘case’ as you cancel his future!

I have picked them up and put them to one side and then later when I came back to kill them in front of the customer the little buggers have crawled some distance away to make their escape.

The case it has made was spun by the worm-like larvae from fibres in your carpet and while it was eating your wool carpet the creature was planning to pupate inside the case and then hatch and start the life-cycle all over again.

We can spray for them but this is obviously a chargeable service and really needs to be repeated initially on a monthly basis and very few customers will bear the cost of that operation.

Often we will do the first spray very thoroughly and then brief the client what to do next if they want to control them. We will price into our service a later re-visit 6 moths later to tell them if the moths are still a problem.

Unless you take really drastic measures, control may be the only feasible level of treatment and is often all you can achieve because - it only takes a couple of missed adults to see the colonisation re-commence at a later stage.

The case moth can do considerable damage to a carpet and if left to their own devices they will go forth and multiply and absolutely destroy a carpets so as to make it a candidate for replacement.

I recommend that the self treatment begins a month after we have treated the carpets. Buy a good aerosol moth killer (Rentokil do one called Insectrol) and spray around all the skirting boards in your wool carpeted rooms and under furniture and in any dark and slightly forgotten corners like behind the television table where the moths can carry on their trade in relative peace and quiet.

Also make sure you knock down and kill any of the adult males that can be sometimes seen flying around at night – they are said not to like light but they will fly towards a flickering TV screen in an otherwise darkened room. The female adults crawl around but are similar in size and description to the males – both are small, brown and fairly feeble-looking things.

Often our clients are horrified when we tell them they have moths but there is nothing dirty about them – I can find them under furniture in most smart homes and it is a sign of the times that the undersides of old furniture inherited from parents will often be festooned with case moth larvae dead and alive.

So when you inherited your parents’ beautiful antique furniture you may also have inherited their moth problem which an antique dealer 'sold' them!

Any problems with moths? Let me know and I will see if I can help…

Cleaning carpets is not just about appearance, but also a health issue…

According to the Environmental Protection Agency in the US, indoor air quality is one of the top five most urgent environmental risks to public health. Especially in the winter, when buildings are insulated against the cold, indoor air is often two to five times more polluted than the air outside.

Further to this the American Lung Association is seeking to educate the public about the benefits of healthy indoor air quality. Cleaning carpets is not just about appearance, but also a health issue.

Case studies have shown that regular steam carpet cleaning on an annual basis coupled with a regular vacuming regimen, can help to transform a ‘sick building’ into a more healthy environment, thus reducing illness due to respiratory-related problems.

How much is it to clean one square metre? (and make it snappy)

Its like the joke about the man who goes into the Bush Tucker Trial Shop. Bear with me here, as I'm sure you've heard the punchline before. He walks up to the counter and says to the man who is serving "Gimme a crocodile sandwich - and make it snappy!"

I had a telephone call like this recently. The well-spoken lady on the end of the phone had no time to spare. She wanted an answer to her question and she wanted it quickly. Her question was not about crocodillians at all but it was simple and to the point. "How much to clean a square metre of carpet?"

I deferred in a weak and defensive manner. "Err.. well its not quite as simple as that!" I have heard the question before and usually I express our firm policy in a more forthright manner. This lady was quite bullish though and she did not take fools like me very kindly. She repeated her question.

I explained that rather than give an outright price per square metre we would be more than willing to pop around at a time to suit her to do a survey of the carpets that needed cleaning.

This was not received with anything other than what I can only describe as frosty exasperation. She did not have time to do this and she just wanted to know how much we charged - yes you guessed it - per square metre.

I tried to explain how we did not like to operate like this as the condition of the carpet was important when considering how much time we would take to clean the carpets. As the operator of two, high-end premium value systems we believe that we provide a much hotter and deeper clean than most of our competitors and that our cost base is different from an operator using an electric system.

Quite frankly I think this picture has been retouched - what do you think?

I quickly tried to explain how much better our clean was going to get her carpets and how we would not be using her electricity or water or venting the stale damp air from her carpets all over her house - all in vain as she was much too busy to let us quote properly, she just wanted to know - yes you guessed it again - how much per square metre.

By this time I was losing her - if she had been in the same room her eyes would have glazed over - she was busy, she didn't have time for all this unnecessary detail. We lost the sale because I was unable to convince her that it was not as simple as she was making out - I hope she got a similar response from other carpet cleaners but I doubt it!

At the risk of mixing my animal metaphors I hope she was able to pay peanuts (as that appeared to be her mission) and I hope she got a monkey with a Rugdoctor®...

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