CM/Spotlight: Carpet Care Hot water extraction of carpet should be scheduled occasionally depending on the facility’s and floor’s traffic load. When using the most up-to-date vacu-um offerings in a set carpet care system, it is possible to cover more area and keep up with other daily cleaning demands. “What we see — and this is documented over and over again — is that an upright can cover 2,857 square feet per hour,” Matt Reimers, VP of sales and business develop-ment for ProTeam, explains. “In a backpack, you can cover 7,407 square feet, just gener-ally used, and when that backpack is used in a cleaning system where you have a vacuum specialist, then it goes up to right at 10,000 square feet per hour.” Utilizing cordless backpack vacuums, a worker can achieve 10,000 square feet per hour outside of a set cleaning system. “So you get that additional benefit using no cord. It’s just time saved not having to plug in and unplug,” Reimers states. Step 2: Spot And Spill Cleaning Now matter how clean a carpet actually is, occupants’ eyes will always be drawn first to existing spots and spills. Thankfully, there are different options for carpet spot removal. Spot removal can be a general responsi-bility of cleaning staff, or it can be a special-ized task assigned to one individual. Warrington’s recommendation is having at least a few basic spotters available to all staff so that nightly janitorial and vacuum-ing workers can address carpet spots or spills immediately. “If I prepare a basic kit to handle every situation I may be asked to come in and spot remove, I’m going to have a protein spotter in my bag,” he states. The other five spotters Warrington listed were: ● A dry solvent spotter ● A citrus type spotter ● A rust remover ● An oxidizer ● A reducer. “Those are the five basic things — and you can get even more specialized than that — but I would say those five basic things ought to be in every spotting kit along with a few little tools to help provide the agitation … some cloths and a brush.” While a protein spotter is needed for oc-casional spot cleaning, pre-spray treatments are similar enough to protein spotters that another option may be best if a spot is vis-ible after thorough carpet cleaning. June 2014 Again, spot and spill removal should be a built-in part of a daily preventative mainte-nance system, Warrington states. It is much easier to address a stain when it is a day or two old than when the spot has been in the carpet for a month. Step 3: Restorative A crucial part of any carpet care program is hot water extraction; this is an important method of actual soil removal. Warrington says that hot water extraction of carpet should be scheduled occasionally depending on the facility’s and floor’s traf-fic load. It can be needed as often as every three months or as little as once a year. The challenge with hot water extraction is it can be overused from a time and cost standpoint, Warrington notes. Step 4: Interim Cleaning To avoid the overuse of extraction meth-ods and guarantee a pleasing appear-ance, Warrington suggests interim main-tenance steps of carpet cleaning with 20 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® Image courtesy of CFR
CMM – Archives June 2014: 20
