CM/Spotlight: Carpet Care This way, spots will not accumulate and create a dirty carpet. Maintenance Should Be Routine In the morning after we eat breakfast, we brush our teeth to remove food particles that can cause odors and create problems. We use this method of maintaining our teeth to keep them in good condition. If we don’t maintain them properly, we might need to go into a restoration mode by extracting our teeth. The same thing is true for carpet care. If we don’t follow good work habits, things usually cost more and have a shorter lifespan. Routine maintenance is the key to carpet appearance and longevity. The cleaning system a building or company has in place should be low moisture output. This is important for a few reasons. First, over wetting carpet can be damaging and can cause downtime for workers that are waiting for carpets to dry as well. The biggest complaint from over saturat-ing carpets would be the stains that have wicked back up. Instead, use a carpet chemical that will dry quickly and leave little residue. The system you choose should have abili-ties to assist in carpet drying. Many types of carpet cleaning systems have brushes to lift pile and extract dirt par-ticles. Brushes are helpful in maintaining carpets. There are multi-purpose tools in our indus-try that have most of these components that will make carpet care most effective. In the last few years, I have noticed a need for cleaning tools that can combine two steps into one and do a better job in less time. The bonnet pad and the brush manufac-turers recently combined pads and brushes into one tool, and this gives workers the ben-efit of both worlds. This new tool will actually extract dirt par-ticles deep within the carpets where the old bonnet systems could not reach. This new method of bonneting and brush-ing carpet using one tool with one motion provides many benefits: ■ Minimal financial investment in product ■ Low moisture management ■ No down time ■ Deep interim cleaning lifting stains as well as particles of dirt ■ Pile lifting ■ Longevity of your carpets. The proper tools along with an educat-ed worker will always promote a sanitary and healthy work environment, and it pre-serves the life of an investment from floors to ceilings. Bonnets do not damage carpets; people with poor habits do. CM FREE INFO: Reader Service 205 or CMMOnline.com/freeinfo 32 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • June 2013
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