What is Carpet Resoiling?
We read this term often in various carpet cleaning publications, but what does it mean and what causes it? Strictly speaking, it simply means that the carpet or rug got dirty again too soon. Carpet does get dirty with foot traffic and cleaning certainly doesn’t prevent that! The normal immediate conclusion is that a poor job by the carpet cleaner caused the resoiling.
What Causes Carpet Resoiling? There are many potential causes of resoiling:
- Track-in of ice melt, especially calcium chloride, will hasten soiling.
- A moisture condition from malfunctioning air conditioning or water leaks leads to moist carpet, which will make the carpet a great cloth to clean off the bottoms of shoes!
- Has the customer recently spilled something sticky on the carpet and tried to get it up with a sticky spotter?
- Sticky residues from soft drinks and hand dishwash compounds will also rapidly cause resoiling.
- Perhaps, the traffic pattern has changed resulting in more soil being tracked in, or the parking lot was recently repaved or there is construction. Before blaming the carpet cleaning, be sure that nothing else has changed!
- If a non-extraction system was used for the cleaning, there may be a great deal of soil attracting residue in the carpet. Moisten an area with water and agitate with a Carpet Shark. If a significant amount of foam is generated, a detergent residue was left behind. Bonnet cleaning and the shampoo methods are infamous for this problem.
- If wet extraction (steam cleaning) was used, how long did the carpet take to dry? If traffic occurs on the carpet before it’s dry, it will, of course, resoil quickly. What type of extraction equipment was used? If the recovery rate is poor, a significant amount of soil attracting detergent will be left behind.
- What kind of carpet traffic lane treatment was used and how much of it was used? Use of too much traffic lane treatment or use of the wrong kind is one of the biggest causes of resoiling. Use prespray only in heavily soiled areas and use the minimum amount of prespray needed to loosen the soil. Many technicians heavily prespray ALL of the carpet hoping to speed up the job. Unfortunately, they forget that anything that goes into the carpet needs to come back out. Wherever prespray was applied, take extra cleaning strokes to ensure its removal!
Will an Acid Rinse Prevent Resoiling?
Some preach prespraying and then using an “acid rinse” to neutralize the detergent and leave no residue. I continue to be amazed that anyone actually believes that an acid leaves no residue or that an acid will somehow magically “zap” the prespray and make it disappear into thin air! Acetic acid (vinegar) will evaporate, but the salt formed when it neutralizes alkali forms sodium acetate which does not evaporate. Some use hydroxyacetic acid, but its evaporation rate is slow and its salts also don’t evaporate. Additionally, acetic acid and hydroxyacetic acid, have an odor that is objectionable to most customers.
We recommend the use of what some call an acid rinse only under certain conditions and we never use the word “acid” in front of a customer! We call it a Brown Out rinse or flush, which is used by adding 2 ounces of Brown Out® per gallon of water through the base unit only when we need to get the pH down, have ice melt residue, or a lot of detergent residue from previous cleanings.
How to Prevent or Cure Carpet Resoiling:
For heavily soiled carpet areas, apply your prespray with an Injection Sprayer set at 1:10. The Injection Sprayer allows you better control of the solution and doesn’t “sputter” like a pump up sprayer. Extract with PCA™ Formula 5 at the normal dilution rate of 0.4 ounces per gallon. The cleaning solution can also contain 0.13 ounces per gallon of Booster™ to improve cleaning, especially when cleaning with hard water.
For heavy-duty professional cleaning of commercial carpet (except wool and prints), use TLS® 2000 as the carpet prespray, but keep the tip of the Injection Sprayer near the surface of the carpet to avoid aerosolizing the solution into the air and breathing the spray at a pH of 12.5! Use Super LCA® or PCA™ Formula 4 with Booster™ as your detergent.
In areas where there is a large number of spills on a level loop carpet only, such as in a restaurant, follow extraction with bonnet cleaning using dry bonnets. This speeds up drying and absorbs much of the material wicking to the surface. NOTE: Do not run a DRY bonnet on olefin (polypropylene) carpet or rug - olefin has a very low softening point!
For individual heavy spills of sticky materials, you can use the Water Claw® Sub-Surface Spot Lifter to flush out the contaminants and apply ARA Anti Resoiling / Anti Wicking Agent or Stain Blotter to prevent wicking and subsequent resoiling.
Additionally, for very heavy soiling conditions, apply Sta-Clene®, Bane-Guard™ or Teflon® Advanced Carpet Protector to keep the soil more on the surface and make recleaning more effective.
How to Avoid Resoiling after Cleaning Carpet:
- Use the correct chemicals at the correct dilutions.
- Take plenty of dry strokes and use air movers where needed to get the carpet dry before traffic is readmitted onto the carpet.
- Use as little prespray as possible.
- Carefully use spotters followed with thorough extraction.
Additional Carpet Resoiling Information and Articles:
Carpet Cleaning Anti-Resoiling Products: