The First Truck-Mounted Carpet Cleaning Machine - Bane-Clene’s Old No. 1

This half-ton 1969 Dodge van was the first truck-mounted carpet cleaning machine in the carpet cleaning industry!

The truck-mounted carpet cleaning unit logged more than 25,000 hours and cost only $967.00 for repair and maintenance in 26 years of service. The original Sutorbilt vacuum pump in the extraction machine still works!

Bill Bane was certainly one of the first to introduce an extractor mounted in a truck. Here is what Bill Bane said in his 50^th Anniversary reflections:

“I started thinking about the possibility of truck-mounted carpet cleaning equipment in the mid ‘60s. Pumps were available that could move the cleaning solution from the truck to the cleaning head, but recovering the dirty water with fan-vacs remained a problem. That little sewage pump introduced by Bill Wisdom was the missing piece of the puzzle. A larger model of that pump would make it possible to create enough vacuum for water recovery beyond 100 feet. An electrical engineer worked out a design that would let a 1½ horsepower electric motor with dual capacitors, drive the large vacuum and solution pumps that we needed on only 12 amps. With an idea inspired by tanker trucks and using available technology, we built our first two truck-mounted carpet cleaning systems in January of 1969. They were designed on the Wisdom concept but our pumps, tanks and motors were larger and bolted to the floor of the truck.”