Carpet Stains Removal

Carpet stains removal is a headache for most homeowners whether you have pets, kids or just a case of the clumsies. High traffic areas can get stain with dirt, pets can spoil the carpet with waste and kids are infamous for dumping everything from Kool Aid to food to paint on the carpet.

Carpet stains are the bane of any household cleaning.

Becoming a stain removing expert is part one way to maintain your carpet’s clean and neat appearance. The first step in stain removal is stain prevention. If you are purchasing your carpet, you want a tighter, densely weaved carpet to make it harder for stains to set it. Some carpets come pre-treated with Scotch-Guard but you can do this yourself if you select a style that does not include this feature. Scotch Guard is great for repelling stains and keeping liquid spills floating on top of the carpet weave, this reduces the amount of staining they can perform.

When you do have a spill, be sure to blot it up rather than rub. Rubbing a spill grinds it into the carpet fibers, increasing the chances that it will stain. Blotting up a spill soaks up the excess (and if you have Scotch Guard) most of it should be excess and you can get it up without any stain whatsoever. Of course, the faster you get to a spill or dirt on the carpet, the sooner it will be cleaned up.

Dirt and mud stains can be avoided by letting the mud dry and then cleaning up the dirt particles. However, mud with clay in it can leave a faintly reddish stain that you will want to remove with a detergent that breaks down the proteins without harming the color in your carpet. You can use Dow Bathroom cleaner on some stains for breaking down hard proteins and making it easier to clean. (Remember to test any cleaner on a small area of carpet out of sight to make sure it doesn’t damage the color).

One of the best carpet stains removal tools you can have is a shop vac. A shop vac allows you to do wet and dry vacuuming so you can suck up the spill with the shop vac, flush the area with water and suck up the water. Plain, ordinary water dilutes discoloration significantly.

When it comes to more solid matter drops (feces, food, mud), remove the loose matter and then rinse the area with water and use the shop vac to suck it up. Most dirt when treated immediately will not stain. Carpet cleaning professionals will tell you that you can clean spots, but you can’t clean stains. Stains are what happen to carpet after the spot has set.

Urine stains are particularly annoying in carpet and almost impossible to get out. On light colored carpets, hydrogen peroxide and water is an excellent way to ‘bleach’ out or ‘severely fade’ the urine stain. Urine is bright yellow in most cases, the peroxide works to break down the bonds in the proteins and fades the stain out.

On dark colored carpets, you can use a combination of vinegar and water to fade out the urine stain. Choose white vinegar and mix two tablespoons of the white vinegar per one cup of water. You can apply directly or with a spray bottle. Saturate the area, blot up the excess and then dampen it again. In some cases, you can dampen it water the vinegar water, then lay a white towel over the area to help absorb the stain up. The towel may become permanently stained.

Most carpet stains you can treat on your own, but for heavy cleaning or water damage stains, you may need to contact a professional carpet cleaner. Remember that stain fading or cleaning is just a surface clean, that does not always treat the carpet padding beneath the carpet.

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