Traditionally Spring was the favoured time of year for sprucing up your home, but these days it’s more likely to happen in the run up to Christmas, when relatives are due to visit and friends are coming over.
After all those rainy autumn days when your pets and family have trodden half the garden through the house, your carpets and rugs are likely to be one of the first things that need a good pre-Christmas clean.
There’s a few options for tackling this task. You can call in the professionals, or hire a carpet washing machine to use over a weekend, or you could buy one to use at your leisure. Using a professional cleaning company to come to your home is an easy option, but can be very costly. Hiring a machine is less expensive, but buying your own will save you money in the long run, because you can use it again and again. The other big advantage with buying a carpet washer is that you’re not tied down to a particular day to do the cleaning. You can choose to clean the upstairs carpets one day, then tackle the downstairs the following weekend.
If you’re entertaining lots of guests it’s also really useful to have a carpet washer on hand, as there’s bound to be a few spilt drinks or footprints by the end of the night. You can simply whip out the machine, suck up the spill and shampoo the area clean before it turns into a stain. This is an especially good idea if you’ve got cream or light-coloured carpets. Carpet washers are also invaluable to have on stand by if your washing machine floods or your freezer unexpectedly defrosts, as they can suck up the liquid quickly, before it becomes a problem.
Modern carpet washers use advanced deep cleaning technology to lift and clean carpet fibres, removing embedded grime, stubborn stains and odours that dry vacuum cleaners can’t reach. For the best performance look out for models with ‘heated cleaning’, which use heat generated by the machine to speed up the cleaning and drying process, and ’edge to edge cleaning’ for even suction all across the width of the floorhead, so carpets dry quickly right up to the edges.
Using a carpet washer is very satisfying if you’re house proud, because you can see the colour of the carpets change literally before your eyes as dirt you never even knew was there is sucked away. If you dry vacuum your carpets daily it can be quite disconcerting to see just how dirty the water is when you pour it away after washing, and you’ll certainly see your ’regularly cleaned carpets’ in a whole new light!
The suction action of the washer lifts up carpet fibres that have become flattened from being trodden on day after day, so carpets feel softer and more springy once they’re dry. They also smell a lot nicer too, so washing your carpets is a good way of freshening up the whole house instead of reaching for the air freshener!