A real rug cleaning business washes rugs remotely in a dedicated rug cleaning plant that only specializes in cleaning and repairing area rugs. Carpet cleaning and rug cleaning are two entirely different procedures. Over the years, we’ve had several clients who turned to us only after they had gone through a fiasco with a carpet cleaner.

The tufted bamboo silk rug, seen above, was cleaned by a professional carpet cleaner. You’ll notice deep yellow stains all around the rug. This was a direct result of the carpet cleaning companies work. They did a few things wrong here. First, the cleaner applied a chemical solution that is too high in pH level for bamboo silk fiber. In general, chemical solutions employed by carpet cleaners remove the natural oils and patina from the fabric. Moreover, they applied too much of the solution over the dirty areas. Secondly, they experienced the most common pitfall that all carpet cleaning techs encounter when trying to clean area rugs: lack of means to dry and rinse the detergent out of the rug. All this resulted in a yellowish cast over the entire rug, along with residue spots over the areas of excessive chemical detergent.

Here’s the kicker: when the carpet cleaner had finished, these stains didn’t appear at all. Because the stains only reveal themselves after they dry for several days, the client didn’t even know that the carpet cleaners were the ones who caused this! The picture on the right shows the rug after it had been ran through our a real rug cleaners process. Unfortunately, situations like these are all too common, and it brings us to our big question:

To put it simply: rug cleaning is a whole different game that plays by a whole different set of rules. What a double bind… Not only do carpet cleaners not fully immerse your rug in water, which is necessary to properly unsettle the maximum amount of soil possible, but what little water they do use cannot be dried properly. That’s why it’s often even dangerous and detrimental to steam clean your area rug.

Besides the actual process itself, the people who are handling your rug are just as important. To safely assess the best solution for your rug, an expert must be present to ensure that the correct procedure is used. The majority of carpets are produced commercially Shaw Industries and Mohawk with guidelines and standardized procedures of maintenance and construction set by the IIRC. Meanwhile, rugs come from all around the rug and have no such standards. A manufacturer will often use different types of dyes and fabrics on the same rug, at their whim! Only a rug cleaner with years of experience in identifying different rugs made from different manufacturers around the world can find the safest solution for your rug. Even then, they may make a mistake, but the odds are much lower. Carpet tech’s have no such experience. It’s an easily attainable job with minimal training based around carpets. That’s why a carpet cleaning business is one of America’s most popular startup businesses.

There are several other aspects of cleaning that carpet cleaners cannot tend to. For example, carpet cleaning techs will only clean the front of your rug and completely ignore the back, which also holds a large percentage of the of air pollutants and contaminants that your rug has been soaking up in the air. They cannot dust the rugs, nor can they soak it in water and condition the fabric. The carpet cleaners time constraints and lack of experience also mean that enzymatic solutions don’t receive the necessary amount of dwell time. In fact, if your rug is stained, a steam cleaning procedure’s heat would only further embed the stain, including any discoloration or added color, into the rug, making the stain removal procedure more expensive, if not impossible!

Moreover, a steam cleaning procedure only cleans the surface of the rug while most of the dust, allergens and contaminants are settled deep within the rug. Because the process can only use a small amount of water that must dry in 20 minutes or less, it can’t eliminate most of the germs and bacteria that have accumulated and settled deeply within your rug over the last few years.

A rug cleaning procedure costs as much as $2.00-5.00 per sq ft according to Fixr and can take as long as 7  to 10 days. Here’s what you get for the difference:

• Expertise – The people who will be cleaning your rugs are passionate rug experts who have spent their entire lives around rugs. We have over 35 years of experience in this industry. This means that within seconds of seeing your rug we will be able to recall the thousands of other rugs just like that one that we have cleaned before and be able to foretell what kind of results to expect and what kind of traps to avoid when cleaning such a rug.

• Better Results – Combine a team of passionate rug experts with organic detergents and world-class machinery designed for this particular use case scenario and you have a recipe for success. A rug cleaner will always be able to safely eliminate more soil, dust, and stains from a rug than a carpet cleaner could. For the all-important task of drying, we use our centrifuge that will eliminate 95% of the water inside of your rug in a matter of minutes.

• Better Value – All in all, this makes our wash a tremendous value for the price: you get results that are safer and more effective at a cost that’s only marginally higher than a steam cleaning procedure. When cleaning sessions are handled by a professional rug cleaner they tend to be needed less frequently.