I agree with what Tony said.
HWE:
Plus- Plenty of water-flow.
Minus- Recovery on glue down carpet is not as great as installations over a pad.
Encap:
Plus- Crystal captures the soil.
Minus- The soil is still present until it's recovered with post vacuuming.
I think that we all recognize that recovery is compromised when we perform HWE cleaning on a glue down carpet. That's why HWE has an inconsistent success rate in the commercial environment.
But on this subject here's something that I've been contemplating. This is solely based on ideas floating around in my feeble brain. So feel free to correct my summation, I will not take offense. But the following reasoning does seem logical to me...
Consider cleaning a commercial glue down carpet with HWE. Let's say that we squirt 1 gallon of water into a given area of carpet (let's say it's 4 square yards). And for the sake of illustration let's say that we recover 70% of the water (70% is higher than what's realistic but let's be generous). So we have cleaned 4 square yards of carpet and we have left 1 pint of water behind.
Let's take a look at the cleaning process. We have our carpet that is heavily soiled. We apply our pre-spray and agitate it. Next we HWE clean the carpet at the rate described above.We apply the wand to the carpet and key the trigger.
What has been accomplished? We have now diluted the pre-spray. And we have also diluted the soil that's present in the carpet. And we have recovered 70% of this dilution. So what is left in the carpet? In this scenario what we have left in the 4 square yards of carpet is a pint of diluted pre-spray and soil.
At this point I have to make it clear that I wholeheartedly agree that HWE cleaning is a great way to clean a carpet. It has a great ability to flush soils out of the carpet. It is an excellent tool, especially in a residential setting where the carpet is built with a fluffy face fiber and is installed over a pad (plenty of airflow/recovery). But can we say that it really cleans hygienically? I'm inclined to feel that claiming this would be stretching the truth somewhat. As I see it, we can only hope to improve a soiled carpet's hygienic condition with ANY cleaning method. No method is truly capable of totally sanitizing a carpet.
Now back to encapsulation. Will holding the soil in a polymer lessen the exposure to the contaminant? I would think that surrounding the soil in plastic would reduce contact with the soil load. It makes sense in theory, but I wouldn't want to say that it is sanitary either. Perhaps it's a step in the right direction, but again I say "no method is capable of sanitizing a carpet".
So when we sell commercial carpet cleaning I think it's fair to say that we're only IMPROVING the health of their building, regardless of whichever method is used. Just my 2 cents.
Rick Gelinas