A few days ago, I had a client that requested that I "absolutely" HWE clean her carpet. I tried to talk her into letting me VLM it, but she wasn't having it. However, in the process of telling her about the tea-tree oil in ReleasIt she said to add the tea-tree oil to my "steam cleaning".

Don't you just love how a client's mind works?

"Clean the carpet this way! And, Oh! I like the sound of that! Be sure and add that as well!"

LOL

I was about to tell her that I couldn't "add" the tea-tree oil, but then I thought........Why not? Oh. Wait a minute. I can't extract her carpet with ReleasIt because all the foam generated will clog the vacuum hose and shut down my extractor. How, can I kill the foam before it happens?

I have it! ChemSpec Powdered Defoamer!

After vacuuming, I sprinkle this all over her carpet and cautiously proceed to extract her carpet with Red-Label ReleasIt (mixed: 3 ounces per gallon of hot water).

What do you know? It worked!!!! No foam (or very little) in the vacuum hose and recovery tank. And it also cleaned and deodorized/protected the carpet fairly well. I did go back over a few bad traffic areas with my OP machine (using cotton pads soaked in H2O and then rung out very hard). The pads came up very dirty and the client was impressed.

Mark

p.s. Rick, how's it coming with those new chems, Buddy? I sure could use them for my residential clients now.

I have been using RL-it with HWE on some jobs. What I have found is that if you prespray (I used a hydroforce with 70% releasit/30% water in the bottle) and let it sit for a minute then I do not have any foaming problems. The other thing I noticed was that the foaming was a very low density foam and did not create any vacuum problems with a TM in the cases where I ran RL-it at a higher concentration or for spot cleaning. For spots I would just dump the hydroforce over and some would spill out of the weep hole in the jug and that would give me some concentrate to spot spills with.


HTH

T