Hello Out there Carpet Cleaning People. Thanks Rick for your call back on the Fiber Plus & Max.

The question I have for everyone is this: Compare to usage of Fiber Plus Pads vs. Brushes, what are the figures for the money in usage in the life of the brushes vs. pads? How much do I save with brushes vs. pads?



Thanx :~}
MA

Afterglow Services
Commercial & Residential Carpet Care

Brushes will save you money because they last a very long time. However brushes don't clean carpet nearly as well. So pads will make you more money. Here's an overview of how the pads compare with the brushes.

The FiberPlus™ pads are well suited for scrubbing carpets with the correct degree of agitation. Why scrub with pads rather than brushes? Consider this illustration – you have a greasy frying pan to clean. You could get it clean by scrubbing it with a scrub brush, but if you scrub it with one of those green kitchen pads the pan will clean up even easier. Why? It’s because the pads make more surface contact. So when we scrub a carpet with a pad the same principle holds true. We have better agitation and we use less solution to get the job done. FiberPlus pads will clean an average of 5 hours or 10,000 square feet before they wear thin and need to be replaced.

Now why wouldn't a brush travel down deeper into the pile? I think this explanation will help. As a brush rotates on the carpet the bristles bend. And the detergent lubricates the bristles. So what we actually end up cleaning with is the sides of slippery bristles. There's not much scrubbing action going on there. By comparison, the pads make a lot more surface contact and they grip the carpet better than brushes. And as the machine runs across the carpet, the pile is moved all over the place. The tufts of fiber are scrubbed from every direction, And the tuft bundles even scrub against each other, much like washing a garment by hand rubbing the fabric between your knuckles. There's a whole lot of agitation going on with the pads.

A few of our customers have thought the idea of pads was too crazy and went ahead and purchased their Cimex with pads and the brushes. Without exception ALL of these customers have continued to purchase pads. The pads simply scrub better. I first heard about scrubbing carpets with synthetic pads about 15 years ago at a trade show. I thought the guy was on drugs. Fortunately for me a few years later another person who I really respected urged me to try pads. I reluctantly agreed to try it. I was blown away. So although it's a crazy idea, the pads scrub far better than brushes. The thousands of tiny fibers in the pad connect with the fibers in the carpet and produce more even scrubbing pressure. And they dispense the detergent more evenly so that we use less detergent.

The FiberPlus Max pads scrub really dirty carpet about 20% faster than the standard FiberPlus pads. However they don't last as long as the standard FiberPlus pads, so that's a factor to consider. Because they're more aggressive you'll want to use care with the Max pads. Use some caution on a cut pile commercial carpet. If you leave the machine standing in one place on a cut pile carpet you could damage the carpet. Whereas the FiberPlus pads are extremely safe to use on all grades of carpet and the possibility of damaging the carpet is essentially non existent.

The soft shampoo 4807 brushes are used for delicate oriental rugs. And they're useful for cleaning carpet with a very pronounced high/low textured pattern. So they come in handy every once in a while. The more aggressive 4805 brushes are great for ceramic tile and grout.

Hope this gives you some food for thought about the pads versus the brushes.




Rick Gelinas
encapman

Pads also as a rule will leave less of a swirlly mark. At least for a rotary which i use.
We also use an ajust a glide brush when I need to use them.

I never cleaned carpet with a rotary of any kind before I bought my cimex and I did not even know that brushes could be used. I still do not own brushes for the Cimex and we have owned the thing for close to two years. We clean lots of oriental rugs and wal-mart special rugs with it and we have not damaged one so far.

Kevin Pearson