I'm just starting to use my new Cimex, taking it to hotels where a demo is usually requested. So far these
have been 3 and 4 star downtown Boston hotels, which means wool carpeting. To keep the weight down during the loading & unloading part of this, I usually pour in a couple of gallons of Releasit to do a fairly small area demo, or 2. It seems that to get the recommended volume of visible foam, I have to put down quite a lot of Releasit. Does this have anything to do with wool fibers absorbing the Releasit, in contrast to synthetic fibers of the more typical low-pile, glue-down commercial carpeting?

Cleaning wool will always take more liquid than any synthetic. With any cleaning system.

Even plain water- wool will hold many times it's weight in water compared to any synthetic.

Takes longer to dry too, because the wool holds more water.

For instance, cleaning a mix of rugs in my rug plant (garage). I do say 5 or 6 at one time, and the synthetics are always dry before the wool rugs.

This applies to full immersion, shampooing, encapping or HWE.

The point is- the wool is as clean as the synthetics, taking everything into consideration, and the finished results are the same, just 3 days for wool to dry and 24 hours or less for synthetics.

Gary

As a rule of thumb, wool will hold onto approx. 30% of it's weight in moisture, Nylon approx. 20% and our friend Olefin will only hold onto 1/10th of 1 % of it's weight in moisture. That is why it is so difficult for that big, hot , powerful, high pressure "truck mount" to clean it.

Just listen to those seasoned veterans. Yeppers. Wool absorbs the detergent much more rapidly than synthetic fiber. So it take more product.

BTW, here's a tip from our distributor in Australia, Gary Bethel. He says he uses the FiberPlus Max pads on wool. You heard it right. He says the heavy wool Axminster carpets love the more aggressive scrubbing action of the Max pads. I never would have considered that myself. Guess I don't know so much as I thought. He says the FiberPlus Max do a terrific job on the dense wool commercial carpets. I appreciated his advice, since he comes from the land of sheep and wool carpets.





Rick Gelinas
encapman

Wool is a fantastic natural fibre.

It takes longer to appear dirty.

It takes longer to clean.

It also takes longer to dry.

This is because instead of being a straight filament, with no obstructions like the synthetics, wool, for simplicity of explanation, is made up like fish scales around a stem.

(Actually cuticles around several cortexes, amongst other elements).

The soil becomes trapped within these 'scales'.

The cleaning solution must release the soil from inside these 'scales', hence it also takes longer to dry.

Wool is also a lot more resilient than the synthetics, but I'm sure most of you already are aware of what I have just stated.

Gary is correct in that about the pads on wool, he told me earlier & I tried it, yep, ya gotta hand it to him.

Cheers,

Shorty.

While I never used Releasit Encapsulating Detergent and Fiber Plus Pads on wool wtw carpets, I did use them several times on wool rugs I had in my shop, with excellent results.

The only drawback was some lint picked up in the FPP, and if I did a red rug, the red lint might transfer to a white or other color rug, which might not be a good thing, so I reserved that particular pad for red rugs. Same thing with a green rug- green lint, brown lint etc. So, I had several pads, each reserved for a particular color rug.

Still gottem when I sold everything else, so if anybody wants some slightly used FPP that are now red pads, (for red rugs) or green pads, (for green rugs) or brown pads, (for brown rugs) let me know, I will sell cheap.

Gary