Do any of you guys encap Oriental's. I have had good success with this and I can do the job right in the customers home. I just got a call from a women who worked at this place I cleaned over the weekend and she wants her carpets (orientals) cleaned the same way. I guess thats the best way
to get referrals. Let them see it for themselves. 6 orientals
in her home (not bad).





Ralph

I have been doing encap on the Oriental's lately and its been comming out nice. Do you charge more for them? People always expect to pay more regardless of the method I use.

Mat,

I do charge more, for a 8 by 10 I charge at least $75
This one job has 6 orientals she wants done plus 3 bedrooms and two hallways. It should be a nice days work.
What part of Mass are you from Mat?

Ralph

Located just N of Worcester Ma.

That sounds like a great way for extra $.
What it the correct way for doing it?

I will sometimes encap orientals here in the shop if they are not super trashed. 1st - vac both sides really good 2nd - use Cimex and plenty of juice 3rd - groom - 4th hang to dry and last - vac and groom. Typical custy response - wow that really looks bright!

Joe, look into taking a class on oriental rug cleaning...never hurts.

thanx --- Derek.

Yes, but only after trying hard to get them to take it to a real rug washing plant.

Reason -

Serious rug care folks (we don't pretend to be) can not only give the rug a careful submerged cleaning and drying, but also have skill in examining and repairing fringes, specialty experience in which dyes need extra care to avoid bleeding and overall experience we could not reproduce easily.

But!

If they indicate they paid very little money, and don't care about whether or not it bleeds or if the fringe is fixed or the overall quality of the whole darn thing, but since we're here would we please just run over it, pretty please with no guarantee of anything at all except a quick effort..after all we bought it at Home Depot for $89 and don't wanna pay to have it done up right....well, OK.

That's our approach....

As you can tell, I'm not gunning for that business.

We clean lot's of Orientals and various area rugs. Several thousand in income every month. Most all of them are picked up or delivered to our shop. Method we use the most is; rug dusting, we have a machine that looks like the Rug Badger (bought from the old fellow who manfactured them in Mississippi) than they are encapped with a Cimex w/white brushes. fringes are cleaned w/Argosheen, undilluted and the GLS machine, hung to dry over a 2" pvc w/1@1/2" iron pipe inside the pvc for strength. That is the condensed version of how we do it. We love them. $1.50 a sq. ft. plus pick-up and delivery. We did 9 Friday that brought in $1458.00, it is hard to make that doing on-location cleaning and we never left the shop ( they were all brought in)

White brushes? Bought my Cimex used. Had 2 sets of white brushes. Seem similar in softness, but one seems to have bristles closer together, the other farther apart. Seems like the latter is a little stiffer.
Am I right? The softer ones for these rugs would be my choice, correct?

Do you have any problem grooming the rugs using that much brush action?

Thanks,
John L.

John, it is very important to groom the rug imediately after Cimexing, while still damp. I have several rakes from Groom Industries, the one I like the best is the one with black bristles which they recommend for orientals. I would bet that if you have two brushes that are white and one is stiffer, that they are by two different mfgs. I was a distributor of Cimexes in the early '90s and the white brushes I recently purchased from Rick are exactly the same as on my earlier machines. I would probably use the softer bristles.

We do all our rugs inplant

Like Ray we dust all rugs first other wise you will not get much dirt
out of the rug. I prefer to submerge clean the rugs as I have seen
the amount of dirt and other particals the come out in the rinse, we either hang them
or put them on a special matt with fans on them then do the fringe work.

We charge $2.00 to $3.00 a sq ft If fringes need special worth it is $1.00 ln ft
I include delievery it they need it delivered and will put it in place also.