I know most of you avoid restaurant's, but I was recently eating with my family at our favorite restaurant and the manager asked me to clean their carpets as I was wearing my logo shirt...

Anyhow, it's a basic dark, plush, patterned carpet, with a somewhat heavy load of grease. They have had it cleaned 3 months ago so it could be worse.

I know most of you here use the Mex, but I will be using an OP machine. I do have fiber plus and max pads. I'm wondering from you folks: 1) would you just use cotton pads, or prescrub with either the plus or max pads; and 2) should I use releasit DS or Punch? or a mixture of the two?

I was thinking I would use Punch at 12 oz/gal with DS at 4 oz a gal and pad it. Do any of you mix the two?

Thanks much. -grant

Grant, I too am not crazy about restaurants, but, my favorite restaurant in our small town needed cleaned bad, so my friend chef/owner asked me to do it. I suggested a swap out ($289.00) job. A lot of my customers (Lawyers, Denist Builders, ect.)eat there, So we agreed on $300.00 worth of coupons @ $20 each. Works for me and I can give some out to my customers. The carpet is CGD Olefin and nasty. Cimex/maxi plus pads to the rescue, steps: Vacuum, Pre-Spray with Encap-Punch mixed heavy/12 ounces to a gallon, and hot as you can get it. It is easy to get very hot water in a restaurant. Spray it down and let it dwell for at least 10 minutes, then use the Cimex with hot Releasit DS mixed at 6 ounces to a gallon of water. It was like cutting hot butter with a knife. Two passes and it was unbelievable. David the chef/owner has been my best cheerleader yet. That was 2 months ago and we have gotten 7 jobs because of it. BTW the carpet looks good, we do again next month. It may take you a little longer with your equipment but is very do-able. My suggestion is to NOT mix the two together, you will get better results if you follow these instructions. After owning 7 truckmounts, I can't say that this job would have been any easier using one. After 3 or four cleanings like this it will need to be flushed with a Steamin Demon or a portable HWE. Hope this helps

did you pad after or anything? I did one last month and in some aresa there was brown/grey slugg

No, that was it.

I would prespray this carpet with an enzyme cleaner with the hottest water I could get. Then I would used a rotary or cylindrical machine to aggitate after about 10 min dwell time. After which I would extract the carpet ( I used a Demon or Cross American).

Once flushed out I would then start the VLM process as Ray described, my preference is to always flush out the carpet as much as possable the first time we clean for a new client then VLM.

Thanks for the tip Mr. Rambo. I tried your method, but I think the carpet was dirtier than I had thought as this job totally kicked my butt... I had a helper for the first time ever so I figured the 1800 sf restaurant wouldn't take all night... boy was I wrong. I padded each area with a bunch of pads, sometimes 3-5, rarely less. When done I sprayed DS at 6 oz/ gal followed by my OP machine with fiber pad. I averaged 100 sf/hour including furniture, vacuuming, etc. I gave up after finishing one wing which was only 1/3 of the restaurant at 4am.

It's really hard for me to believe a Cimex or any other scrubber would do better. The area where I did looked great, but def. not worth the time for the $$. I am now gun-shy of restaurants and it will probably be a VERY long time before I do one again.

The issue was not that the cleaner didn't cut the grease, all the pads were BLACK, but I pulled 70 pads and could have pulled 50 more in a mere 800 sf area... I'm not sure I'd do this job for .50/sf now...

iv done a really really greasy restraunt with both the cimex with fiber plus pads and the brute op machine with fiberplus pads and releasit both do a very very good job using very hot water when i was using the cimex the steam coming out the bottom was similar to using an rx20 and a truckmount lol and the cleaning was like using a truckmount also the results were much better and way faster 2 guarenteed but i think in this situation the cimex worked it much better because of the gravity fed situation it puts more of it down

Try this for VLM:
Vacuum & prespray with Punch @ 8-12oz per gallon. Put a fiber pad under your OP machine & scrub with a solution of DS & Punch @ 6oz each per gallon. Follow the fiber pad with synthetic(Tuway)pads then switch to cotton. Beleive it or not the synthetic pads will hold quite a bit of grime when the soil load is high. Seems like your cotton pads go a lot farther on trashed if you use those first...

Try this for HWE:
Vacuum & prespray DynaChem Powermax Powder @ 8 oz per gallon. Let dwell 10-15 minutes(agitate the worst areas immediatly & reapply prespray). Prescrub everything w/OP machine & fiber pad. Rinse with the hottest water available. OP clean with cotton & 6oz each of Punch & DS per gallon or 8 oz of DynaChem 2XSR Encapsulate Cleaner per gallon.

You can clean restaurants with VLM & Releasit:


Try again. Just to see what you can do. Make it a learning experience. Get some before & after pics. Try & set them up on a monthly or bi-weekly cleaning schedule. It will be a lot easier if you keep up on it.