The first is the after picture and second is the before. We have 20 yr ++ commercial in a high school band room. I doubt it has ever been professionally cleaned before. Severe browning/wicking/soil build up before as you can see. Cleaned with an Aerotech TM, CTI with energy. Prescrubed with CTI and Citrasolve with the cimex. I went back over half the room as a test after almost dry hour and half later with encap DS. The browning was only slightly less than the side that I did not Encap.

We made a huge difference but I was hoping it would look better. The customer is very happy, but I would like to make it better. Any suggestions on what I can do.

Thanks!! Bryan

It sounds like the backing of the carpet may be impacted with soil. Commercial glue down carpets have a propensity to become loaded with soil at the backing underneath the crushed/matted tufts of fiber. Unfortunately there is no pile lifter or vacuum cleaner in the world that can recover the build up of soil at the base of the fiber. Neglect and poor vacuuming is what leads to this problem. And solving the problem is never easy, in fact it may not be 100% possible. Here is a post that I made about a carpet like this. Perhaps this will fit what you're talking about.

http://www.network54.com/Forum/228309/thread/1110945922/>

My suggestion would be to under-promise and then do a thorough 2 step cleaning. First DEEP clean using HWE and do a lot of flushing. Then clean with Releasit Encap-Clean DS (mixed at 6 oz per gallon) and add a heaping tablespoon of Citric Acid Powder to each 4 gallons of mixed Releasit (not to be confused with citrus solvent). Scrub slowly and do a thorough job. Keep your moisture to a minimum, and get it dry fast. This should hopefully improve thing quite a bit.







Rick Gelinas
rick@excellent-supply.com

Bryan, the way I get around this is explain to the client that as it hasn't been maintained, it'll probably require a number of cleans to lift it back again.

As Rick has said soil overload. Did you try a very slow thorough east-west and the north-south vacuuming? That would be a good place to start. Without knowledge of your chems overthere, your procedure is the same as I would follow.

What you'll probably find though is if you went back in a month or even 6 months you'll get the same difference in appearance as it comes cleaner and so on, each thorough cleaning will get it that much better again.

Problem is, if they let it get that bad to start with, they are certainly not going to want to spend any serious money over a 6-12 month cleaning programme to get it back again.

John

John Middleton
Carpet Pro Ltd
Palmerston North
New Zealand

Did a white sofa today that all sorts of brown rings...from soda spils, etc. I find that some times they disappear and some times they dont...is this citric acid powder any help in this situation?

P.S. I scrubed on the DS at the 50/50 mix, and then extracted problem areas, followed by padding...still could see those rings in the fibers...

I'm not sure if it would work on the upholstery fabric.
However Citric Acid powder works well for most "browning" in carpet.

Here's where you can get some...
http://www.chemistrystore.com/citric_acid.htm






Rick Gelinas
rick@excellent-supply.com