The time to clean your carpet

During the 1980’s there was a general consensus in the market place that you shouldn’t clean your carpeting too often, it would take out the stain protection from the carpeting. Many people still believe that this is true. I will argue that this is the wrong approach to carpet maintenance. Once you start seeing that the carpet is getting dirty, you have already started harming your carpeting.

Carpeting is mostly made out of nylon fibers. These fibers will get damaged when the carpet gets dirty. If you were to look at the fibers under a microscope, you would see this damage occurring. It is similar to what happens when you run sand paper over Plexiglas. You are sure to see scratches in the Plexiglas and will not be able to remove them.

How often is often enough when it comes to carpet cleaning. Well that depends on the amount of people walking on the carpet and what type of conditions that the carpeting is subjected to.

Areas such as lobbies and entrances which get subjected to a consistent amount of traffic and dirt need to be cleaned more often than a conference room towards the back of the office. A private office will usually need to be cleaned less often than the conference room.

Areas such as the entrances to commercial kitchens and pantries are areas where grease and grim build up will need to be cleaned more often as well.

As a rule of thumb, I recommend that the entrances get cleaned once a month, the common corridors once a quarter, the conference rooms and cubicle areas twice a year and private offices either twice a year or once a year.