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Soft Floor & Carpet Care Best Practices
March 12, 2020 8:05 AM by Tennant Company
Posted in Cleaning Solutions, Best Practices,
The maintenance of soft flooring options like carpet requires a reasonable and methodical schedule using a variety of cleaning techniques.
Vacuuming can help your carpet look neat and clean. However, over-vacuuming an area can create wear and tear on the carpet fibers. By keeping a reasonable schedule of vacuuming low traffic areas once a week, and high traffic areas every day, you can create the ideal balance between the life of the carpet and the cleanliness and attractiveness of your facility.
Vacuuming alone isn’t enough, though. A rapid-dry carpet cleaning is a great way to keep your carpets looking well cared-for in between the deep-clean of a restorative carpet cleaning. How often you need an interim cleaning will depend on the wear your carpet sees on a day-to-day basis, but will generally be from three to six weeks.
After six months to a year, your carpet will be thirsting for the time inherent in a deep, restorative carpet cleaning with an extractor.
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Get the DIRT on Carpet Care
A great way to remember your floor-cleaning routine is D.I.R.T: Daily carpet care; Interim solutions; Restorative care and Treatment of spots. In the 5th chapter of our Retail Guide to Shine eBook, we share the D.I.R.T. methodology for soft floor cleaning and carpet care.
Daily Carpet Care
- Frequency: every day
- Result: clean daily dirt from high traffic areas
- Action: vacuum
- Equipment: vacuum cleaner
Interim Cleaning Solutions
- Frequency: 1-6 months
- Result: remove dirt with limited disruption
- Action: interim carpet cleaning, preferably with a rapid-drying system
- Equipment: carpet cleaner equipped with a rapid-drying technology
Restorative Carpet Care
- Frequency: 6-12 months or more
- Result: deep cleaning
- Action: extraction
- Equipment: carpet cleaner suitable for deep extraction
Treatment of Spots
- Frequency: immediately as needed
- Action: spot treatment
- Equipment: portable spot cleaner / extractor
D.I.R.T. carpet care methodolgy a great way to maintain your carpets. With various Tennant floor cleaning machines, maintaining your carpet becomes less of hassle.
Clean Carpets with Minimal Disruptions
For venues with high-traffic carpeted areas, maintaining carpets while minimizing disruption to the space can be a challenge. Use the D.I.R.T. system (Daily, Interim, Restorative, Treatment) to plan a maintenance schedule that helps maintain the carpets you’ve invested in and provides a welcoming environment for guests.
Additional Floor Cleaning Tips:
- Fast-drying interim cleaning products, paired with spot cleaners, can allow you to gently and quickly clean areas far more frequently. This means that dirt and grime does not stay in the carpet, which decreases the chance of permanent staining. Quick drying times mean that interim cleaning is far more convenient than older processes as well. With some of the newer products on the market, drying times are as little as 30 minutes.
- Vacuums with true HEPA filters help control the levels of airborne particles including those associated with allergens. Lower quality filters fail to capture the smallest of these particles, so vacuuming can stir up them up and degrade air quality.
- Keeping entrance or barrier mats at entrances can help remove soil before it gets tracked into the building. The EPA recommends that schools vacuum each barrier mat daily using a beater-brush or beater-bar vacuum, and vacuuming in two directions — in line and side to side. The Carpet and Rug Institute suggests an alternative. Rather than trying to clean those heavily trafficked mats, they encourage schools to change out the barrier mat regularly.
Did you miss our other posts about our Retail Guide to Shine?
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