LisaWagnerCRS
Member
Just got home from a fun trip that took me to Ontario Canada, then Nashville, then Phoenix, and now back home in CA. Thankfully I escaped the SNOW all along the way.
While in Canada I put on a rug cleaning clinic - just a day program - but we had a lot of fun. And I wanted to do some direct testing of a few items while there, topics that have been brought up here on Mikeys Board so I wanted to share.
I'm going to apologize first if I screw up the photos - I'm a MB photo poster newby.
Here was one of the rugs we washed - a Chinese rug that had strong GRAY areas in the field. We dusted it with the Badger and got pounds of soil out of this puppy. Tested it side by side with an upright vacuum, and the Badger out beat it hands down.
We washed the rug thoroughly - using rug shampoo, a Cimex scrubbing, and rinsed to see the results. But those gray areas as you can see, had heavily impacted soil in those base fibers.
A couple points regarding this:
1) ANY dusting method, even as aggressive as the Badger, canNOT remove soil that has been attached to the fibers with past cleaning residue. All dusting methods remove DRY soil, not greasy, ground-in soil.
2) This is the biggest danger with rugs being cleaning in the home, or in a plant, using surface cleaning methods and no thorough dusting step. That soil becomes mud, and creates hard impacted soil all along the foundation fibers that gives that gray cast to these rugs. Long term this contributes to dry rot, and in some cases strong odor problems. It also is VERY difficult to remove with standard "wool safe" chemicals and soft brushes as are on the Cimex.
I wanted to see what a standard wash process, using recommended rug approved chemicals, following a thorough dusting, would do for this rug once over.
A regular wash was not enough. Not because it was not thorough, but because this rug had not been thoroughly cleaned in the past (when we first got it wet suds came up from past residue).
Because this rug did not have dyes to potentially bleed, a few things could be done here which worked (but took time) - using an enzyme to help break up the soil, and using a stiffer broom floor brush (stiffer than the Cimex) to brush at the base of these fibers throughout the rug. Much more manual labor was required, and more aggressive chemicals, due to those past surface cleaning efforts. So the second wash created a much cleaner rug. If this rug had dyes not colorfast, we would not have been able to spend as much time as we did on this one.
The other test we did - which I will download photos of when I get them off my photo card, was urine removal from a Iranian rug and attacking the odor. The contamination was bad enough to have created three major areas of dye bleed and dry rot - and the smell was horrible.
We flooded the rug in acetic acid and squeegeed out very yellow water. In fact we poured straight vinegar on these specific problem areas.
After a thorough cleaning - and extraction (using a water claw and wands with a truckmount) - we put this rug in the drying room, on the floor, with a tarp over it and the Odorox running with an airmover under the tarp to tent the rug.
The rug did not smell as bad after the wash as beforehand because we removed so much of that urine. But I was not expecting the Odorox to do much overnight. It did two things though: 1) it removed the odor completely from the side of the rug it ran over (the top side of the rug) and 2) it dramatically decreased the dry time of the rug - an unexpected result, but Tom at Odorox tells me it does in fact remove grains of moisture from the air as it is working. Without a wringer or Revolution I had expected a 2-day 100% dry time - yet overnight the rug was almost completely dry. Running the Odorox along the back side, that odor was knocked out completely in another half day.
I have been around a lot of pet contaminated rugs. I am the "sniff tester" in our rug plant because I am the most sensitive to everything from pets to perfumes to Ozone. I expected a lukewarm result from this test in just one day because the pet urine was so heavy on this rug - but I am completely sold on its performance.
I tested some other things in the clinic - I'll share as I get the photos in order. And don't be mad but I'll be posting this info on other forums also... but because you've had discussions here specifically on the Badger and Odorox - I wanted to post for those of you interested in the topics.
Hope those photos show up!
Lisa
While in Canada I put on a rug cleaning clinic - just a day program - but we had a lot of fun. And I wanted to do some direct testing of a few items while there, topics that have been brought up here on Mikeys Board so I wanted to share.
I'm going to apologize first if I screw up the photos - I'm a MB photo poster newby.
Here was one of the rugs we washed - a Chinese rug that had strong GRAY areas in the field. We dusted it with the Badger and got pounds of soil out of this puppy. Tested it side by side with an upright vacuum, and the Badger out beat it hands down.
We washed the rug thoroughly - using rug shampoo, a Cimex scrubbing, and rinsed to see the results. But those gray areas as you can see, had heavily impacted soil in those base fibers.
A couple points regarding this:
1) ANY dusting method, even as aggressive as the Badger, canNOT remove soil that has been attached to the fibers with past cleaning residue. All dusting methods remove DRY soil, not greasy, ground-in soil.
2) This is the biggest danger with rugs being cleaning in the home, or in a plant, using surface cleaning methods and no thorough dusting step. That soil becomes mud, and creates hard impacted soil all along the foundation fibers that gives that gray cast to these rugs. Long term this contributes to dry rot, and in some cases strong odor problems. It also is VERY difficult to remove with standard "wool safe" chemicals and soft brushes as are on the Cimex.
I wanted to see what a standard wash process, using recommended rug approved chemicals, following a thorough dusting, would do for this rug once over.
A regular wash was not enough. Not because it was not thorough, but because this rug had not been thoroughly cleaned in the past (when we first got it wet suds came up from past residue).
Because this rug did not have dyes to potentially bleed, a few things could be done here which worked (but took time) - using an enzyme to help break up the soil, and using a stiffer broom floor brush (stiffer than the Cimex) to brush at the base of these fibers throughout the rug. Much more manual labor was required, and more aggressive chemicals, due to those past surface cleaning efforts. So the second wash created a much cleaner rug. If this rug had dyes not colorfast, we would not have been able to spend as much time as we did on this one.
The other test we did - which I will download photos of when I get them off my photo card, was urine removal from a Iranian rug and attacking the odor. The contamination was bad enough to have created three major areas of dye bleed and dry rot - and the smell was horrible.
We flooded the rug in acetic acid and squeegeed out very yellow water. In fact we poured straight vinegar on these specific problem areas.
After a thorough cleaning - and extraction (using a water claw and wands with a truckmount) - we put this rug in the drying room, on the floor, with a tarp over it and the Odorox running with an airmover under the tarp to tent the rug.
The rug did not smell as bad after the wash as beforehand because we removed so much of that urine. But I was not expecting the Odorox to do much overnight. It did two things though: 1) it removed the odor completely from the side of the rug it ran over (the top side of the rug) and 2) it dramatically decreased the dry time of the rug - an unexpected result, but Tom at Odorox tells me it does in fact remove grains of moisture from the air as it is working. Without a wringer or Revolution I had expected a 2-day 100% dry time - yet overnight the rug was almost completely dry. Running the Odorox along the back side, that odor was knocked out completely in another half day.
I have been around a lot of pet contaminated rugs. I am the "sniff tester" in our rug plant because I am the most sensitive to everything from pets to perfumes to Ozone. I expected a lukewarm result from this test in just one day because the pet urine was so heavy on this rug - but I am completely sold on its performance.
I tested some other things in the clinic - I'll share as I get the photos in order. And don't be mad but I'll be posting this info on other forums also... but because you've had discussions here specifically on the Badger and Odorox - I wanted to post for those of you interested in the topics.
Hope those photos show up!
Lisa
