encapping did I miss something??

[steve g]

keep in mind carpet cleaning is about 25% of my revenue these days the other is water damage, I still have a love for carpet cleaning that will never go away, hell maybe I like doing it anyways after hearing about how great encapping was I decided to give it a try on on a couple problem carpets on a couple accounts I have, so I rented a Cimex for a day. here are my impressions. I tried it as a stand alone on a couple trashed commercial glue downs, it made the carpet look better but not to an acceptable level so I still ended up breaking out the truck mount, which immediately made a huge difference in the carpet. the second area, is an olefin CGD specd for the total wrong area, ie the highest traffic area in the plant, this one I chose to truckmount it first and then encap it with the cimex afterwards and then used air movers to dry I think I got it looking decent and it should dry decent. I felt the encap just would not break up the oils in this situation, now carpet 3 is another CGD this one I thought came out great, but the customer called and said it looked like crap when it dried, so I checked it out sure enough, it had a lot of wick backs from drink spills and other assorted stains, this one the Cimex did the best on, but keep in mind I had already used the truckmount, bottom line I don't see what all the encap hoopla is about, IMO I think its tuff to use it and get acceptable results as a stand alone method, I think it should only be used as a stand alone when the truckmount is doing nothing or making the carpet worse, otherwise as we all know there has to be a rinse and vac step to cleaning or else we are just moving the dirt around,

 

[Mikey P]

Your standards are too high.

 

[floorguy]

Steve, plan ya a trip up north and i will take you out and show you hows it works....

And you can show me what you did, and we can fix it...


It just landed me a theater contract...they said it looks as good when it was put in...(personally it looks tons better, but needs about 3 more cleans to make it right) but hey they are happy as hell that

A. it was DRY before they opened....HOW IN THE HELL CAN YOU LEAVE A CARPET WET FOR ALL DAY???? I MEAN WTF???

B. it cleaned up and got rid of the spills the other joker blamed on the cleaning crew...

funny how after 2 weeks MY carpets dont have the stains come back...

 

[Shorty]

With experience comes knowledge.

 

[steve g]

well you guys educate me, this was a real world test on carpets out in the field, not some demo at a suppliers, I still stand by at this point the method is at its best when paired with HWE

 

[Jimmy L]

Just remember that encap really is the SHAMPOO method.

Years ago and maybe even today people would just get out a rotary 175 rpm with a shampoo tank and scrub the stuff in and call it done.

ITS THE SAME THING doing it with a cimex and the shampoo tank.

What you did was to use your cimex and SHAMPOO to scrub in the shampoo and rinse it with your truck mount.

This also is a very old method.

Encapsulation is the new marketing term for SHAMPOO.

 

[John Buxton]

I was so impressed, I just bought a Cimex. Have you tried Scot's products, or Excellent Supplies? What kind of pads? You can get more aggressive on pads.

 

[rhino1]

If you are getting wickback with encapping, you are getting the carpet too wet. The chemical you use makes a world of difference as well. Another thing I found was to use the chemical at 1.5 to 2X the recommended dilution on a greasy carpet, the dilution rates seem to be way too low for carpet that is really dirty.

If you are using an encap solution to pre-scrub and then you rinse it out, you are wasting your money. Encap is designed to be left in the carpet to help remove the left behind soil, so if you are rinsing the encap solution out, you are defeating the purpose. You can RINSE with some encapping solution and that would be great, but i think I would find a less costly pre-spray myself.

Go to www.excellent-supply.com good advice there. You can do some wonderful things with encap, but it is NOT as good as a really good HWE cleaning by any means.

Advice From a reformed SHAMPOO ADDICT