So, you’ve decided to take the plunge and rent a carpet cleaning machine. Wonderbaah! We all knew you had it in you and that’s half the battle. The thing I love about renting the rug weasel or the carpet cruncher is the beater bar on the bottom. That agitation is the bomb for working loose soil. If you want to bake a cake or clean a carpet you have to follow a recipe. If you decide you’d rather just eat cake, then make it a Portillo’s chocolate, and I’ll bring my own fork.

To bake our carpet cleaning cake you need several ingredients; Heat, chemicals, agitation, & time. There are others, but for this article we’ll concentrate on these four. Using hot water improves our baths and carpet cleaning. In many instances the newer cleaning produces are heat activated. You crank up the BTU, and they swing for the bleacher.

The people who make the rental machines hired other people to make carpet detergent. You only need a little, but usually they sell it by the kegger. Buy the smallest amount you can find. Maybe a quart? It doesn’t go bad and if you ever decide you loved cleaning your carpets you’ll have more than enough for the next few jobs.

The instructions tell you to put the detergent in the top of the machine and add water. Here I’d like to make a suggestion. Suppose you lathered up your hair then toweled it dry. Yuck. All that soap is still in there and will quickly make you feel groady. Same difference in your carpets. Though you can’t see it, if you load your fibers up with detergent and don’t rinse it out your carpets, just like your hair, they will become sticky. And instead of attracting admiring glances, you’ll only attract crows and dirt.

Try this instead. Take just a few ounces of the detergent and put it in a quart spray bottle, fill the rest with the hottest water you can get. Here also is a chance to burn a few calories. Put on your eye pod and crank up some something funky like Chuck Berry’s Madeline or anything by Wayne Tupes. By the third song you should be in the groove. Spray the spots with your diluted prespray and do the Texas two step on those spots. Agitation and a good aerobics burn. You’re crushing it.

You’ll need those chemicals to cook the spots for about 15 minutes. It’s a good idea to run the machine across the spots without spraying any water the first time. More agitation looser soil, better cleaning. Fill your rental unit with only hot, hot, hot water. It will rinse out the soap and flush out the grit and grime. This prepray, prescrub step cannot be over emphasized. If you skimp on the dwell time or the heat or agitation your only hope, at it’s a slim one at best is to flush out the spot with gallons of water. Over wet the rug and you’ve mildew concerns and three day drying times-maybe longer. diamond burrs with metallic