Commercial carpet cleaning is an important part of maintaining a building. However, persons concerned with the quality of their indoor environment are asking about healthy ways to clean a commercial carpet. Today, there are ways to clean a commercial carpet and actually enhance the indoor air quality.
Commercial carpets usually suffer more abuse than residential carpeting. Commercial buildings are located near busy roads, large parking lots and perhaps other sources of dirty air. This dirt works its way into the building. Commercial carpets are exposed to much higher levels of foot traffic than a home. These carpets are often located in parts of building that are attached to a warehouse, laboratory, assembly plant, or some other workspace. Many commercial locations have lunchrooms, so cooking grease and food spills occur just like in a home. Household pets and children are about the only “residential problems” missed from most commercial environments (but not all).
Commercial carpets are not usually cleaned as well as residential carpets. This is because there are not as many good carpet cleaners available to perform quality commercial carpet cleaning. Most commercial carpeting is being cleaned by housekeeping departments or janitorial contractors. In-house departments and janitorial contractors seldom have top of the line hot water extraction equipment. (A truck-mounted carpet-cleaning machine costs between $40K and $55K). Not many businesses take their cleaning seriously enough to make this type of in-house purchase.
The majority of commercial carpets are now being rotary cleaned (cotton spin pads on an old fashioned shampoo machine) with residue producing dry chemicals, or by some other dry-chemical system. These carpet-cleaning methods are only brushing across the top surface of the fibers and are purposely leaving the fibers coated in chemical residue that encapsulates the soil particles. These chemicals are designed to turn to dust, powder or crystals that will be vacuumed away. The problem is that some of this dry chemical residue also becomes airborne and it pollutes the indoor air.
Sometimes commercial carpets are cleaned with a truck mounted “steam” machine or by a portable water extraction tool. This is a huge improvement over the dry chemical air polluting methods. While these water extraction systems clean deeper and leave very little cleaning chemical residue, there is a wide variance in the performance of the competing water extraction machinery.
In recent years the EPA has been stressing the important role that hot water can play in sanitizing. As bacteria continue to become immune to cleaning chemistry, the use of hot water is more important than ever. Some of the manufacturers of hot water carpet cleaning machines are now selling truck mounted cleaning plants that do deliver hot water to the carpet and textile cleaning wands. Water that is hot enough to kill bacteria, dust mites and other contaminates. This means that a trained cleaning technician with the right hot water extraction equipment can deep clean, kill bacteria and leave little or no chemical residue behind, making the indoor environment better. In short, there is nothing more natural than hot water for total cleaning and the heat will kill bacteria.
