First, a naming problem. Steam cleaning is not steam. It is the common name for hot water extraction: hot water is sprayed into the carpet and then vacuumed back out.
The appeal is intuitive. Hot water sounds like it must be sanitising, and people like the idea of heat killing bacteria in the fiber. But a cleaning product that genuinely works kills the bacteria on its own. A good deal of the industry leans on hot water to make up for what its product is not doing.
Low moisture liquid dry cleaning takes the other route. A solution strips and encapsulates the soil, which is then lifted out using very little water.
What we use for most jobs
Also called steam cleaning
Oversaturation is the biggest complaint in professional carpet cleaning, and the most expensive one. One customer described walking across her carpet after a professional cleaning and watching water come up between her toes.
When carpet is soaked like that, the backing starts breaking down. So does the padding beneath it. That erases years from the usable life of a floor somebody paid thousands of dollars for.
Which produces a genuinely damaging piece of folk wisdom. People put off cleaning for years, telling themselves they are protecting the carpet, and by the time they call, the grit has already sanded permanent traffic lanes into the fiber. They avoided one risk and walked straight into a worse one.
With low moisture cleaning, none of that trade-off exists. Regular cleaning is what preserves carpet.
When the problem has genuinely reached the padding. Soil, bacteria and pollutants live at the surface level of carpet, not down in the pad, so the pad only needs flushing when something soaked through to it.
In practice that means a pet accident, or a spill that went all the way down. Around one job in ten. It also means an entryway or traffic lane where soil is ground in deep enough that a targeted acid rinse and extraction pass gives the better result.
Both methods are available here, which is the point. The method gets matched to the carpet in front of us, rather than the carpet being matched to the only machine on the truck.
Before
AfterOils were ground deep enough into this commercial entryway that hot water extraction was the correct call, not the usual liquid dry cleaning. A full color restore rather than a surface sweep.
Describe it on the phone and you will get an honest answer, including if the answer is that it does not need cleaning yet.
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Whichever way is easiest for you. Free estimates, and no hidden fees.
