Sean's Carpet Care

The web provides a wealth of free information. You can learn everything you ever wanted to know about the next political candidate, your favorite celebrity, or how to take the best care of your carpet, and much more!

The question is what information is good information? I mean I am a professional carpet cleaner in Portland OR and I see the results of some of the FREE information spread throughout the web. When I say results I usually mean bad as in, “Wow, I wish you would have called me because I could have easily fixed this.” Not to be rude or hurt anyone’s feelings, but I want to help people take the best care of their environment.

To help people with the carpet cleaning maintenance needs I write these blogs and give suggestions.

You know I just found a great article, 10 Best Carpet Cleaning Tips which doesn’t just talk about how to remove stains from carpet, but has some great tips on how to SAFELY remove spots and stains from carpet.

Removing spots is not just about having a magic formula, but how to apply the solution or understanding when to use heat and when NOT to use heat.

This is a great article that really covers the tips to help you safely remove spots and stains.

Hope this information is helpful! Until next time…Sean

Is it time to have your carpets cleaned again? Are you thinking of Doing the Carpet Cleaning Yourself or hiring a professional carpet cleaner?  Finding a great carpet cleaner can be difficult at best. Often with my business, offering carpet cleaning in Portland OR, I hear customers talk about their past experiences with carpet cleaners receiving overwet carpets, rapidly re-soiling carpets, and less then desirable results. With some of the stories I have heard about other carpet cleaners I can understand why some people choose to rent a Rug Doctor carpet cleaning machine and go the route of Do It Yourself Carpet Cleaning.

Carpet Cleaning is Science

The truth about carpet cleaning…It’s not equipment alone that is required to provide the best results in carpet cleaning. Often, to impress new customers carpet cleaners talk about their powerful truck mounted carpet cleaning machines and how hot the machine gets the water. Having the proper tools is only part of the equation to provide the best carpet cleaning results. For example, if you buy the best cooking pans does that make you the best cook. You guessed it, not necessarily.

With carpet cleaning the tools do matter matter to a certain degree, but having a good understanding of carpet cleaning science and using this information provides the best results. To become a highly skilled carpet cleaner you must have a desire to continually learn about carpet cleaning. Usually training is achieved by taking classes through the IICRC. Combined with the right tools and proper education on carpet cleaning can yield great results.

Why Get The Carpet Cleaned?

Your home is your castle and spots can be very annoying and sometimes embarrassing. Part of good carpet cleaning is being able to remove those annoying spots.

The good news about carpet…It traps all of the pollutants so you don’t breathe them over and over. Cleaning your carpet is very healthy for you and your home environment.

The Secrets To Do It Yourself Carpet Cleaning

Now that we have talked a little bit about carpet cleaning experiences, equipment, and the benefits of clean carpet let’s move to the good stuff.

If you want to do your own carpet cleaning then I will help you out and offer a couple secrets to getting the best results from renting a carpet cleaning machine or buying a home carpet cleaner.

The reason for many problems with carpet cleaning is due to the cleaning process or lack of understanding of carpet cleaning. Four major complaints I hear about from new customers, although to me they are ‘clients’, is that the carpet rapidly re-soiled, the carpet was sticky, the carpet was wet for days, and none of the spots came out.

A common trick by many so called ‘professional’ carpet cleaners is to rinse the carpet with soap. The belief, while being incorrect, is that if you leave more soap in the carpet the carpet will be cleaner or you need tons of soap to get the carpet cleaner. There are two truths to getting carpet as clean as possible. The first truth: More is not necessarily better. More soap does not necessarily make the carpet cleaner. Using too much soap can just make it much harder to properly rinse the carpet. For example: Have you ever noticed that there is many more rinse cycles than cleaning cycles on your washing machine? So understanding that having tons of soap is not the best idea for clean carpet leads us to the second truth to clean carpet. The second truth: The secret to getting carpet as clean as possible is using the correct cleaning solution that will neutralize the spot or stain. Understanding what makes up the type of soil or stain in the carpet and using the correct solution to neutralize the soil or stain is the secret to getting the carpet as clean as possible.

The reason carpets can be left sticky after carpet cleaning is because there is a ton of soap residue left in the carpet. If the soap in the carpet is not properly rinsed out then carpet will be left sticky. Sticky carpet attracts more soil quickly!

Often, the reason many spots return after carpet cleaning is due to improper rinsing of the carpet. Many times carpet cleaners will clean an entire home as if they are in race to get to their next job. Quick cleaning only provides a light surface cleaning and very little water is used. Really there is not enough time and water used to rinse out the soil or the stain. A couple days later after cleaning many of the spots will return. The secret is to rinse out the carpet as thoroughly as possible.

The reason carpet is wet for days after cleaning is probably obvious…All the water wasn’t removed, Duh! Yes, the reason the carpet is wet for days is because the carpet cleaner did not take the time to properly extract the water. In addition to taking time to properly extract all of the water it is also a good idea to run a air mover, aka a fan over the carpet. Did you know…If your carpets are left really wet then there is a bunch of soil that is still left in the carpet.

Another problem that I hear complaints about with hiring a carpet cleaner is that none of the spots came out. The trick to removing all of the spots is using to correct sptting solution for the specific spot on the carpet. Did you know…Professional carpet cleaners do not carry one spotting solution that removes almost all types of spots and that I carry over 20 differnet types of cleaning and spotting solutions on my truck at any given time. So I find it strange how many of the over the counter spotting solutions available to consumers promise to remove almost anything in the carpet from one bottle. Amazing!

Tips to Help You Get The Best Results

So after reading this information and learning the secrets to get carpet as clean as possible you still want to try and clean the carpet yourself with a home carpet cleaner or carpet rental machine? Great! My first tip would be not to use too much soap. Only use as much soap as needed to get the carpet clean. For my second tip I would get the correct spotting solutions to treat the stains in your carpet. For my third tip I would receommend taking your time to rinse the carpet with water. Go slow and extract as much water as possible. Do not over wet the carpet. For my fourth and final tip I would vacuum the carpet first! Make sure the use proper vacuuming techniques and vacuum before starting to clean the carpet. Here is some good information on how to clean carpet stains

Use this information at your own risk. It is your responsibility to make sure the cleaning solutions and methods you use are safe for your carpet. If you have any questions please contact the manufacturer of your carpet.

Hope this information is helpful…..Thanks…Until next time….Sean

My company Sean’s Carpet Care has just received a new review from one of my customers that I provided Carpet Cleaning in Portland for.

“Sean has a great carpet cleaning machine & knows how to use it very professional & polite-our carpet in the house and motorhome looks great.”

Thank you very much Mr. Reitzenstein

You read the review and visit Mr. Reitzenstein’s business page at: http://www.merchantcircle.com/merchant/review/detail?id=1507737

Ink removal from carpet can be difficult even for a professional carpet cleaner. On the internet there are many ink removal tips. Many of the tips for removing ink from carpet involves using alcohol. The problem with using alcohol to remove ink is that if the alcohol is used improperly it will spread the ink and make the stain worse.

For ink removal it may be best to call a professional carpet cleaner.

Hope this information helps….Thank you…Carpet Cleaning in Portland

I just received another great client review for my business Carpet Cleaning in Portland. This is a review from a proven top-producing Vancouver WA Realtor in Clark County, and the #1 un-assisted Coldwell Banker BSSP Realtor for SW Washington (2008, 2009, 2010)

Plus, he is a great guy to work with!

Yea! I just received a great review from one of my new clients on Angie’s List that I provided Carpet Cleaning in Portland for:

“Sean was a pleasure to deal with. Gave me a discount for  being an Angie’s list customer. We needed 2 very dirty bedroom floors cleaned on a home we just purchased which had been a foreclosure and was bank owned. Since we planned on eventually re-doing the rooms with wood flooring, we only needed clean carpet to live with for now, and Sean provided quick and very good service. We highly recommend him.”

Elke P. Portland, OR

Thank you! Sean

Do you have a terrible red stain on your carpet or upholstery? Do you know that incorrectly treating a red stain on the carpet can set it permanently? Learn from the owner of the Best Carpet Cleaning in Portland when to practice Do It Yourself Red Stain Removal and when to call a professional carpet cleaner.

The web is a valuable resource for finding information, but when it comes to red stain removal you have to be careful where you receive information from. With this article I am going to  help you understand the different types of red stains and which ones you can treat yourself and the ones you need to call a carpet cleaner to remove.

Before treating any type of red stain on the carpet or upholstery you need to know what created the stain. For example: Did the stain come from red wine, Kool-Aid, Crystal Light, a candle, or something else? Using the incorrect treatment for red stain removal can cause an easy to remove stain to become permanent.

Just a Note: As a professional carpet cleaner I am amazed at the variety of spot removal solutions available to consumers that promise to remove almost everything all in one bottle! As a professional carpet cleaner there is not one specific spot cleaner that does everything. Personally, I carry about 30 different cleaners on my carpet cleaning truck daily!

Is The Stain From A Natural Or Synthetic Dye?

Surprise! Some of the dyes in stains are synthetic, natural, or a combination of both. Treating a synthetic stain like a natural stain can cause it to become permanent. I get calls everyday in desperation about removing a stain only to realize that if the consumer would have called me first I could have removed the stain. Most red stains in our world today are comprised of synthetic dyes. Hint: As professional carpet cleaners we rarely use products with the word “Oxygen” in the name to remove stains. Adding “Oxygen” to a synthetic stain will usually cause it to become permanent.

Causes of Red Stains:

Red Wine - With removing red wine stains from carpet it is important to understand what type of wine it is. Ok…Don’t get offended, but I must ask if the wine was from from a bottle or a box? There is a big difference to red wine stain removal for wine from a bottle and wine from a box. Let me explain…Wine from a box has a synthetic dye and wine from the bottle has a natural dye. Removing red wine stains from carpet using the incorrect procedure can cause the stain to become permanent.

Kool Aid or Crystal Light – Usually stains from these products are synthetic reds. Like wine from a box.

Candle Wax- Candle wax can be made from various types of dyes and can be hard to remove. WARNING: There are many tips on how to remove wax from carpet on the web, but if you use an iron to remove colored candle wax, such as red, purple, etc. you are taking a change of setting the color. The wax is easy to remove but if done with a steaming iron the color will stay. Most carpet is post dyed and the dye is set in the carpet with heat to make it stick to dye sites. So when you add heat to a colored dye stain incorrectly you are actually setting the stain. For colored wax stains it is best to call a professional carpet cleaner.

Cleaning Doesn’t Always Fix Stains

Often with red stains cleaning will not remove them. Sometimes my clients are shocked when I walk in with a spotting bottle, the correct bottle, and remove their red wine stain without unloading anything in the truck. The solution is not cleaning the stain but modifying the chemistry of a stain to make it disappear.

Chemistry Rules…Once I spilled transmission fluid in the driveway, so I stopped to think, “What is the pH of the transmission fluid?” Then I realized that my tile cleaning solution would clean it right up! See the Tile Cleaner has the right pH to neutralize the oil and it a degreaser as well. Hiring a carpet cleaner with expert knowledge of cleaning chemistry is key to exceptional spot removal.

What Does All Of This Mean?

Ok, you now have some knowledge about what red stains are comprised of and what not to do with some stains. So lets put this all together. Red stains can be tough to remove even for professional carpet cleaners. If red stains are treated improperly then they can be almost impossible to remove later. Then your next option is carpet repair or spot dying (if possible). More on carpet repair in a future article.

So if you have a red stain and want to treat the best thing to do is to follow some simple Stain Removal Tips provided by the Carpet and Rug Institute CRI.

Stain removal Tips

1. Blot – Do not rub the area and instead blot the spill with a white towel or non printed paper towels.

2. Pretest - Test any spotter in a inconspicuous area first to make sure the solution will not damage the fibers or remove color.

3. Apply Spotter - Put the spotter into a towel. Do not spray the spotter into the carpet. Put a small amount of spotter on a towel and blot the area. Be patient and work the spotting inward to decrease the chance of the spill growing.

4. Rinse - After you no longer see any transfer of the spill into the towel and the spot is gone you need to rinse the area with cold water. Spotters will usually leave a residue in the carpet and if not completely removed will attract soil.

Checkout CRI’s  Spot and Stain Removal Guide This guide has useful tips for Residential Customers and Spot Remover Section.

Remember if you are not sure if a specific spotting solution is safe for your carpet, please your carpet manufacturer.

I hope this information is helpful…Please let me know if you have any questions…Until Next Time….Sean

I was shocked from the Google Slap. Like many folks on the web my small business website disappeared. I searched and couldn’t find my webpage in the Google search results anywhere. I searched and searched to figure out what happened to my website for Carpet Cleaning in Portland. Then I found out that Google had another change to their algorithm called the Farmer update.

I was like…”I’m not a farmer i’m a carpet cleaner!”

My phone went quiet and work slowed down. I had to postpone my trip to Hawaii. Damm!

I am not some scammer…I am just a small time carpet cleaner trying to survive.

The truth…I never did any intentional farming or bought any links. I always tried to write original content and get legitimate links.

How I Goofed and Was Seen As A Farmer

I wanted to move farther up page one with my website. I thought the best way to do this was to update my on-page SEO. It worked and I quickly started climbing up page one. My Places listing climbed up and up the page also. I was getting tons of traffic via phone calls and work. Very Cool, Right? Hey, let’s go to Hawaii!!

We’ll shortly it all ended!

What Happened, I Now Know

Honestly, I made duplicates of my original pages and renamed them without changing the content or internal links. The only thing I changed on the duplicate pages was some of the on-page SEO, i.e. tittles, h1 tags, etc.. I left the original pages on my server to keep their rank until the newly re-named better SEO’d pages found their own ranking. Mistake!!! About a week or two later Google launched their Farmer update and my index page disappeared.

I now know that my page never disappeared, but it was sent out to some other universe. Ok, what really happened is when a user typed in Google keywords that my site was optimized for Google would basically hide my website from the search results. The page was still there, but invisible to searchers. If I typed my domain name directly into Google the page was there, but again not in the search results.

My Previous Page Click See Current Page

The page above (only images) is the one that got hit by Google’s Farmer update. The problem is the internal links. Again, this page was duplicated several times with the SAME links. Having the same links made me appear to be a farmer.

My Page is Back on Google!!!!

My index webpage is finally appearing in the google search results. Click here to see the changes I made

Notice the links I wanted to keep at the top of the page, as part of “My mission” statement, point at the original pages with different anchor text. I removed the links in the middle and the bottom of the page, for now.

Keys to Getting Re-Indexed

1. Remove Duplicate Content Pages with Internal Linking

2. Remove the links Google Doesn’t Approve

My page is currently at the top of Page 3 on Google for the number one keyword in my business. Now it’s time to build some more links.

I almost re-built an entire new website to get over this problem.

Thank fully I am back! Hope this info helps someone else…Aloha…Sean

Have you thought about buying new carpet recently? I know that it can be tough to look down at your carpet sometimes. Does it make you feel like you don’t take the best care of your home?  Sometimes when I meet new clients that call my company for Carpet Cleaning in Portland and I see their homes and I never judge. I always mention that I am there to clean and not to judge.

Don’t feel bad! You know…With some types of carpet you can clean it until you feel like your arms are going to fall off and it will still look like it’s dirty! Often, people consider the reason their carpets look dirty after cleaning is due to wear.

Do you know…That what most people consider as wear in their carpet is actually damage. Wear is a legal term that addresses fiber loss. Some types of fiber don’t actually wear and what you are looking at is most likely damage. I hear about wear everyday and educate my clients on the difference between wear and damage.

When searching for the type of carpet that will work best for your situation you should consult a good Carpet Buying Guide. As a professional carpet cleaner I meet clients with all types of carpet fibers. Carpet fibers are generally comprised of wool, nylon, polyester, olefin, and a few new ones. Each of these fibers can have different weaves like Frieze, Berber, Loop Pile, cut loop, and many others.

My favorite type of carpet fiber is nylon. But choosing a fiber for your next carpet does depend on the type of traffic that will run running across it on a daily basis.

Before choosing carpet I would recommend looking at StainMaster’s Carpet Buying Guide. When choosing new carpet you will learn about carpet styles & construction, importance of padding, carpet installation, and more!

So before looking at buying new carpet do some research and pick the best fiber and style to suit your needs. TIP: After getting your carpet installed make sure to read the warranty information and make to sure to note the recommended cleaning frequency. You definitely want to maintain your new carpet warranty.

I hope this information is helpful! Until next time take care….Sean

P.S. Please use this info on your blogs or where ever just please hit me with a trackback. Thanks!

Your home is your castle. When you own a castle you need to make sure you perform regular and proper maintenance. One of the goals with my website it help people learn how to take care of their home environment. Often, i’ve noticed that there are a lot of maintenance tasks that get over looked.

With owning a home you need to make sure to regularly clean the heating filters, carpets, hardwood floors, tile & grout, and counter tops. One other important maintenance tip is to take care of your lawn. One major problem with lawns that leaves homeowners at a loss for answers is How to Identify and Control Snow Mold Lawn Fungus. Check out the website link above for the answer on how to identify the mold and treat it yourself.

For more information on how to take the best care of your indoor environment, please check out my website. Hope this info helps…..Sean

My website: Carpet Cleaning Portland