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Professional carpet cleaning

618 views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  ASusan 
#1 ·
I am moving into a rental house next week that has a lot of wall to wall carpeting. Not my first choice of flooring but thankfully the carpet is soft and clean feeling and white, and we have been through many rentals recently and are happy to have this one. The current tenant has 2 indoor cats- so there is probably a fair am't of cat fur- though I explicitly asked her about if they ever had fleas and she thankfully said no. Anyway- the owner said that when a tenant moves out they have the carpets professionally cleaned for the next tenants, which is great. But I am worried about the smell, risidual chemical types of things that could come from a carpet clenaing. I ahve a 17 month old who is on the floor all the time.

Should I ask them to steam clean the carpets but not use the product? Woudl that still do a decent job of cleaning? Are there no toxic non chemical nice smelling gentle products they could use? I could even buy the product and leave it at the house for them to use if there were.

thanks for any suggestions- we have been through a rough time this year of renting bad houses and moving al ot- we are really ready to settle into a nice place and want to make sure it doesn't smell chemically or weird or feel toxic when we move in!

The other option is I just vacuum it myself and forgo the cleaning but I like the idea of them steam cleaning it for sure- just maybe not the product they would use.
 
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#2 ·
I just looked int oit more and confirmed that I do not wnat them to clean the whole carpets with toxic stuff. So the options i see are either buying an organic product and iving it to them to use, or asking them to steam clean the carpets with just water and no product. thoughts?
 
#3 ·
I had my carpets professionally cleaned with just hot water. Their equipment was capable of getting the water to a much higher temperature than anything I could have done with a rental unit, PLUS, the extraction power of their equipment pulled almost all of the water (and other crap) out of the carpet. They assured me that the heat would kill anything that was lurking to grow there. (It was a basement room, after a flood.) They were right. I was amazed at the job that just hot water and extraction did, and I never had a mold or mildew problem after that (with judicious use of a dehumidifier, because it was a basement, after all).

However, that experience was with a low-profile carpet without a pad (think the kind of carpet that would be in an office building), not something with a lot of plush, where the dirt is embedded deep down in the fibers and might require a product to loosen it before it is lifted out.

In one apartment I lived in, the plush carpet was professionally cleaned once a year, but it really only got the top layer clean, and after a week or 2, the carpet was looking grungy again because the dirt was so deeply imbedded. If you have plush carpet, where the dirt is deeply embedded, I would look into using a product rather than just hot water.
 
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