Carpets are naturally a welcome addition to your home or workplace. They’re warm and soft and far more pleasant to walk on. But over time regular use can lead to dirt and dust build up that needs to be dealt with – vacuuming your carpets can help remove surface dust and dirt, but how clean is your carpet really?
Thick, plush and deep carpets are a welcome addition to any home, but they’re also a home to all sorts of germs, dirt and nastiness. Regular vacuuming can help combat the problem, but how do you get deep down into the fibres? Over time and with regular use, you’ll probably find a change in the overall colour and shade of your carpet and this will be an obvious sign that it needs some extra attention.
Dirty Carpets and a Smelly Home
With such a large surface area and a depth of fibres, the carpet in your home or workplace can not only be a breeding ground for germs, but also the source of unpleasant smells. If you often find your room with a damp or musty smell or other unpleasant odours, then you might be surprised to find that your carpet is the source of these smells.
Combating dirty and smelly carpets doesn’t have to be a chore use of deodorisers, sanitizers and detergents and a professional carpet cleaning machine can help give your carpets the deep clean that they deserve and remove those nasty stains, unwanted smells and leave them smelling and looking as fresh and clean as the day you bought them with the added bonus of leaving your room smelling fantastic.
Regular Carpet Cleaning to Reduce Allergies
When you think about all the potential germs, dirty, dust, dead skin cells, food fragments and insects that could be nesting in your carpet, it’s probably enough to make your skin crawl. If you have pets (especially cats and dogs) those germs could be even worse – with mud, faeces and other unpleasant matters being trampled into your house from the outside world.
It’s no surprise then that regular carpet cleaning and vacuuming is a good way to keep allergies at bay. Keeping the house clean and the carpet as free of build-up as possible can help prevent asthma, eczema and other unpleasant allergies that might come about as a result of contact with dust mites, dirt or other unpleasant germs.
Properly cleaned carpets act as a filter in your home and have been shown to improve air quality by trapping the allergy inducing dust in their fibres and removing them from the air you are breathing. But maintaining this effect requires regular (and thoroughly) carpet cleaning, vacuuming and washing that most people don’t carry out.
Facts You Don’t Want to Know About Carpet
- The Norovirus can live up to a month in a dirty carpet – especially worrying this time of year when over a million people have been struck down with the vomiting bug so far.
- Bacteria can live for up to 4 weeks in your carpet – so think twice before dropped food and sticking to the 10 second rule!
- As well as plaguing an untreated bed, bed bugs can also live in carpet fibres.
- On average, people shed just under 2 million flakes of skin an hour and most of that dead skin ends up in your carpet.
- Dust mites can often be found at home in carpets – happily nibbling on the flakes of skin you’ve dropped for their lunch!
- Fleas can live in carpets and dry carpets are a perfect home for the little ankle biting menace.
Things to Remember When Cleaning Carpet
It’s important to keep your carpet as clean as possible, but when washing a carpet, extraction and drying is almost as important as important as the actual cleaning itself. A wet, damp or moist carpet can be an even more tempting breeding ground for germs and can have the opposite effect to what you’re trying to achieve. Most professional cleaners recommend using a steam carpet cleaner to get the best results, but there are also ‘dry’ carpet cleaning machines that use ‘very low moisture’ technology to get the best results with minimal liquid and faster drying times.
Carpet cleaning machines don’t have to cost the earth but they can make a world of difference to your home, your hygiene and the colour of your carpet!