Clean It Up
UK Floor Cleaning Forum => Carpet Cleaning Forum => Topic started by: justin 88 on September 04, 2011, 09:20:25 am
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hi all,
i have an airflex 600 psi turbo but have never used heat. i actually got told on a training session by the instructor heat is not important (i know people on here disagree but when your new and starting out, listening to an experienced instructor say "save yourself £600 quid on a heater as it makes no diffrence" was a godsend!!
anyway, after a couple of years now am thinking it could help? any feed back would be appreciated?
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I think instructors say heat doesn't matter as they are not referring to hot but warm water, if all you have is warm water don't bother it makes no difference than using cold..... but HOT water makes a big difference to bad carpets.
' hot' means not being able to touch the QC
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spag bol dried on a plate,
run one under a cold tap and one under a hot tap. time each one til its clean.
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Hi Guys
Heat is a very important part of the cleaning process for lot's of reasons.
Most people who claim it is not have no technical qualifications.
Cheers
Doug
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Hi Guys
Heat is a very important part of the cleaning process for lot's of reasons.
Most people who claim it is not have no technical qualifications.
Cheers
Doug
I think those people have plenty technical knowledge. I think it more a case of saying what sells certain machines best.
The debate is useless its just plain common sense.
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It simple for me, I like hot water for cleaning carpets.
With oven cleaning, if I put the customer's oven racks in my dip tank without turning the heat on, the DON'T come up clean, what-so-ever.
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Hello Doug
I'm sorry but I must disagree
I am sure that all new (& re-trained) carpet cleaners are taught the importance of C.H.A.T?
You need a balance between all four to complete the cleaning process regardless of what is being cleaned.
However, they are also taught that if one is taken away then the other componants must be compensated for elsewhere, more agitation, longer dwell time or a chemical that is not dependant upon one or more of the 4 elements.
Microsplitters need no time or significant heat but do need agitation.
Nemisis, M Power although work better in a warm pre-spray are not dependant upon heat or heavy agitation BUT do need a longer dwell time than many others.
None of our ready made spotting products say "must be used hot" however most of them work extremly well without heat, very little dwell time.
Household bleach, limescale removers, anti-bacterial sprays etc do not require any sort of heat to work but they do. I'm sure that Jeyes know what they are doing, It is all about chemistry & how chemists can make the impossible possible.
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Hello Doug
I'm sorry but I must disagree
I am sure that all new (& re-trained) carpet cleaners are taught the importance of C.H.A.T?
You need a balance between all four to complete the cleaning process regardless of what is being cleaned.
However, they are also taught that if one is taken away then the other componants must be compensated for elsewhere, more agitation, longer dwell time or a chemical that is not dependant upon one or more of the 4 elements.
Microsplitters need no time or significant heat but do need agitation.
Nemisis, M Power although work better in a warm pre-spray are not dependant upon heat or heavy agitation BUT do need a longer dwell time than many others.
None of our ready made spotting products say "must be used hot" however most of them work extremly well without heat, very little dwell time.
Household bleach, limescale removers, anti-bacterial sprays etc do not require any sort of heat to work but they do. I'm sure that Jeyes know what they are doing, It is all about chemistry & how chemists can make the impossible possible.
Well said that man!
But i still say heat is a must!
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Colin, Jeyes do know alot about chemical manufacturing but they also know alot about marketing. How much would they sell if they told the consumer to.... 'pour it into a pan and warm it up to make it work better' they have to sell ready-to-use products..... so you can't really use them as an example.
I could use Hotpoint or Mielle as an example, they make washing machines that have a built in heater because they know that heat cleans better..... but this is also an invalid comparison
heat makes cleaning easier you can do without it but why make thing hard for yourself. You need to ask..... is increasing the rest of the pie a good idea to compensate for the lack of heat?.
more agitation - can cause pile damage...
more chemical - can be a problem and is using more chemical the direction we want to travel in an ever increasing green, chemical free world....
more time - we don't want our extra chemical sitting on the carpet or fibres longer than needed the longer its there the more chance of it creating problems.....
heat could be the safest part of the cleaning pie but its given a bad reputation by some individual & companies
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Don't they say that for each 10 degree drop you go below 60 degrees, you lose a massive percentage of cleaning capability?
Gimme heat!
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Hi Mike & thank you
The main points that I was trying to make is that things have changed & moved on. In the "good old days" heat was everything & helped make inadequate products work better.
It is still the case with many old fashioned cleaning products now (regardless of industry).
Window cleaning used to be a nice hot bucket of something foamy & a scrub, nowadays most seem to have cold pure water systems.
My washing machine has no heater & is cold feed only but I don't use a traditional heat Dependant cleaning agent.
When I ran the Tm a by product of that was heat & an awful lot of it. At the time it was a necessity, however (& thank goodness) lots has changed & made this industry better. Yes there are still a lot of detergent cleaners on the market that all require some form of heat, albeit in the tank or as a pre-spray, however many suppliers are showing massive advances in detergent free products, phosphate free, non toxic, non carcinogenic, all of which USED to be a must in most cleaning agents in order that they may work.
Many people seem to forget that you are not "cleaning" with your extraction machine. Nowadays it is the cleaning solution that does most of the "cleaning" & that nice shiny, expensive machine that we have sitting outside is a "rinsing" tool.
Like a standard washing machine (hate that analogy but it seems to work) with its detergent in the ball it does all the cleaning with warm water, it then dumps it all so that it can complete a rinse cycle, which will be done with cold water (cost a bomb if they rinsed with hot water!)
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It is so easy is nt it too convince house wives that heat is not essential after all they all know how effective washing clothes and dishes in cold water really is.
One of the guys that started me off in business tried to convince me that you could clean carpets with cold water. You can but no where to the same standards as using hot. He was a complete numpty and could not be told any different. Luckily I did pay attention to my chemistry teachers and have for a long time realised the importance of heat. It is a bit like the argumet that less powerful machines can clean as well as others. Let the cold water boys carry on.
Peter
www.carpetcleaningnewport.com (http://www.carpetcleaningnewport.com)
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Hi Mike & thank you
The main points that I was trying to make is that things have changed & moved on. In the "good old days" heat was everything & helped make inadequate products work better.
It is still the case with many old fashioned cleaning products now (regardless of industry).
Window cleaning used to be a nice hot bucket of something foamy & a scrub, nowadays most seem to have cold pure water systems.
My washing machine has no heater & is cold feed only but I don't use a traditional heat Dependant cleaning agent.
When I ran the Tm a by product of that was heat & an awful lot of it. At the time it was a necessity, however (& thank goodness) lots has changed & made this industry better. Yes there are still a lot of detergent cleaners on the market that all require some form of heat, albeit in the tank or as a pre-spray, however many suppliers are showing massive advances in detergent free products, phosphate free, non toxic, non carcinogenic, all of which USED to be a must in most cleaning agents in order that they may work.
Many people seem to forget that you are not "cleaning" with your extraction machine. Nowadays it is the cleaning solution that does most of the "cleaning" & that nice shiny, expensive machine that we have sitting outside is a "rinsing" tool.
Like a standard washing machine (hate that analogy but it seems to work) with its detergent in the ball it does all the cleaning with warm water, it then dumps it all so that it can complete a rinse cycle, which will be done with cold water (cost a bomb if they rinsed with hot water!)
yes it would cost a bomb, but thats not the discussion.
heat all the way with me. don't believe the hype on cold water products and modern chems, its just marketing bolockxxx like mike said
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Don't know where I found this info now and believe me I have looked for it again and again - pretty sure I came across it in some US government-funded study of carpet cleaning methods produced by a university (As these figures have come from an American university scientific paper I have left them in Farenheit)
Anyway the crux of it was:
"It is a scientific fact that the hotter the water the better the clean. For every 18 degrees Fahrenheit rise in temperature above 118 degrees Fahrenheit, chemical activity doubles. This continues until you reach a temperature of approximately 250 degrees Fahrenheit" (121 degrees Celsius)
That may apply purely to old school high alkaline chems but I believe this and will continue to use them (old school chems and high heat) where appropriate and as I say for me I have proved over and over again, day in day out, that high heat works - end of - as far as I am concerned.
Well almost - the other factor for me is having a powerful enough tm machine to give you the confidence that you can rinse and rinse and rinse and rinse again and again BUT STILL recover any rinse water laid down on the carpet - NOW that pre-supposes that you have a powerful motor driving an industrial vacuum blower (sutorbilt/tuthill/roots). As it so happens a major by-product of that motor driving that blower is plenty of heat - so why not use it...
I rest my case m'lud!
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Hi Guys
As someone who worked as a chemist for 8 years I can say that heat makes cleaning more effective.
CHAT is just a simplified schematic, it is not proportional, certainly not in a way that can be quantified.
Hotter molecules have more energy, will have more collisions, more reactions, therefore faster rates of reaction.
Heat will also soften fats, oils etc thereby increasing surface area, more collisions, more reactions etc.
The surace tension of water is reduced with higher temperatures allowing greater penetration, more collisions etc
Could go on.
Cheers
Doug
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thanks all, will get a heater.will the magma heater make a difference, i.e will the water get hot enough?
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Hi Derek
I think that I may sound as though I am coming across as a "cold water freak"?
I like heat, I use heated water for most of my pre-sprays, I know that some like Nemisis & M Power don't NEED them but it does tend to make the chemical process better. Having said that you can still achieve the same results even when the pre-spray has gone cold.
Since my Tm days I've not used heat once in the machine's tank.
I can understand sceptics as using cold even to rinse does not sound right, for years I was told "heat all the way", but things change. Some still love heat, others don't, it really doesn't matter how you achieve the result so long as it's a good one & carried out safely.
Doug
How long were you a chemist? That's quite an achievement, are you able to still carry letters after your name?
Sadly back in the late 80's I didn't make the grade as a qualified chemist at Glaxo & ended up as a lab tech which gave me years of insight into areas I never knew existed, bit monotonous at times but the science boffins were great fun.
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i'm not saying you can't get good results from cold water. but it takes longer, i don't have a dwell time. my dwell time is my agitation time, spray hot, agitate and rinse hot, far quicker. same results but far quicker. oh and did i say that hot water makes the job a lot quicker. ;D
it does ya know.
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how much difference does spraying hot make? i'd have thought by the time the solution hits the carpet from being tiny particles it's lost almost all it's heat.
also the rinse being hot is mainly for rinsing. i'd have thought by this time the carpets should be clean as all the dirt loose so heat shouldn't make much difference except on maybe realy mingers where the solution isn't able to do it's job fully as just too much dirt to break down.
when clenaing cups i wash with hot as yes it does work but when rinsing i leave a cold tap running to rinse the loose dirt off. what peopel are talking about is not hot spraying but buying a £600 heater to be able to hot rinse which seems a bit more pointless. if heat works i'd have thought it should only be needed when spraying the solution which doesn't require an expensive machine just free hot water from the customers tap.
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how much difference does spraying hot make? i'd have thought by the time the solution hits the carpet from being tiny particles it's lost almost all it's heat.
also the rinse being hot is mainly for rinsing. i'd have thought by this time the carpets should be clean as all the dirt loose so heat shouldn't make much difference except on maybe realy mingers where the solution isn't able to do it's job fully as just too much dirt to break down.
That's cleared that one up then ::)
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Hi Easter Bunny
You may be supprised.
When you mix up your preferred pre-spray solution with warm, hot or very hot water it only has about 4ft to travel before it hits the carpet & it will hit it at the same temperature as is in the sprayer.
Yes it will cool quickly but it has already started doing its job.
On occasion I use Blitz (high ph cleaner that needs very hot water to work), I spray it VERY hot & cold rinse at the end. The results are exactly the same whilst using my Tm or portable so cold rinsing has not slowed me down at all.
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I'm greedy. I want heat, flow, pressure, chemical, agitation and lots of suck. Why settle for anything less. ;D
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in winter when i'm spraying carpets with the hrdra force you can see the heat coming off the carpet, hydra force is best for hot prespray and allthough it cools, if you touch the carpet even a minute aftyer the prespray has been put down the carpet is still very warm.
like i said, i'm not knocking cold water cleaners, but did i mention heat is quicker.
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will give it a try with hot pre-spray but i feel what derek just said was a bit of an exaggeration. you must be using boiling hot water derek for it to still be hot a minute after spraying down.
i'm going to do a test. i'll spray fairy on 2 plates with dried tea on them. one bottle with hot fairy, another with cold fairy. will test to see if there any noticeable difference.
still though then we're only talking about prespray hot, would this suggest hot rinse is kind of pointless unless filthy? for hot prespay you don't need anything more then a kettle
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hot rinse is again about speed. you prespray a carpet, (hot) you agitate that carpet, the carpet is now clean and needs rinsing, cold water would be fine but, how many times do you rinse a carpet and theres that stain you missed and end up going over it a few times with the wand? again hot rinse to the rescue. ;D
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good point. well you convinced me to try heat a bit more often see if it speeds things up a bit. suppose it'll also help with dry times and does look better when customer sees the heat coming out from the wand. feel i'll prob go back to without it though as from what i remember it seemed to take longer to wait for very hot water from the taps and also it's another item to get from the van, to plug another inline hose, wait for it to heat etc.
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i'd probably say portable is not much difference in speed, between hot and cold, but i won't cos ive never used one so wouldn't know. i'll let the porty guys answer that one.
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good point. well you convinced me to try heat a bit more often see if it speeds things up a bit. suppose it'll also help with dry times and does look better when customer sees the heat coming out from the wand. feel i'll prob go back to without it though as from what i remember it seemed to take longer to wait for very hot water from the taps and also it's another item to get from the van, to plug another inline hose, wait for it to heat etc.
You're convinced, but you're not.
That's cleared that up then.
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you lost on the few sentences i wrote? i said he (derek west in case you forgot) has convinced me to try it (using heat when cleaning in case you forgot) again, but i feel i wont last. that's shorter for you so you should get it now :D