[lewis_webb]

Hi Guys,

As said on here before Im very new to carpet cleaning and had some problems with a low profile commercial carpet yesterday. I started and all was well, carpet was coming up really good. I was doing it in stages but when I came to the final stage it started to go horribly wrong.

It was the entrance and at first glance I just thought it was heavily soiled, I was vacumming it with my sebo and the colour was coming out great straight away, was looking quite patchy but thought it would probably be fine once I carried out the clean. Anyway it seemed to be makes lots of difference just vacuuming, so I just carried on, the area was about 5m x 6m and I probably spent about an hour just vacuuming it. It was until I was nearly finished that I notice that the red part of the carpet was actually coming away and thats what I had been vacummiung for the last hour!

I was LM  cleaning so gave it a quick prespray and then a bonnet clean however this did not really change anything apart from make the areas that were not brown and patchy come up really clean. I tried taking a photo with my phone but it hasnt come out particulary great. After I finished i tried resetting the pile and my brush was covered in the red part of the carpet.

Any idea why this happened? What could be the cause of the brown marks? Could it have been a previous bad clean or could the carpet have been damaged by sunlight as the rest of the carpet was fine and there was no windows there.

Sorry for the long post
Cheers

[Mark Lawrence]

Explain to them that all you did was vacuum and that the carpet is faulty (for whatever reason). I would expect to still be paid - its there problem tbh. I would tell them either to go to the manufacturer- or find out what theymay have done to cause the issue.

Mark

[Jamie Pearson]

What were you using to clean with?

Are the light patches where face fibre has come out?

[Buckland]

Not trying to be flippant but thatlooks like it needs a bloody good clean - difficult to see from the piccy - dont know whare you are but you need to get another pair of eyes on it - older eyes possibly with some experience - we all have to start somewhere but this sound really like lack of experience in the survey and methods and all important job of conditioning the expectations of the client

We all learn something every day - the most important thing to do when you first see a job is get down and dirty with the beast, inspect it carefully with your hands and eyes - fingernails, scraper, rub, brush, test with small patch of prespray, whatever it takes to see what the problem is - if the fibres are coming away with a vacuum its either the carpet (tiles?) are breaking down or something has been added in terms of something that was not part of the original installation

[clinton]

You mean it looked patchy?i have a feeling it might be salt that has been put down outside and has been troden in mate so explain that to them ;)I ckleaned an area for another cleaner who had a similar problem as i remember.

[Stu.Clem]

dont worry!! its so counter productive its only a carpet and unless you have cleaned it with caustic soda or some other stupidly non professioanal  fluid (as some CCs out there do) you have done nothing wrong in cleaning it - probably a faulty batch or badly abused (salt / corrosive cross contamination etc) batch of carpet. Out of 14 gazillion carpets out there they cant all be perfectly manufactured.  Tell then you have followed all correct procedures -  if you really can clean dye out that easily then please get round my area and perform your miracles - fake tan waterproof mascara hair dye blah blah blah - LOL

All the best

Stu

[John Kelly]

Probably salt damage. If you've had icy weather in that area and they've put salt down outside it is likely to have been tread into the carpet causing the damage evident.

[nevil]

Only seen something like it once. It was in a conservatory and I think the fibres were damaged due to the sun shining on them which seemed to have made them very brittle. On close inspection, even gently scraping the carpet with finger nails produced a load of blue dusty carpet fibre. If your troubles are because of the same issue, I don't think there is much you can do other than explain the situation to the customer.

[Jim_77]

I agree with you, your pictures are terrible

I can't see if it is the same types of carpet I've seen this happen to, but have experienced this problem myself.

It's always been with polyprop carpet.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think polyprop is "solution" dyed, i.e. the liquid polyprop is mixed with a liquid dye to obtain the right colour when it sets.

The best explanation I could find was the different dyes have different effects on the material properties of the carpet fibre - in this case the red is making it less durable, and it is simply breaking up and wearing away at a noticeably faster rate than the other colour in the carpet.

Doesn't have to be direct sunlight, could be another cause.  If it's in an entrance way then the salt option looks plausible, partly due to alkalinity and partly due to extreme abrasion/ wear underfoot.

I too have been horrified by the red fuzz collecting round my rotary brush, on my wand, etc etc... but in the worst case of this happening it was my first!  I didn't know what it was and didn't really see it before starting the clean.  Luckily, with a professional explanation, the customer was satisfied that I hadn't done anything wrong as such.  I've seen a few other minor instances of it since, and always pre-qualified... it's just part of the learning curve