Maybe I'm old school. I thought that encap was used on commercial carpet tiles where they loosened the soil and put a polymer coating round the dirt. When that dried then it was removed with a vacuum cleaner with a beating brush. I use encap where needed with a Cimex so it's not as though I am totally against encapping.
Then hey ho some bright spark says get an oreck orbiter as a little rotary and lets do a bit of this in customers homes. Be in there quick and out and with the brighteners on the carpet it looks fantastic. Add a bit of lemon smell and the customers will go wild on the speed at which I can "clean" and get a result. Hey my hourly rate goes up and I can always say that the customers like the quick drying times and the carpets look great.
Then try it on minging carpets and it struggles because even on a commercial carpet that has really heavy footfall the soiling is so great that it cannot be cleaned this way as the carpet is full of dirt and it just cannot be lifted out. So you need to extract that out with a hot water extraction machine. So now on a bad EOT it wont cut the mustard.
So then more bright sparks try it on upholstery and get great results, and some now do a combination of HWE on the front and then shortcut the job by putting encap on the rear of the settee.
It's all about what you want to do in the carpet and upholstery cleaning business but to me there is a right and a wrong way. The suppliers supply the products for the correct use and as Simon says you are risking it. Paul Pearce et al would never advocate encapping upholstery in their training sessions.
Just to finish my rant.............went to price up an EOT. Big house and she has to have a receipt for the landlord to show that she has had the carpets cleaned. I discounted the price as it would be empty from £369 to £300 as with a truckmount I could still make it pay. She looked at me and said that all she wanted was the receipt and wasn't bothered about the clean. So maybe that's the next step for some guys - just a receipt and no clean!!!!
Tony,
I agree with every single word of that. And, it is not now, nor will it ever be 'old school' to be a 'professional.'
It was only ever a matter of time before before encap would be used beyond the circumstances it was designed for and low and behold, Oreck Orbiter and encap everything, even domestic carpets and to defend it claim that it is brilliant, my customers love it, never had any complaints blah blah blah!
And now, just as inevitably, encap is creeping onto upholstered fabrics, for which it most definitely was not designed and, because it does such a great job, just dry extract it and leave all of those polymers on it for children to ingest at their leisure. Even if you wet extract it, there is no escaping the fact that it wasn't designed for fabrics and therefore shouldn't be used on fabrics....full stop.
But you've got to wonder why? There are loads of fantastic fabric cleaning products out there that were designed for the job, so why use anything else? And if you can't get fabrics clean by any other means then should you really be cleaning fabrics at all?
Just expressing my opinion btw.
Simon
