i have a real dirty job coming up. can a wet vac (its a good one) pick up dirt kind of like a portable extractor or am i kidding myself. would like to remove some of the crud before i ruin my pads. thanks bill y
Can you pre vac with a household vac first. I use a Dyson vac to do this. I suppose a wet vac would work as well maybe take a bit longer. But still should work.
I doubt it would do a very good job of extracting all by itself. My only experience with this though is in using my new shop vac to extract my basement 2 weeks ago when it flooded. It got the bulk of the water out, but left the carpet fairly wet... wet enough to take 1 day plus to dry.
If you had a tool called a water claw though it might work pretty well. I believe the small one is made so it can connect to a shop vac, but the larger ones might not. The small one wouldn't be practical to use on large areas. Maybe Joe knows, I think he has a water claw.
yeah, basically what i was thinking is a process like this
1. pre-spray
2. scrub
3. use the wet vac to try to extract some dirt
4. go over it again using pads
IMHO it's pointless... the reason HWE works to remove water is because there is so much water in there that it has something to grab onto when you are sucking on the carpet... now if you took a gallon of water... dumped it on the carpet area... then sucked it out w/ the shop vac... you'd remove a bit of soil... (it's esentaly how HWE works... spray on high pressure water using it to agitate the fiber, then extract that water.. some of the dirt will attach itself to the water as it's extracted...
that being said... i've used some shop vacs that have better suck then some of the cheaper portable HWE units... (neither compares to even a fairly cheap truck mount though)
i'd say... pre-vac VERY well... with a tradtidional upright vac... the beater bar is VERY important as this is what digs into the fiber making the dirt literaly bounce out and into then kicks it up into the vac air stream...
if it's REALY trashed you should prob pre-spray... be on the heavier side of soulution vs what you normaly do (whatever the instructions say on yoru bottle) and then pre-scrub with some other type of pad (wonder if fiberplus would be a good option here?)
then go at it as you normaly would... pull lots of pads... and have fun seeing how nasty they get :)...
