I just wanted to share. I believe Challenger now has a new type of OP pad called a Turbo Pad. These are 21" pads that are fairly thick. They hold a TON of soil and are much much gentler on carpets than any cotton pad, yet clean IMO just as well.

I had the benefit of getting one of these pads 4 or 5 months ago and have put about 100 uses or so on mine. It is starting to develop a hole in it so I may not get too much more use out of that one. If these pads don't get holes I would expect them to last 200-300 uses. These pads are well worth the extra $$ over cottons, and they also run on the challenger max.

I certainly recommend to all you challenger users to get one or two and try. If you like them as much as I do you may well find yourselves switching over to them.

Grant, we've been experiementing with different pads lately too and have tried the double pad and the blend (poly-cotton) pad from Challenger, but have not yet tried the turbo. How is the turbo different? It's not as expensive as the double pad, so I'm interested.

There are some pretty good pictures on the challenger chat blog if you know where that is. There's a link to it on the challenger site.

IMHO cotton is too aggressive for almost all residential nylon cut pile carpets, but those double layer cottons do work great for commercial work and berber. These pads hold a ton of dirt and are much gentler on carpets, making them suitable for use on most nylon carpets.

I don't know how many uses you guys get out of those double layer cottons but I suspect these will last roughly as long. As I mentioned mine got a hole in it from running over something so I will probably only get 5-10 more out of the first turbo pad, making it about 110-120 uses. If it didn't get a hole in it it would keep going another 100-200 uses no problem.