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OP Very Soiled Carpets

Just curious about the folks who ONLY OP when it comes to very soiled carpets. I have great success with OP, but find it counter productive to OP very soiled situations, mostly larger ones.

Case in Point: I had a 10K SF job and at least half was BAD. I could have used every bonnet I had on just a 10 x 10 section.

Restaurants also. How many pads do you have in your arsenal? wihch ones work best for which situations?

Thanks for the info!

Re: OP Very Soiled Carpets

Keep in mind that for your very large (10,000 s.f.+) jobs, many would now approach such a job using an encapsulation cleaner, leaving it up to whoever periodically vacuums the premises to actually remove the soil. This approach works well for me on many commercial jobs, for the whole place. When any kind of job has areas where soiling is particularly heavy, I will go over these areas via padcapping - using an encap cleaning product, but removing soil as I go with cotton pads, or with pads that contain a blend of cotton and synthetic fibers. For this kind of soil removal, particularly on a low-pile, CGD kind of carpet, I prefer pads with some thickness to them over very thin pads. These would include the 2-sided
pads made by Argo & Co, similar pads sold by Challenger, as well as the Turbo Pads that Challenger sells. Gladiator pads may also do this well, although I personally do not own any.

Re: OP Very Soiled Carpets

Mark, We use all encap detergents, and follow the procedure you outlined above. Im just curious how far can you go with this system when it is this soiled.

If I can use both sides of a Tuway bonnet, or n e kind for that matter on a 10 x 10 area, and still have alot more to go...

Re: OP Very Soiled Carpets

You describe a particularly rare type of carpet cleaning situation - other than restaurants, which I and many other in this industry choose not to target in our marketing for this very reason. I did a condo building earlier this week which the condo management company previously had cleaned by a HWE company. It wasn't bad in general, but the main front entry area, including three stairs, had really packed-in black soil. This area obviously took quite a bit more time per sq. ft. to clean than did the rest of the building, but overall I was still very pleased with dollars generated per hour. I used one helper.
The super-soiled areas looked very good at the end of the day, and this property mgmt company continues to give me additional buildings apparently since the areas we clean stand up better than what they were doing previously via HWE. If I were offered a building in which the entire property were as badly soiled as the area I just described, my proposal to clean it would take into account the additional time (and pads!) needed to get the job done to my standards. That way, I would leave the ball in the customer's court. You don't want jobs where the amount of work is relatively greater than what you are going to earn from it.

Re: OP Very Soiled Carpets

We have run into this type of situation a few times as well. Recently cleaned an office area (approx 3500 sq.ft.) - looked great when we left. They called later and said, "we can see lines of dirt". I thought, "no way, they must be seeing the rotation patterns from the cimex and think it's dirty." Well, We showed up and to my astonishment, there was so much soil in the carpet, that the encap couldn't hold it all. We ran a few pads over it and it looked great. Very rarely do we use the HWE (only for big messes like vomit and poopoo).

However, one of our tech's works part time for another company and has restaurants that I would steer clear of with encap...even vacaway's hot knife. Some of these restaurants are so disgustingly dirty/greasy, that are cleaned every two weeks and it would take hours if using pads. They literally throw buckets of scalding hot water (and some serious chemicals) on the carpets to get it up...HWE only.

Our business name is Natural Solutions Cleaning, and we market a very professional image...therefore, we stay away from the cut-throat HWE market. Not saying it's bad...just not our niche. Therefore, we rarely see jobs that encap and/or pads won't tackle better than other methods. Hope this helps.

Re: OP Very Soiled Carpets

It's always good business to know "when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em".

Re: OP Very Soiled Carpets

I definately understand staying away from restaurants.

We do a few and they are higher end ones that do it often and can handle the encap, sometimes a little HWE.

An example of a customer we have that generally had nice carpets to encap:

This particular apartment complex usually houses higher end folks who usually take care of their place, but time to time the customer needs us to clean a place that has been trashed. We don't turn this away because we like to use OP.

We had to evolve to include HWE part time into our arsenal. I have tried several times to just OP it, but there was always a return call. Now we just scrub with OP, extract with demon and pad with OP.

Thanks for the info!

Re: OP Very Soiled Carpets

I would guess Steamin Demon is what you are referring to I am assuming? So you vacuum, prespray, agitate with op, the demon, then cotton pad? What pad do you normally use to Agitate? Thanks

Sounds like a lot of work but I bet it comes out great. I just got two demons from craigslist and am in the process of getting them running. Simple kinda fun to work on and I hope they work as well as Steamin Demon claims.

Rick