Thanks to Mark and Brooks for your help. Our equipment is arriving today and we can't wait to get rolling. We already have our first two jobs scheduled for this saturday. The first is 2500sf of commercial carpet at a local church. It's a lot for a first job and will probably take some time with the 15" machine but we are up for the challenge. We under bid this job because a) it's a church and b) we need the experience. Our plan is to use encap Green, cotton pads and holy glider. The second is 225sf residential berber carpet. We plan to use the same cleaning method as the church. Any words of advice for us beginners?

Be sure to have the Holy Glider Blessed!!!

Keep your pads wet and spray in small areas, have fun

Working alone (short notice) I did a job for a Jewish temple west of Boston. The facility manager on the phone said it was just an entry and hallway, but you could land a jumbo jet on the hallway. The job totalled 4560 s.f. (I charged .17/s.f. for a cost of $775.00. It took about 4.5 hours to complete the job. I used Encap-Green with cotton pads for about 3/4 of the job, and encapped with the beige Fiber-Plus scrubber pad for the rest. The facility manager was very pleased with the result. There were a couple of kind of yellow-ed spots that I was not able to remove.

With the residential berber, you can experiment between using the holy glider and working without a glider.

In which situations do you use the beige Fiber-plus scrubber pads, and where do you get them? Thanks.

We are pleased to say both jobs went well today. My only gripe is that the holy glider tore up our pads on both jobs. We only ruined two pads, one at each job before we decided to change to the thin glider. We also tried no glider but the challenger was too difficult to operate. Has anyone experienced this problem when using the holy glider? Mark I know this one is your #1 choice but from my experience today I am afraid to use it again. Could it be a problem with my challenger?

I ruined a couple of pads my first time out as well. In my case I did not change the pad until it was too late It was pretty dry

Sometimes on the first use or two, some threads will pull out from a pad.

I buy Fiber Plus pads from www.excellent-supply.com.
I use them when a carpet is heavily soiled, or there are a lot of spots to break up.

Every time I try to clean commercial carpet it tears my pads all to pieces as well. I called around trying to find out why and everybody I spoke with said they never heard of that happening before.Glad to see its not just me.

Is your pad wet enough?. Carpet presprayed Holy glider or solid. Or maybe even no glider. Cotton pads or Turbo pads? Well I am out of idea's

We used 100% cotton pads and yes they were wet enough. Carpet was presprayed as well. The same thing happened on my residential berber job. Needless to say we shelfed the holy glider and stick with the thin glider. Not as much ground coverage with the thin glider as opposed to the holy but peace of mind that we won't ruin our pads. So far so good!