A couple of weeks ago I did a job for a woman who resides in a beautiful oceanfront home in the sailing town of Marblehead MA. Part of the job was her carpeted kitchen floor. Carpet in the kitchen is always a bad idea.
Shortly afterwards,I received a distressed phone call from her. On New Year's day, someone who had come to visit was "helping" in the kitchen, and managed to spill a large, multi-gallon container of some kind of stew on the kitchen carpet. The splash went off in all directions. Lots of cooking oil in it, tomatoes - the works. I was able to get there two days ago to see if I could repair the damage. While the customer had been able to remove all of the heavy stuff, there was a very large pale-ish grey/brown pattern
on a large area of the floor.
What I did was to spray the carpet somewhat more heavily than I might do normally, but not so much that I would be creating a potential wickback situation. I then centered a 10" FiberMax pad on my Challenger's pad driver (the dark grey pad used for encap work on heavily soiled commercial carpeting.) Although I have some of their larger 15" pads, I felt that the more downward pressure I could achieve, the more aggressively I could scrub her carpet. I made several passes, and as I did so, the outline of the spill stain gradually disappeared. Then I removed the FiberMax pad and replaced it with a fairly wet 2-sided Argo terrycloth pad, and worked first one side, then the other repeatedly over the area, then followed this up with a tightly squeezed out Argo pad for good measure. The first pad got really dirty, (and smelled like dinner) and the second pad not so much. I wrapped things up with a dry pad. Mrs. B. was amazed.
I told her to call me again if there was any sign of the stain re-appearing, and so far, so good. I was using Vacaway's Encap Green at a mixture rate of 6 oz. to a gallon of water.
Mark, my question is when I read your process for cleaning a bad stain on the kitchen carpet. Is the fiber max pad included with the start up package? Another question how many different pads are used on the challenger? Are they all included? and if not are they very expensive? Just interested.
I include a Fiber-Plus pad in the package for scrubbing stains of this type. The Fiber-max pad is more aggressive, and I try to use it sparingly. If you do decide to buy a Challenger or a Package, I can tell you where to go to buy it.
Challenger sells a Tile & Grout brush attachment for $35, which will allow you to also sell services in tile & grout cleaning. I also (in my own business) use some pads specifically designed for honing & polishing such natural stone floors as marble, travertine, limestone, terrazzo, etc. These pads are indeed pricey, but since you can sell marble refinishing services for around $4 - $5 per sq. ft., they quickly pay for themselves. You can also buy very inexpensively what is called a maroon pad for abrading wood floor finishes, allowing you then to offer wood floor recoating services. With the Black Magic pad from Virginia Abrasives, you will also be able to condition super-hard aluminum oxide floor finishes prior to recoating.
