What Can I Expect When I Have Dirt Busters Clean My Carpet?

You can expect the best carpet cleaning you have ever had.  With over twenty years’ experience of cleaning carpet, area rugs and upholstery throughout the Valley of the Sun we’ve mastered customer satisfaction in a job well done.  

We begin with discussing the work to be done in your home, and your expectations and concerns.  If you have any especially troublesome spots, pet accidents, red stains, damage to the carpet, etc., we will ask you about them during this time and discuss with you the solutions we have available.

Once we are set in what the job will consist of, we will get right to work thoroughly vacuuming your carpet.  Without thorough pre-vacuuming, there is no way to achieve a high-quality cleaning.

We know that no one solution will suit everybody’s needs.  We custom mix our cleaning agents and spot removers for each home, since each carpet has its own individual needs and troubles.

We also know that, generally speaking, if your carpet wasn’t looking a little dirty you probably wouldn’t have called us to begin with, so we never charge extra for pre-treating normal spots and traffic areas.  That’s just silly.

After vacuuming, moving the furniture you’d like moved and pre-conditioning the heavily soiled areas, we’ll begin thoroughly cleaning your carpet.  We use a floor buffer with a brush that scrubs the carpet fibers using our custom mixed cleaning solution.  The flow of solution to the brush is carefully controlled so that each area of carpet receives the proper amount.  

Once the carpet is cleaned, we finish by raking or “grooming” to stand the fibers back up so they can dry upright and as good as new. 

What Is Dri Foam?

Dri Foam is the method of carpet cleaning that we chose, after trying them all, as the all-around best, and then perfected it.  With having twelve (yes, twelve, all together) children as well as plenty of cats, dogs and various other little creatures at home over the years, we’ve had ample opportunity to practice, try out different products and perfect our techniques in our own home before we use them in our customers’ homes.  

With Dri Foam cleaning, your carpet will be only damp – not wet – and each carpet fiber will be thoroughly scrubbed.  The cleaning agents that we use are non-toxic and biodegradable; they’ll not leave a residue behind to clean the dirt off of your shoes, either.  This means that they are also perfectly safe for use around children, pets, and anyone with respiratory problems, as well. 

Why Is Dri Foam The Best Way To Clean My Carpet?

Dri Foam is best for a variety of reasons.  Most importantly, the carpet will be only damp, not wet.  When carpets get wet, the backing begins to become compromised which then compromises the integrity of the whole carpet.  The backing will begin to separate and the useful life of your carpeting will be many years shorter, meaning you’ll have to replace it much sooner than if the backing was able to maintain its integrity.  Also, if it takes too long for a wet room or house full of carpet to dry, mold will grow, causing general unhealthiness of the home.

With Dri Foam, the carpet fibers are scrubbed.  They are not soaked and extracted.  They are not sprayed then toweled off.  They are actually scrubbed, which is the only way to ensure a true, thorough cleaning.

Since your carpet will be dry in generally about forty-five minutes, we are able to replace the furniture that was moved very quickly and you can walk on your floors right away. 

What Are The Down-sides Of The Other Available Carpet Cleaning Methods?

Steam Cleaning

With steam cleaning, gallons and gallons of water and cleaning chemicals are sprayed with high pressure into the carpet and then extracted.  

This is bad for a number of reasons even if you overlook how much water is being wasted in the process.  The high pressure with which the water and chemicals are sprayed into the carpet also have the effect of forcing dirt deeper into the carpet, often even beneath the carpeting and into the pad, than the extractor can effectively remove.  A steam cleaner can extract and extract and extract the carpet and can continually show you the dirty water being pulled from the carpet, but have they ever shown you clean water, showing that all of the dirt was successfully removed?  

The amount of water that a steam cleaner uses damages the carpeting by compromising the integrity of the carpet’s backing, as well as degrades the pad beneath the carpet.  Additionally, since the carpet will generally take anywhere from several hours to a few days to dry completely, this allows mold to grow throughout the structure of the carpet – in the backing, the fibers, the pad; even the foundation beneath it all.  These consequences can be extremely costly.  Mold growing beneath your feet can cause serious health concerns.  Replacing carpeting due to premature expiration of beauty and usefulness can be very expensive indeed.

Oftentimes, the chemicals and cleaners used in steam cleaning carpets leave behind a residue that cleans the bottoms of your shoes or strips the natural oils from bare feet as people walk on the floor.  This means that your re-soil time is significantly shorter than it ought to be because the carpet is drawing soil to itself.

Also, sometimes a steam cleaned carpet will look fantastic as the cleaner leaves.  Spots and stains that you may have thought would never come out seem to have vanished, like magic.  You are pleased.  But then as the days pass, those spots and stains begin to show up again.  This phenomenon, called “wicking back up” is the result of simply pushing the soil deeper into the carpeting.  Once normal traffic resumes, the spots wick back up through the fibers because they were never really gone to begin with.  

Carbonated Water Solution (like Chem-Dry)

This process involves the spraying on of a carbonated water and chemical solution under the premise that the carbonation will bubble the dirt and soils to the top of the carpet fibers to then be toweled off.  The cleaning technician then follows the spraying of the solution with running a floor buffing machine over the top of the carpet with spin-bonnets, which are like white terrycloth towels.

In theory, this seems like a good idea.  But in reality, this method cannot offer a thorough cleaning because there is no scrubbing involved.  The carbonated chemical solution cannot effectively lift all of the soils to the top for the buffer to wipe off.  Additionally, the residues left behind due to the lack of thoroughness will begin to clean the dirt from the bottoms of shoes and strip natural oils from bare feet as they walk on the carpet, reducing the re-soiling time significantly since the carpet is then drawing dirt to itself.

Dual-Process – Shampoo Then Extract

This kind of cleaning involves first using a shampooing machine that does scrub the carpet with froths of suds and water, which usually includes chemicals that leave high amounts of residues behind.  Think of shampooing your hair.  You always want to make sure you rinse every bit of suds out of your hair before you would let it dry, right?  If you don’t, your hair will be filmy, sticky, dull, and unhealthy.  This process for cleaning carpet is very similar.  However, it is impossible to rinse all of the cleaning agents from the carpeting.

Carpet cleaners try to remove as much shampoo as they can with the second part of the process, which is the same thing as steam cleaning – rinse and extract – therefore adds the negative aspects of steam cleaning on top of the downfalls of the shampooing.  

Do-It-Yourself Machines

While these cleaners are helpful in quickly sucking up spills or touching up areas that are dirtier than the rest of your carpeting, they have many drawbacks for cleaning an entire room or an entire house.

First, they are not easily practical for most consumers to use to clean their own carpets.  To make them truly functional machines for large-scale carpet cleaning, the prices would become cost-prohibitive for most people who would have otherwise bought one.  So manufacturers of these machines have put out machines that seem convenient to use, until you try to use one to clean a room of carpet and find out how much more work it really is.  Also, these machines do not offer the strength of extraction necessary to remove much of the water and chemicals that they place into the carpet.

Second, the shampoos and chemicals that are manufactured and sold for these machines are not professional quality and they leave behind a high residue.  When there is residue from cleaners left in the carpet, the carpet becomes, in effect, a cleaner itself – it cleans the dirt from your shoes and strips the oils from bare skin, which also then attract even more dirt.  

Carpet cleaning is as much chemistry as it is hard work.  Most consumers do not have the training in custom mixing chemicals to treat the needs of each individual carpet that a true professional carpet cleaner has learned in the years spent mastering his trade. 

Spot Cleaning Sprays (like Woolite and Resolve)

Of course these are not practical for cleaning a whole room; however they have a place here in this list because of their popularity despite the high levels of residue that they leave behind after their use.  Yes, they will remove many of the spots and stains that they are advertised to remove.  In their wake, however, they leave behind a sticky residue which, as mentioned above, leaves the spot where the product was used looking just as bad as or worse than if it had been left to be treated professionally or treated yourself with another method of spot cleaning.

Please see our recommended methods for spot cleaning your own carpet and upholstery here: Stain Removal Guide