Will it leave my carpet “crunchy”?

Will it leave my carpet feeling crunchy? This question is because someone has had a bad experience in the past or just had a problem with their carpets at some point. First let’s review what are some causes that carpet could feel crunchy. The first one that is universal is hard water. In Oklahoma we have harder water and higher humidity. For example if you take a shower and toss your towel in a pile on the floor it will smell bad the next day. So we all know to hang our towel to dry after a shower. If you feel the towel the next day it will have a slight stiffness to it. This is because the water has evaporated from the towel but left behind anything not water. This can feel “crunchy”.  Second is residue left on something that dries hard. Going back to our towel example let’s say that your kids are in a hurry and  didn’t rinse off that good. They used lots of soap and little water and they dried themselves with a towel. Now the towel has soap residue on it and when it dries it feels much like bar soap. It can feel “crunchy” because it has soap residue still on the fibers. Those are both reasons the towel can feel “crunchy” from cleaning. Let’s add in a final way it could feel “crunchy”. If you take that same towel and see something spilled on the floor. You wipe up the floor and realize it’s honey. Now the towel is sticky and tacky and it will harden up over time. 

Let’s replace towel with carpet in the above examples and tell you how we address those problems when we clean your carpets. Here are the 3 things that we do to help carpets stay soft.

First we use a water softener in each van to help reduce the hardness of the water that we clean with. That way as the carpet dries there is not hard water that will leave the carpet “crunchy”. 

Second we use all of our chemicals in a prespray and not in the water that we rinse the carpet with. This is a big thing because most companies put their carpet cleaning chemicals in the water that they are rinsing with. Why do they do this? Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and say it’s because they want to clean the carpet in one pass. This is a time saving plan in theory, because you don’t have to take up time prespraying all the carpet and spots beforehand. You rely on the chemicals in the water to break down the dirt in one pass. The reality is that most dirt needs to get back into solution before it can be rinsed out. For example let’s say you have had some spaghetti and the sauce has dried on the plate the next day. You could try to scrub that sauce off the plate with a sponge. But if you just put a little dawn and hot water on the plate and let it soak for a few minutes. Now you can just turn the plate sideways and the spaghetti sauce will just rinse right off with no scrubbing. So if you use your soap in a soak then you can use just water in the rinse and not need to leave soap in the carpet. 

Third we use a pH balancer in our rinse water. No soap, but a negative water that offsets any soap in the carpet and helps condition the carpet to leave it soft and to dry faster. 

Here is the main reason using soaps in your water, outside of leaving the carpet feeling “crunchy”, is that the residue will attract new dirt over time. If you have a residue on the carpet then it will hold the dirt the next time you vacuum the carpet. The dirt won’t just release and the carpet will start looking dingy. Some not so honorable carpet cleaners use this knowledge to their advantage and crank up the soap in their water so that they carpet will look dingy faster than normal requiring another cleaning sooner then needed.