With over 20 years of experience, I’ve learned a thing or two about the carpet cleaning process. The main lesson learned is that, soap is not your best friend when it comes to stains in your carpet and I’ll tell you why.

One afternoon a child goes walking through the house with a large cup of soda. Unfortunately for you they are quite clumsy, spilling the entire cup all over your carpet. What we’ve all been trained to do at this point is to reach under the kitchen sink and get the bottle of “carpet cleaning solution”. You spray it on your carpet, rub it in, rinse, vacuum, and voila, good as new. 2 weeks later that same spot has come back, and common sense says “ Use what you used last time…. It worked great”. 2 weeks later the spot is back. Now, the obvious thought is that the original soda spill has reared it’s ugly head again, and this cycle will go on forever. To find a solution, we have to look at why all spots come back after being cleaned. It generally has very little to do with the original spill, and everything to do with the spot cleaner you are using. More importantly the soap content in the cleaner being used. Soap is a great cleaner. However, it leaves an incredibly sticky residue behind. Any time someone walks across this spot or runs the vacuum cleaner over it, all the dirt sticks to that one spot. Over the course of a couple weeks the spot progressively gets darker, and we think the spot is coming back up. In actuality, it is new dirt sticking to the old spot, not the original soda coming up.

The solution is simple and inexpensive. White vinegar is the best spot cleaner. It is a natural astringent, and leaves no residue behind for dirt to stick to. Mix a small bottle 50% water 50% vinegar and use in place of any soap based cleaner.  Spots cleaned with this solution will not come back to haunt.