Three Things That You Need To Keep Away From Your Carpet

1) Yellow Mustard . . . or as I like to call it yellow carpet dye.  It never fails . . . I get invited to someones house for a BBQ and the the first thing I see is pickle relish, diced onions and French's yellow carpet dye sitting on that little part of the kitchen counter, you know the one . . .  that sticks out right in front of the ivory white carpet.

The first thing I do is discreetly grab the mustard, move it to the back counter and inform the home owner how important it is to keep the mustard as far from the carpet as possible.  Ususally it only takes a few minutes before someone puts it right back out on the edge of the counter just barely in reach of the four year old who is jumping up to grab it.  Can you guess what happens next?  It always goes somthing like this . . . " Oh don't worry about it . . . daves here, he can get anything out of the carpet". 

Then I have the unenviable task of explaining that yellow mustard contains tumeric and vinegar and how that makes a very effective yellow acid dye . . . the same type that is used by manufactures to dye carpet.

2) Bleaching agents like liquid acne/pimple removers and plant fertilizers.  Most people already know that you can not put clorox bleach on your carpet or the next day you will have a bright yellow spot.  What they typically don't know is why.

With very few execptions, the colors used to dye carpet contain all three primary colors in varying amounts.  Bleaches like Clorox will remove the red and blue dye, leaving behind the yellow dye in all its blazing glory.  Then the only way to get the carpet back to it's original color is to neutrilize the bleach and add back the red and blue dye. . .  which is pure art and extremely difficult to do.

In addition to clorox one of the worst offenders I have seen is the liquid pimple removers that come in a jar and have a little pad inside.  These are just begging a teenager to walk around the house while rubbing the pad on their chin; all the while dripping this liquid as they go and unaware that there will be little thumbtack sized bleach stains on the carpet the next day. In the last 23 years as a professional carpet cleaner I have seen it over and over and over again.

3)  Combinations of cleaning agents.  I got a call back in 2001 from the company that makes simple green.  they asked me to investigate a situation in Carmichael where a guy had used it in his home carpet cleaning machine and claimed to have green stains all over his carpet.  Sure enough I arrived at his house and he had about ten 4-6 foot areas of green all over his lving room and family room carpet.

First I tryed to clean out the green but it wouldn't budge so I tryed to duplicate the problem using his bottle of cleaning solution.  After using various dilution ratios that were much higher then the suggested 1 to 64, I finally poured it onto his carpet straight out of the bottle and let it dwell for about 15 minutes.  In every single case it rinsed out of his carpet with ease and was clearly not the problem.

Well long story short . . .  he got home around midnight and found his dog had suffered from diarhea all over his carpet.  He grabbed his cleaning machine out of the closet which still had another brand of cleaning solution in it.

The morel of the story is that Product A combined with product B Combined with what ever made the dog sick, created a new compound that permenently dyed this man's carpet green.  So remember . . . anything that gets in your carpet whether you put it there or your dog put it there, don't forget to rinse it completely out of your carpet before you add a differnt product and end up mixing the two together in your carpet.