This obviously won’t apply to everyone, but for those in a position where you have new carpet that may still be covered under warranty, this is CRITICAL. Most manufacturer warranties will have specific verbiage included in the terms/conditions that will specify the cleaning requirements. In most cases, manufacturers will require professional steam cleaning once a year, but be sure to verify with your specific warranty documentation to avoid any surprises once it’s too late.
How Often Should Carpet Be Professionally Cleaned?
James Corley • August 15, 2019
This is one of the most common questions asked, and the answer might surprise you!
Carpet is one of the most common flooring choices in homes and offices alike. With the right care and maintenance, carpet will display amazing resilience and look great for many years. However, if you do not adhere to recommended maintenance plans, your carpet will quickly begin to show signs of wear and damage. When considering the question of how often carpets need to be professionally cleaned, we must take into account several factors to arrive at the best answer for your situation.
Manufacturer's Warranty
Vacuuming Habits
Although having to vacuum frequently really sucks (see what I did there), the reality is that this is one of the best ways to help make sure that your carpet stays in the best possible condition. Carpet deteriorates as the carpet fibers break down over time due to abrasion and wear. FYI - this is also what happens to knees… as I am realizing with age. Unfortunately, this is unavoidable and will ultimately lead to replacing your carpet (and knees). However, the deteriorating process can be greatly slowed down by maintaining a regular vacuuming regiment. This is helpful because vacuuming removes much of the dirt and debris that causes abrasion to the carpet fibers. This improves the overall carpet wear and helps make sure that you get the maximum life out of your carpet. Not to mention that infrequent vacuuming is just gross. If you have a strong aversion to vacuuming, try this: Skip vacuuming for 5 days, get a high powered magnifying glass, and have a close look at the community of gunk that has taken up residence in your carpet! WARNING: This will be a frightening experience… so be prepared. Your resistance to vacuuming will be cured and you’ll gladly put forth the effort to rid your carpet of that filth on a regular basis. If only it was that easy to solve the knee problems.
Pets and Kids
You might think it strange to lump pets and kids together, but let’s be honest, both of them are on pretty equal footing when it comes to wrecking your carpet! Most pets aren’t using dandruff control shampoo, and hence, have a strong tendency to spread their dander all through your carpet. Additionally, pets aren’t always the best at making sure they restrict all biological expulsions strictly to the outdoors. They don’t mean to cause problems, but when Fido decides to eat deer droppings outside, it’s a pretty sure bet that later that night Fido will be making some sort of mess on your carpet. And everything I just said about pets, is true of kids too… except hopefully for the deer droppings. Seriously, kids just don’t care about taking care of your carpet and hardly notice when they create giant stains and smelly spills. If you have pets and/or kids, then you will likely need to have your carpets professionally cleaned more often than the recommended once a year. We recommend that you make your pets and kids work to earn the money to pay for the extra cleaning charges they incur… unless that’s against labor laws in your state.
Traffic Patterns
How much traffic moves through your carpeted areas on a regular basis? This plays an important role in determining how often your carpets should be professionally cleaned. For normal traffic patterns, the typical recommendation is that carpets should be professionally cleaned once a year. If you don’t have much of a social life and people rarely come visit you, then you likely have pretty light traffic on your carpet. This is one case where being anti-social may actually work in your favor, because you could feasibly reduce the cleaning frequency to once every 18 months. However, if your home is like Grand Central Station and every kid in the neighborhood strolls through your house on a regular basis, then undoubtedly you have high traffic on your carpeted areas. If this is the case, then you should consider increasing the frequency of your professional carpet cleaning to every 8 months. Again, these little monsters should be required to fund this additional cost and we recommend putting them to work… at least with odd jobs around the house. Most of them are full of energy anyway, just direct that energy toward something productive, like yard work.
Carpet Color
As you might expect, the color of your carpet also plays an important role in determining the recommended timeframe for professional cleaning. As a kid, my home was decked out with orange carpet, like many homes in my neighborhood in the early 80’s. I found this to be particularly beneficial because it provided me with an easy way to clean off the finger residue left after eating my favorite snack, Cheetos. Yep - I really did that for many years. It’s one of those stories you tell your parents many years later when you are comfortably out of the danger zone for a good spanking. Anyway, back to the subject at hand, lighter carpet will tend to show stains much more easily than darker carpet. Thus, those with light carpet will tend to require more frequent professional cleaning to deal with the inevitable stains that will develop over time. If you have darker carpet, chances are that you could delay professional cleaning a bit longer because the stains are not as easily visible. So, next time I get carpet, my plan is to purchase carpet that is the color of Georgia red clay… and then I’m set!
Conclusion
Generally speaking, it is recommended in most situations that carpet should be professionally cleaned once a year. However, as discussed throughout this post, there are numerous factors that can directly impact the frequency with which your carpets should be professionally cleaned. Any time-frames mentioned in this post are merely estimates, and every customer will have unique needs depending on the factors mentioned in this post, plus many other contributing factors. The carpet care team at Victory RCS specializes in evaluating the unique needs of our customers to develop the best plan for every situation.
So, if you suspect that your carpet may be filled with Cheetos residue, you're tired of the stains left by Fido's addiction to deer bon-bons, or you've just decided that you're ready for clean carpet, give us a call today!
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Athens, Georgia, in July is not so much a city as a large, leafy sauna that happens to have a football stadium in it. The humidity here is so committed to its job that by mid-summer your house can sit above 70 percent relative humidity for weeks at a stretch, according to the fine climate scientists at Peak Restoration, who I assume measured this with actual instruments and not just by standing outside and going "yep, soggy." The University of Georgia Extension Office, meanwhile, says your indoor humidity should stay under 60 percent, ideally between 30 and 50. That gap — between what Georgia air wants to do and what your drywall can survive — is where mold moves in, and it does not pay rent. This is a problem for mold in Athens, GA homes , and it is sneaky, because unlike, say, a raccoon in your attic, mold does not make noise or leave little raccoon business cards. It just quietly colonizes your bathroom ceiling while you're at a Georgia game, cheering, oblivious, drinking a beverage that is 90 percent condensation itself. Why Athens Homes Are Basically a Mold Timeshare Mold has two demands, and Athens meets both of them enthusiastically: moisture, and something organic to eat. Your house, unfortunately, is a five-star buffet of organic material — drywall paper, wood trim, that one cardboard box of tax documents from 2019 you keep meaning to shred. Add in Georgia's summer thunderstorms, the crawl space nobody has visited since the Clinton administration, and an air conditioner that spends all August sweating out condensation like it just ran a 5K, and you have got yourself a mold incubator with a mailing address. The 60 percent humidity rule isn't a suggestion from people who enjoy nagging you; it's the line past which airborne mold spores stop window-shopping and start signing a lease.
There you are, minding your own business at 3 a.m., dreaming a perfectly nice dream about, let's say, tacos, when you hear it: a sound like the ocean has decided to relocate into your hallway. You stumble out of bed, step onto what should be carpet and is now technically a wading pool, and realize that a pipe somewhere behind your wall has apparently been training for this moment its entire life. Congratulations. You are now the proud, damp owner of a water damage situation. Maybe your version involves a washing machine that quietly staged a mutiny, a toilet that overflowed with more enthusiasm than any toilet should ever have, or a roof that let a thunderstorm know your attic has an open-door policy. Doesn't matter. Water, it turns out, is sneaky. It looks like it's just sitting there on your kitchen floor, minding its own business, but really it is quietly infiltrating your drywall, your flooring, your insulation, your cabinets, and your subfloor like a tiny, wet special-ops team with zero respect for your homeowner's insurance policy. This guide will walk you through exactly what to do in those critical first hours, how professional water damage restoration actually works, what you need to document for your insurance company, and — this part is important — when you should absolutely not try to handle this yourself with a mop, a prayer, and a box fan from 1987. Because here's the thing nobody tells you at orientation for adulthood: mold doesn't wait around. Materials that stay wet for as little as 24 to 48 hours can start growing it, according to the EPA, which is a group of people whose entire job is knowing things like this so you don't have to find out the hard way. If your home has active flooding or visible water damage right now, stop reading and contact Victory RCS for prompt water damage restoration assistance. The rest of this you can read with a towel in hand. What Is Water Damage Restoration, Anyway? Water damage restoration is the technical, professional way of saying "returning your house to the condition it was in before it decided to become an indoor swimming facility." It sounds simple. It is not simple. It involves three distinct phases, none of which is "point a fan at it and hope": Mitigation — stopping the water source and hauling out the standing water before it invites more of its friends over. Remediation — dealing with contamination, lingering moisture, and the ever-present threat of mold setting up a colony in your baseboards. Restoration — actually repairing or rebuilding what got damaged: drywall, flooring, trim, cabinetry, your will to live. Here's the part that trips people up: just because the puddle is gone doesn't mean the water is gone. Moisture is a master of hide-and-seek. It can be lurking behind your baseboards, under your flooring, or inside your walls, patiently waiting to become a much bigger, much smellier problem. That's why professional restoration starts with a proper inspection and assessment — someone actually checking where the water went, not just where it was originally spotted crime-scene-style on your floor. The bottom line: what happens in the first few hours after water damage determines pretty much everything that happens afterward. This is not a "deal with it eventually" situation. This is a "deal with it right now while wearing pants you don't mind getting wet" situation. Common Causes of Water Damage (Or: How Did We Get Here?) Knowing where your water came from matters, because clean water from a supply line behaves very differently than water that has recently been in contact with, say, a sewer. Here are the usual suspects for residential water damage: Burst or frozen pipes (a Southern winter favorite) Plumbing supply-line leaks Water heater failures Washing machine, dishwasher, refrigerator, or toilet overflows Roof leaks and wind-driven rain Foundation seepage and basement flooding Storm flooding and sewer backups And if you're running a business, you get your own special lineup of villains: Sprinkler system malfunctions Leaking plumbing in multi-unit buildings Roof drainage failures Equipment or appliance leaks One important distinction worth remembering: there's a big difference between "relatively clean water from a supply line" and "water that has recently associated with sewage or floated in off the street." One of these you can approach with mild annoyance. The other you should approach with a hazmat mentality and zero DIY heroics.
