What You Should And Should Not Use For Cleaning Wool Carpeting

If you have a large and expensive wool rug in your home, then you may need to clean this rug on occasion. However, there are certain types of cleaning methods that can ruin or damage the rug. Keep reading to learn about a few so you are prepared to do the right thing when it comes to cleaning.

Steam Cleaning

Almost everyone has accidentally shrunk a wool sweater by either washing it in warm water or by drying it in the dryer. Well. this same sort of thing can happen if you expose a wool rug to wet heat when cleaning. This means you should never steam clean your wool rug. While the whole rug is unlikely to shrink, you may see some sections bunching up, and this will essentially ruin it.

Instead of using a steam cleaner, you can use a water extraction machine, like a traditional carpet cleaner. The water should be lukewarm or cool, though, and you should try to remove as much water as possible during the cleaning. Also, the wool carpet should not be scrubbed extensively like synthetic or cotton carpeting fibers. This means that you should try to pre-clean the carpet by removing stains first. Do this with an appropriate stain remover made for wool carpeting and blot the stain when removing it.

Also, you should keep in mind that wool is highly absorbent, so make sure to suck up as much water as possible when cleaning or your carpet may feel soaked for some time afterward.

Using Bleach

You probably know that it is unwise to use bleach on any type of colored fabric. However, what happens if your wool carpet is white. Well, you still should not use bleach. Bleach products and other cleaners with harsh chemicals can actually burn and melt through the wool fibers and leave you with a hole in your carpet. In some cases, products can also leave brown spots where they have damaged the natural fibers.

When it comes to cleaning a wool carpet, you want to look for cleaning agents that say they are safe for use with wool. The cleaner should be free of abrasives and any extremely strong cleaner like bleach or ammonia. Cleaners should also be closer to neutral instead of acidic or basic varieties. Dish soap is one option that can be safely used.

Carpet cleaning powders that are free of whitening agents and foams that are gentle and free of bleach are good options as well. Just make sure that you look on the back of the packaging to see if it is recommended for use with wool.

If you want to ensure that you don't damage your wool rug, consider hiring rug cleaning services.