My name's James from Mountain Rug Cleaning.
And today I'm going to be cleaning
a rug infested with earthworms.
The rug was just
completely saturated in mud, soaking wet.
And then on further inspection,
I could see what looked to be little maggots inside the rug.
Turns out it was probably earthworm larvae.
It was a rug that somebody didn't want anymore,
so it was just discarded in their garden.
Basically, I just wanted to see if I could clean it,
test my skills essentially,
and see what I could do with it.
Essentially I'm just rinsing the rug with water.
So it's just a high-powered hose,
and it's just pushing water out onto the rug
to just rinse out as much of the mud as possible.
It's not a pressure washer.
Pressure washer has a lot of power,
but it doesn't necessarily shoot out
a high volume of water onto the rug.
And essentially what you want to do in the beginning
is just get the water on there as quick as possible.
I have a pump attached to the hose
just so it gives enough pressure and power.
But it's not trickling out really slowly,
it is powerful enough
that you can sort of blast the top of the rug
and it will just sort of wash away
any sort of surface soils from the top of the rug.
You're going to be using brushes on the rug,
and the water alongside with the shampoo
lubricates the rug to prevent any kind of damage
from the machines that you're going to be using on it.
All sorts of leaves and twigs and soil and things
are just blasting off the top of the rug,
as well as the earthworms that were in there.
I wanted to make sure
that I got those washed off the top of the rug,
because I didn't want to churn them all up into the rug.
So I wanted to make sure that I got those all off first
before I took any more steps.
I'm using just the watering can
with a mixture of shampoo
and oxygen booster in it.
And then I'm just using that
to just get the shampoo distributed over the top of the rug.
So, that's the rotary machine.
It has a rotating brush on the bottom of it,
and that is used to essentially
get the shampoo mixed into the rug,
so it's easier to then wash out.
I'm using a special fiber shampoo.
It's quite a mild detergent,
pet-safe, wool-safe.
It's not very strong,
it's just enough to break down the soils in the rug
and make it easier for you to sort of wash it all out.
The oxygen booster
just helps break down the soils a lot quicker.
It can make things whiter,
it can bring the colors out, reduce odor,
and, yeah, just essentially
make it easier for you to remove the stains.
I wouldn't use bleach at all.
Bleach in general damages the fibers.
Especially because this was a wool rug,
it can damage the colors in the rug.
So it's better to just avoid using the bleach.
It's cold water.
You don't want to use hot water on rugs,
because they tend to have a problem with shrinking,
so you just use cold water,
and that just eliminates any kind of potential problems
that you might have with cleaning them.
You then use what's called a squeegee,
essentially like what you'd use to clean your windows,
and you scrape off all the dirt and foam
from the top of the rug.
The next step is flipping the rug over
and then cleaning the wash floor underneath,
'cause a lot of the dirt and stuff
is still underneath the rug.
So I think it's a good idea to just wash all that away
before you then put the rug back on top
that you've just cleaned.
And then, again, it's pretty much
exactly the same process as doing the front.
Just start off with getting the rug saturated with water,
adding the shampoo and oxygen booster again,
and then just cleaning the back of it with the rotary
to get as many of the stains out as you possibly can.
Always clean the back and the front,
because when you clean the front
it pushes a lot of the dirt through into the back.
And then also on the flip side, when you clean the back,
it then forces a lot of the dirt and stuff
which is deep in the rug out from the opposite side,
if you see what I mean.
I usually then use a CRB machine
on the top of the rug.
It looks a bit like a vacuum.
It's like a gray box.
It stands for counter-rotating brush head.
Inside it's got two brushes
that revolve in opposite directions.
And then as they roll up,
they sort of pull the fibers of the rug
up into the machine.
So it kind of gives you a much deeper clean,
but it also lifts the pile of the rug,
making it a bit more fluffy.
I'm adding more products to the rug
to sort of break down more soils
that are still left inside.
You do it until the water comes out as clear as possible.
You'll never get a rug 100% clean.
There will always be some dirt inside a rug.
You could be using thousands
and thousands of liters of water
unnecessarily for very, very little gain.
So there's a point at which
it's still getting little bits out,
but it's just not worth wasting so much water
in order to get it out.
At that point, I'm adding acidic rinse to the rug.
It neutralizes all the chemicals
that you've previously used,
and it helps to wash them all out.
It also helps prevent cellulosic browning,
which is a process at which the natural fibers
in the rug can turn brown.
That is called a Grandi Groom.
It's used to remove the pattern left in the rug,
but it's also to set the fibers to help it dry quicker.
I'm vacuuming out as much moisture as I possibly can.
So that's basically a wet vac,
and it's sucking out the moisture
and then it's going into a tank.
It's quite an important process,
'cause it is obviously removing
a lot of the moisture from the rug.
Then I put it in a centrifuge,
which gets about 95% of the water out of the rug.
You hang the rug in a warm room
with fans and a dehumidifier.
And then that just gets the last remaining bits
of the moisture out.
I mean, don't leave your rug in the garden,
for a start.
But, yeah, the biggest tip I've got
for taking care of your rug is lots of vacuuming.
The worst thing that damages a rug
is probably the dry soils
that are in the rug for long periods of time.
It kind of can wear down the rug.
So lots of vacuuming and regular beating.
I didn’t really feel comfortable
with then giving it on to somebody else,
so after I cleaned it, rather than just
throwing it in the bin and wasting it,
I thought a good thing to do
would be to give it to a dog shelter.
So that’s what I did.