How to Remove Carpet Stains

Series Summary

Cleaning is something that everyone has to do, and the longer people put it off the more work accumulates that needs to be done later. With the hectic schedule some keep, it is hard to even find the time to take care of chores. This professional knows the tips and tricks to make cleaning fast, simple and effective, as well as making the living experience much more enjoyable in the home. In this free video series on carpet cleaning, a contractor's assistant demonstrates how to remove a variety of stains from carpet and other fabrics. Find out how to get tough stains out, like shoe polish, coffee, cosmetics and wax. Learn the basic process of blotting the stain from the outside and working inward to prevent spreading. Find out what household materials best get out unsightly spots on the carpet. Get the carpeting or rugs looking spotless with these great cleaning tips.

Video Transcript

"Ok, we're back and the next type of stain we're going to be talking about is a general stain, one that you don't know what caused it so you're going to use a series of trials and errors, it's only three steps. The first one, you want to scrape as much of the material as you can off of the carpet, if you can. Once you do that you just want to begin with soap and water, just a little bit of mild liquid detergent and some water and you want to just blot it. So, if it's a weak stain, that should pull it right out and you can do a series of repeating the rinsing and blotting to get it off. Now, if that doesn't work you'll need to switch to something a little bit more intrusive, which would be rubbing alcohol, isopropyl, and you want to just blot rinse with rubbing alcohol and you want to blot in one direction only. You want to keep the rubbing alcohol on just the tips of the fibers. The rubbing alcohol, if it seeps down into the latex binding of the carpet, it'll actually wind up dissolving it over time and so you're carpet will just fall out and you don't want to do that. So, you want to blot in one direction, keeping it as light as possible and then you can do a series of water rinse blots and see if that pulls the stain out. If that doesn't work to pull the stain out, what I usually go to after that is using three percent hydrogen peroxide solution. You just want to soak the area and you want to let it sit there for an hour. Once you come back, you just blot the area dry and that should take out the rest of the stain. You don't have to worry about rinsing after that because the reason that hydrogen peroxide comes in an opaque container is because it's sensitive to light, light will actually convert it back into a water state anyway so you don't have to rinse it out. That should remove the stain completely, in a general sense, when you don't know exactly what you're dealing with."