how to clean stains off carpet

Carpet Cleaning Tips

How to Clean your carpet and floors

These ‘How to Clean’ guides haven’t happened without the Mad Carpet Scientist coming out in me… My idea of a fun Saturday night these days is to take myself off to my lab (read: garage) and get messy. By messy I mean throw all sorts of typical household spills at my carpet samples. Yes, I have a library of carpet samples.

If a find yourself with a stain on your stain or a spill on your carpet you’re going to need to act fast. Or at least as fast as you can. 

5 things to remember when attempting to remove an unwanted spill from your carpet...
  • Act fast, but don't just throw the first solution you find at it
  • A basic stain removal solution (eg Baking Soda) is better than nothing, if you don't have a specific carpet shampoo for your carpet type
  • Don't expect to have it perfect after your first attempt at cleaning it
  • Don't rub your carpet, DAB your carpet clean instead
  • Stains happen, your carpet may be imperfect and that's not the end of the world

Basic stain removal solution

If you don’t have a fancy carpet shampoo specific to your carpet pile than my baking soda mix should do. This stain removal mix will get you through the first stage of your emergency stain removal .

Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1:

Vacuum your Carpet to remove all the lose debris and dirt. You don’t have to get this 100% perfect, you really just need to make sure superficial dirt is gone so it doesn’t interfere with your treatment.

Step 2:

Throw (ok, sprinkle) on a decent amount of baking soda. You need to completely cover the stained area. The baking soda should be on thick enough that you can only just see the carpet under it. Ideally you either use a sift so that no clumps of baking soda are on the stain or you whisk it quickly before sprinkling it on the stain.

Step 3:

Walk away…. walk away for at least 12-24 hours and try not to interfere with the baking sods gods as they work your magic on your carpet.

Step 4:

Vacuum up the baking soda to reveal your (hopefully? probably?) clean carpet.

Step 5, if required:

 If stains remain then I’d be jumping online and grabbing some carpet shampoo that is specific to your carpet type.

See which carpet shampoo I use

How-To-Clean Guides