Video: Cleaning Spills on Your Carpet

CONCORD — Host, Sarah Rutan: When a spill occurs on your carpet, knowing how to deal with it properly can make all the difference in preventing a permanent stain. Today we’re in Concord with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Dave Steely of Maximum Carpet Cleaning to learn more.

Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Dave Steely: So, today, we’re going to address what to do when something gets spilt on your carpet. This is the proper way to absorb – and this can be any kind of liquid. For this demonstration we’re going to use red wine – which is unfortunately a common occurrence with our clients – but anything will do.

We got a little bit of a red wine spill here. So, first thing you want to do is grab a one hundred percent cotton towel. You’re going to place that towel right on top of the affected area. Now, cotton is much more absorbent than your nylon carpet. So, as you can see, we’re getting color transfer, and that’s what we’re looking for. So, we’re going to rotate that towel, and we’re just going to keep blotting. We’re trying to get as much liquid out of here as we possibly can. Now, this may take one or two towels, maybe more depending on how much liquid. But, we just keep repeating, repeating, repeating.

Once we’ve got it to the point where we’re no longer getting any transfer, we’re going to just kind of lightly spread this apart. We’re going to grab some table salt, and we’re going to put a generous amount of salt on there. The salt is going to absorb the liquid. So, what we want to do – once we get it on – we’re going to spread that carpet again, let that salt work its way all the way down to the back end of the carpet just by gently rubbing it here. Then we’re going to apply some more.

Now, we’re going to want to let that sit for at least fifteen minutes. Once that’s done, we’re going to take our vacuum and we’re just going to vacuum it up. Then we’re going to take a simple mixture – this is one part white distilled vinegar, two parts water, and just a splash of dishwashing liquid – we’re going to apply that on the affected area. Once again, we’re going to get our cotton towel. We’re going to put that on there, and we’re going to blot again. What we’re looking for is color transfer. We want to see is anything still coming off onto the towel.

Once we see we’re no longer getting transfer, we’re going to take it and we’re just going to gently raise that carpet up. We’re going to take a dry cotton towel, we’re going to place that on the affected area, and then we want to take something that weighs about the equivalent of a gallon of water. We want to make sure this is a plastic container. We want to be sure we don’t use wood or metal. Wood or metal can both stain the carpet and create much more damage.

We leave that set roughly for at least an hour – let it absorb the rest of that liquid out of there. Once it’s done, we’re just going to pull that up, remove it, let it sit for twenty-four hours, run a vacuum over it, and that should take care of it.

Host, Sarah Rutan: To learn more from local top-rated companies, visit our Diamond Certified Expert Reports at experts.diamondcertified.org.