Video: The Proper Way to Vacuum an Area Rug

PLEASANT HILL — Host, Sarah Rutan: In order to maintain a fine area rug, you need to know the proper way to vacuum it. Today we’re in Pleasant Hill with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Dave Steely of Maximum Carpet Care to learn more.

Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Dave Steely: So, here’s a pro tip for all you homeowners with area rugs. Today we’re going to talk about the proper way to vacuum your area rugs, especially wools, Orientals, Persians, things of that nature. Wool fibers tend to trap a lot of dry soil in there. Most homeowners will take their vacuum cleaner and just do a quick single pass right over the rug and think that that’s good enough. Well, it’s not. You really need to thoroughly vacuum these rugs. In order to get all the dry soil out of them, it’s going to require to go a little bit slower, make multiple passes.

So, the first thing you’re going to want to do is allow your vacuum to work properly. The way you do that is by adjusting the height to the thickness of your area rug. If your vacuum is set too low and it becomes too hard to push, it’s actually not moving air, it’s not breaking up the dust, it’s not pulling anything, it is simply creating a suction almost like a seal to the area rug itself and will not remove any of the soil. So, you got to adjust that correctly. Then we’re going to go over it nice and slow. You’re going to go up once, bring it back. So, make two complete passes on there, and then we’re going to go in different directions. You’re going to go up and down vertically, then we’re going to go side to side to make sure we’re hitting those fibers from every angle.

Once that is done, once we’re finished vacuuming the top of the rug, we can lift the rug up, and sometimes we’ll see visible dry soil underneath the rug. At that point we’re going to want to sweep the floor to remove that, get rid of all that, flip the rug over, and then vacuum the other side. When we vacuum from behind, we will pull even more soil out of there. So, then we flip it back over once again, we’ll be back to the surface of the rug, and then we’ll go over it one more time not quite as aggressively, not quite as slowly, just to vacuum it and finish it off.

This is a process that should be done probably about every one to three months, depending on your lifestyle: depending on if you have kids, pets, is the rug being used every day, where is it located at, things of that nature. And again, this is all something to help preserve the life of your rug. So, just follow these simple steps, and this will go a long way to properly maintaining your area rugs in between professional cleanings.

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