Certified technicians deep clean your office carpet

Every carpet cleaning follows the same order

Every carpet job starts before the machine comes in. We find out what the carpet is: carpet tile or wall-to-wall, glued to the slab or laid over pad. We read the maker's care guide, because it says what that carpet can take. Then we vacuum slowly, in overlapping passes. Most of the dirt in an office carpet is dry grit, and dry grit comes out with a vacuum. Put water on it first and you make mud, then push it down into the backing.

Next come the spots and the traffic lanes. The gray path from the elevator to the break room gets sprayed with cleaner first. We give it time to work, then a brush loosens what is stuck to the fibers. Only then does the hot water go in. The machine rinses the soil loose and pulls the water straight back out, and then we make extra passes with no water at all. Skip that wait and the rinse only moves dirt around. Leave out the dry passes and the carpet stays wet for hours.

Last, we groom the pile so it dries standing up, and we walk the area to check it before we leave. Done right, the traffic lane from the front door matches the carpet under the desks, and it does not feel sticky under your shoe. That sticky feel is soap left behind. It grabs dirt from every shoe that crosses it, so a carpet cleaned that way goes gray again in a few weeks. That is why the rinse matters more than the soap.

• Dry soil vacuumed out before any water
• Spots and traffic lanes treated first
• Hot water rinse, then extra dry passes
• Pile groomed so it dries standing up
• Included in our standard janitorial contract

Winter salt wears out entry carpet

Parking lots and sidewalks around Lisle get salted all winter, and every boot that crosses them carries some inside. Most of it lands in the first stretch of carpet past the entrance and along the main hallway. You can see it as a white crust along the edges of the traffic lanes. Or it shows up as a dark patch that looks damp and never quite dries. That damp kind is usually calcium chloride, which pulls water out of the air and holds it.

Salt hurts carpet in two ways. The crystals are sharp, and every step grinds them into the fibers, which dulls and frays the pile in the busiest lanes. The film it leaves behind also holds dirt, so salted carpet soils faster than clean carpet. Salt does dissolve in water, but it rarely comes out in one ordinary pass. Scrub it with more detergent and you leave soap on top of salt, and the spot returns as a wider ring once it dries.

So salt gets its own step. We flush the entry carpet with plenty of hot water and a rinse made to break up salt. Then we extract it more slowly than the rest of the floor, so the salt leaves with the water instead of settling into the backing. On our maintenance program the entrances get more attention than a back office does, and more still in winter. Salt left in place for a whole season is how a traffic lane wears down to the backing.

Office carpet in Lisle sits on concrete

Around Lisle and Naperville, the office buildings run from big corporate campuses along the tollway to low brick buildings with a handful of suites. Almost all of them have carpet laid over a concrete slab. So do the front offices of the warehouses in Bolingbrook and Aurora. Some of that carpet is wall-to-wall, glued straight to the concrete. A lot of it is carpet tile, held down with a tacky adhesive so one damaged square can be swapped out. Either way, there is no pad underneath to soak up extra water.

On carpet like this, too much water is the usual mistake. It runs through the backing into the adhesive and then sits on a slab that dries slowly. Carpet tile edges start to curl, and glued carpet can lift in soft bubbles. A musty smell may follow a few days later. Brown rings around a cleaned spot are another warning. The water carried dirt down into the backing, then carried it back up to the tips of the fibers as the carpet dried.

So on carpet over concrete we use as little water as the job allows and pull it back out with more dry passes. Summers in DuPage County are humid, and wet carpet dries slowly in air that already holds a lot of moisture. We ask for the air conditioning to stay on while it dries. We also schedule the heavy extraction for evenings or weekends, so the carpet has time to dry before people walk on it.

Our carpet program starts on day one

When CLS takes on a building, the carpet goes on our maintenance program from the first day. That runs alongside the Intensive Initial Cleaning every new building gets at no additional cost. Deep extraction is part of our standard janitorial contract, so it is not billed as an extra the way it is with many cleaning companies. After that, each area is cleaned on a schedule set by how hard it gets walked on, instead of waiting for it to look bad.

Most commercial carpet comes with care instructions from its maker, and the warranty usually depends on following them. They cover things like the cleaning method and what can safely go on the fibers. We follow those recommendations on every carpet we maintain, so the warranty stays valid if you ever need it. It also makes the carpet last. Carpets on our program have lasted over twenty years, which puts off a replacement most buildings would otherwise budget for much sooner.

The carpet work is done by our own staff. Our carpet technicians are IICRC certified, and CLS keeps its people for years. Many of our cleaning technicians have been with us for over ten years, so the same people tend to keep coming back to your building. Every building also has a single point of contact who is responsible for the Everyday Cleaner Standard. If a coffee spill shows up in the lobby carpet, you know exactly who to tell.