What's In Your Carpet
So what is actually in your carpet?
The following list gives you some idea of the possible contents of your "clean" carpet.
| Asbestos dusts Asphalt Bacteria Blood (dried) Candle wax Cardboard dust Car Exhaust Cellulose dust Chalk dust Chemicals Cockroach dust Concrete dust Cooking oil residue Cotton fibers Dead skin scales Dirt Dust mites Dust mite Feces Dust mite Carcasses |
Deodorant residue Earth Fleas, eggs & bodies Flour dust Fly dust Food particles Foot powder dust Fungus Gasoline residues Germs (assorted) Grease Grime Grit Hair Hairspray residue Hazardous Wastes Hydrocarbons Insecticides Industrial Waste Lice bodies |
Makeup residue Metal particles Microscopic fiber Mildews Molds Mud Newspaper dust and ink Nits Oils - MANY kinds Paper dust Pet: - dander - feces - hair - oils - urine Plant decay Pollens Pollutants, air Resins |
Rhinovirus Rocks, big & little Salts Sand Seeds Smoke, all kinds Soil Soot Spiders, dead Tars Textile fibers Tobacco residues Viruses (assorted) Vomit Worms (Microscopic) |
This is but a minute sampling of the thousands of objects -- chemical, biological and other contaminants that invade your home daily and are captured by your giant filter - your carpet! Can you imagine that some people let their babies and kids crawl around in this stuff?
This is but a minute sampling of the thousands of objects -- chemical, biological and other contaminants that invade your home daily and are captured by your giant filter - your carpet! Can you imagine that some people let their babies and kids crawl around in this stuff?
Research has shown that the air quality inside the average home is far worse than that outside your doors. Today's tighter homes, combined with the filtering qualities of their carpet, trap all of these contaminants indoors. This plays havoc with allergies, and can even trigger the onset of symptoms in others.
As the seasons change, environmental conditions inside also change, meaning your house creates it's own indoor weather. Yup, all these critters, germs and viruses that you're raising in the pasture that is your carpet are inadvertently nurtured by you, the homeowner. Until you decide to sweep them away.
Vacuuming captures some percentage of these, but others are microscopic and are spewed right back into the air, are too deeply embedded for your vacuum to remove, or are missed all together, meaning they remain in your environment where they build up to intolerable, though invisible, levels, potentially causing a variety of diseases or discomfort.
Hot Water Extraction is the next best thing to throwing your carpet into a giant washing machine and flushing out all of these nasty things. Do you really believe that sprinkling perfumed powder on your carpet then vacuuming it up (leaving lots of it to add to the pollution) is really going to improve your air quality? Until I was properly educated, I actually believed the hype. Advertising can be a powerful medium, causing people to doubt the very laws of logic and physics. Taking the time to learn the science, as you are doing now, will OPEN YOUR EYES to the facts under your very feet.
Soiling is classified as anything that is not an original part of your carpet. What makes up the average soil in carpets? The following chart breaks it down for you:
