Time and time again, customers walk into Persian Rug Cleaner with a beautiful piece that has lost much of its value. The culprit is usually carpet cleaners.
As many of you have probably experienced, when carpet cleaners come to clean your carpets and notice a handmade rug, they are quick to tell you that they clean rugs as well and it would be no trouble to clean your fine rug.
Recently, a couple came in with a pair of rugs with extensive damage. The husband had fallen for the carpet cleaner’s promise that they could clean rugs, specifically $40,000 pure silk Persian rugs, as well as carpets, much the the dismay of his wife, who knew better.
These companies often claim to know everything about fine handmade rugs, and assert that they clean them all the time. While it’s true that they could clean the rugs, it’s clear that doesn’t mean they should!
In just two weeks after cleaning, the fringes of their beautiful Persian rug completely unraveled. It was obvious that the destruction was tied to the “cleaning” perpetrated by the carpet cleaner. We won’t say who cleaned their valuable pieces and ruined them, but we will say it was one of the leading carpet cleaners in the area.
Never never never trust a carpet cleaner to wash a handmade rug. The methods and chemicals they use are made for artificial fibers, essentially nylon. You can imagine how bad this kind of method is for a rug made of delicate natural fibers such as wool or silk. Would you clean your hair with the same chemicals you clean your car with? Of course not! Hair is much more delicate and made of a completely different material. The material is what dictates what cleaners you should use on an item.
Rugs are works of art made by hand. The machines used by carpet cleaners for carpets are much too rough on the fragile foundation of fine rugs and can cause your rug to unravel, which is exactly what happened to that couple, unfortunately. Only trust your rug to professionals who specialize in cleaning rugs by hand. Your rug should not be cleaned at your own home. Professional rug cleaning requires your rug to be taken to a specialized facility.
In addition, carpet cleaners typically leave soap inside your rug without rinsing it out. This causes materials like silk to lose their luster, while at the same time becoming cumbersome and stiff. The cleaners they use can even cause color fading and stains.
As we have seen in the past, unprofessional rug washing leads to fringe and binding damage, color bleeding, and harms texture of the rug fibers. If you have allowed a carpet cleaner to wash your rugs, call Persian Rug Cleaner immediately for a consultation to remove the soap and cleaners undoubtedly left within the pile of your rug before they cause further harm.
We use only the safest of organic shampoos and natural enzymes. Our hand washing method is machine free and passed down through generations from Old Persia.
Luckily for the couple that brought their damaged pure silk Persian rug in, Persian Rug Cleaner was able to reweave the fringes and restore them. However, the methods for doing so are expensive due to the amount of manual labor involved and the value of the rug will never be the same. Allowing a carpet cleaner to wash your rug causes the rug to lose a great portion of its value. It would be better yet to not let a carpet cleaner wash your rugs to begin with.
When it comes to cleaning fine handmade rugs, experience matters. Trust the experts at Persian Rug Cleaner for generations of expertise, knowledge, and care.
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