Most residences and commercial facilities don’t have their carpet cleaned often enough. Some wait a long time in between cleanings, and that’s not good, it’s not good for health, for the carpet and all that. Let’s find out how often you should get your carpets professionally cleaned in NJ homes.
Why NJ Homeowners Don’t Clean Often Enough
Historically, it’s the age-old question, it has to do with top of mind, people think of cleaning every two to four years.
We think of cleaning at every home, every restaurant, every hotel room. It’s who we are and what we do.
Carpet Cleaning in NJ
It’s up to professional cleaners to educate customers, explain what’s being done, show them why it’s different. If somebody has you in their home every couple of years and it’s 300 to clean their home, but if they were there every year it’d be substantially less.
So maybe every year a cleaner makes less money from that customer overall, but they’re there keeping the carpets at a good clean level and looking good. So it’s more conducive and long-term for the carpet’s life to clean more frequently.
IICRC Recommendations for NJ Homes
The IICRC standard, the S100, has said for years that every 12 to 18 months is recommended for cleaning, especially to maintain most warranties on residential cleaning, to keep up appearances, get the spots out quickly, and keep the levels of soil down to where it should be, so long-term damage isn’t being done.
Commercially, it’s a bit different, you’ve got to be on some sort of a routine cleaning program, some areas like the lobby of a large medical health building where thousands of people walk across might need cleaning once a week, while some areas on the 15th floor at the very back might only need it twice a year.
Maintenance programs are based on soil traffic, footsteps per square foot per day. It’s much more about the light, medium, heavy soil areas throughout the home and then also within each room or area.
Six stairs up, six stairs down, when you walk in the front door, you’ve got that four-foot by eight foot tile area and all that dirt goes somewhere, usually on those six stairs going up, so if that area isn’t cleaned, that carpet’s life is a few years, and carpet should last a lot more than that.
The Financial Impact of Delaying Carpet Cleaning in NJ
The cost of carpet has gone up, especially nylon has gone up more than double in some areas. A home with a hallway, three bedrooms, living room, and dining room could be eight to ten thousand dollars when bought ten years ago and now it’s double, so if those six stairs wear out, that’s a huge financial impact.
Commercial buildings taken over from mediocre to lousy cleaning can take months and months to rejuvenate, and a defined walk path in commercial buildings should never have occurred.
Maintenance cleaning more than once a year or twice a year through the whole place, broken up into parcels and areas that require more maintenance, is the way to go financially, since hundreds of thousands of dollars can be dropped in commercial buildings with cubicles just in the carpet.
Many people just have their carpet cleaned when they look at it and go, it’s dirty, especially in a residence, when there’s a party coming up, a graduation, family coming over. After COVID, some customers went almost three years without cleaning, and it may take a couple of cleanings to bring it back.
The Health Impact of Regular Carpet Cleaning
Routine vacuuming residentially matters, and it’s important to talk to customers about how to use a vacuum, what their vacuum is, how to push vacuums properly, what beater bars are for.
Commercially, talking to the customer about their janitorial service and how frequently it happens matters too, since vacuuming is what removes the allergens, the things that are airborne, that can be removed by vacuuming, while carpet cleaning removes what can’t be removed from vacuuming, the things that may be stuck to the plastic.
If what can become airborne isn’t maintained, that’s contributing to the indoor health of the home or commercial building, so vacuuming is critical alongside professional cleaning.
What NJ Homeowners Should Know
The more frequently carpet is cleaned, the more the health of the home is improved. Removing things like allergens and particles, not just what’s on the surface but what’s deep-bedded in the carpet, the things that stick there like cooking oils and pollutants from the air, greatly improves indoor health.
It also extends the life of that surface, so carpet with 10 years left, when cleaned, gets significantly more than 10 years left in life. A good person in this industry doing a high-quality cleaning job greatly improves indoor health and extends the life of the carpet, which is really what homeowners are looking for.