Hand Held Stream Cleaner

[CosmicTwirlyLlama]

Can anyone recommend a good hand held steam cleaner for cleaning the edge of a carpet? Just moved into a house. Nothing wrong with the rest of the carpet (spare bedroom) but the edge of the carpet (where it touches the wall) has black marks all around it. Not sure why! I don’t really want to replace the carpet just yet bit wondered if a hand held steam cleaner would shift it.

Is it dust that's accumulated? I went round the edges of our carpet wearing rubber gloves and got rid of lots of dust that way then vacced. It does make your hands hot with the friction though lol.
appreciate too that it's not your dust and could be stomach turning!

I don’t tthink it’s dust. The whole house is very clean but this carpet has a black marks all around the edges. The carpet is fine, otherwise.

We love our one of these. I used it when we moved for exactly the same reason you are asking. Also does upholstery and so on: www.vax.co.uk/carpet-cleaners-and-washers/spot-cleaners/spotwash-home-pet-design-and-car

I bought one from Amazon- 37.99 from a company callled Assca. It is scarily powerful! And the range of attachments are ideal for carpets

I was told by a carpet fitter that this is dust thats drawn to the carpet edge because of the gap under your skirting boards. If you can lift your carpets you can seal this gap and stop this happening. We did this when we replaced our carpet upstairs and don’t seem to have this issue now.

This. In older houses there were intentional gaps left around the outside of the rooms to help the fires draw. But when you put carpet on top and hoover them, you're pulling dust and old soot that exists under the floorboards through the carpet which is acting like a filter. You'll need a carpet cleaner to tackle it, probably best to hire one. But it'll come back. When you get round to replacing the carpets, get the edges of the room sealed first

I ordered one of these earlier!

https://easycleaninglondon.co.uk/draught-filtration-marks/

It's usually caused by a gap in the floorboards or under the skirting board where there's air filtering through.

Edited to add - I'm not advertising the cleaning company. It's just the first website that came up that had a good description.