best method of carpet cleaning?

[kickassangel]

we have just moved into a house with cream carpets (i know!) and the previous owners had a dog.

we are all allergic to dogs, and there are marks all round where the furniture was, so we need to clean them thoroughly.

What is the best way to get them clean? I was tempted to shampoo them, using a shampoo that claims to use anti-allergy stuff, but would steam cleaning work better? it is realtively easy for me to hire either one for 24 hours.

If you have cream carpets, hten I would suggest buying your own cleaner.

If you've got a lot of carpets then probably best to hire a carpet cleaner or buy one like scienceteacher says

We just had our carpet cleaned in the front room for £25 (DH spilled red wine and calpol on it!!).

They did a good job

hmm, but the domestic ones just don't look that good or cost about 10 times the cost of hiring! so still prob best to hire.

You can buy cleaners quite cheap nowadays, probably save money against hiring more than a few times but I did find my mid range vax cleaner wasn't up to my cream carpets. Nothing beat elbow grease on your hands and knees.

fortunately the hallway, kitchen diner etc are hard floor, so bedrooms, stairs & lounges are carpet. long-term we may replace some, but not yet. the anti-allergy thing is quite important for us

name.. hands & knees! i could weep! am hoping there's a beast of a machine i can use which will literally susck it all up for me!!

I think you probably need a professional clean too. It is much less hassle than doing it yourself and pretty equivalent to the cost of hiring. They also do spot stain removal also. Once it has had a good clean, then a steam cleaner in combination with Oxyclean foam does a good job.

Or get new carpets!

hiring a cleaner cost about 30 pounds for a day - juingle bells apid 25 for one room. i know there's the cost of shampoo as well, but a prof clean would cost a few hundred!!

is there anyone who's hired a 'steam cleaner' who can tell me how hard it is? the web sites i've looked at say you can overwet the carpet & get damp/mold problems. there are some patches where things werre spilt & only sort of cleaned, and down one side of where the bed was, a grease/dirt mark - i think the dog must have slept there, can't imagine that one of them had such dirty feet.

Whe hired a Rug Doctor from the local dry cleaner-they have them at B&Q too- when we got back from hols to discover the cat had mistakenly thought her treat while we were away was to wee and poo all over the sitting room floor instead of using the cat flap.

I think it cost £30 for 48 hours, and it was amazing, much better than the Bissell super-dooper steam carpet cleaner thing that we had bought for about £300 a few years before.

We used it in the bedrooms too, as we had it for the whole weekend, and the gunge that came out of it was like chocolate sauce. And were really not a mucky family, and rarely have shoes on by the time we get upstairs. Honest! I found it curiously fascinating to see how dirty the water had become, like examining a pore-removing strip post-nose use.

When you hire it, you buy the detergent as well, and I'm sure that they sell stain-specific stuff too, which could help with the dog-stain!

thanks, missy, so the websites saying use a professional, or you'll get mould etc, (sponsored by a cleaning firm) were just trying to con me.

will book one for a weekend - we want to do the whole house. particularly since i found out that white vinegar is good at neutralising wee, and they left behind a gallon jar of white vinegar - eww!