Professional Carpet Cleaners,
Listen Up!

If you’re a professional carpet cleaner and want to have an advantage over your competition, then you’ve come to the right place. We’re not going to talk about the latest detergent/solution or the newest wand or bonnet, no. We’ll be talking about water. This applies to truck-mount hot water extractors and Very Low Moisture (VLM) bonnet carpet cleaners. 

If you’re not using softened water, then you’ll find yourself spending more on labor and materials for results that are subpar. The reason being, hard water that comes straight from the tap is rich in minerals and magnesium. When it’s used to clean carpets, those contaminants are then sprayed straight into the fibers. In addition, if your truck mount has a hot water heater, the scale build-up on your equipment will become a costly problem down the road. 

For the professionals who use a pump pre-sprayer that needs to be filled with the customer’s garden hose or bathtub water; spraying a hard water/shampoo solution onto the carpet will yield stiff and sticky carpets once it’s dry. Clients will not be happy with the results and will call you to complain or worse, leave a bad review on Yelp.

To address hard water issues, consider making a little investment in something called a portable water softener by Pro Aqua. This tiny titan can take the hardest of water and make it up to 40% softer through the use of premium NSF food-grade resin. Basically what it does is remove calcium, magnesium, and other minerals from tap water through ion exchange. As water travels through the softener, the minerals cling to the resin beads and do not come out the other end, thus making the water softer. 

The tank and resin have the capability of conditioning water for 40 days or 2,000 gallons. A typical 150sqft bedroom can use anywhere from 3-5 gallons of water for hot water extraction cleaning. While a VLM  cleaner can use 1-2 gallons of water per room. That means if a truck mount cleaner that uses an average of 80 gallons per day, the crew wouldn’t need to regenerate the water softener until 25 working days later. While a VLM cleaner who uses an average of 8 gallons per day, they wouldn’t have to regenerate their water softener for at least 250 days. 

To regenerate or get rid of the hardness stuck on the resin inside the tank, the process only uses 2 boxes of salt ($.50 per box) and a total of 30 minutes. In addition to everything that has been mentioned above, the water softener tank measures only 10" x 19.5" in total size, making it the ideal size to mount in a work van/truck or to put on a tool cart or a small dolly.

A portable water softener like the Pro+Aqua is a must with carpet cleaners. This device will provide a better return on investment than any other piece of equipment that is used for carpet cleaning. It’s affordable and will help any carpet cleaning business stand out from their competition by making sure they provide their clients with the best results.