These Common Shop Bought Cleaning Products Can Ruin Your Carpets And Upholstery!

In addition to carpet and furniture cleaning jobs, we often get called to carry out individual stain removal treatments.

Indeed, it never ceases to amaze me the havoc a drunk husband or messy toddler can wreak on a lovely cream carpet!

Anyway, most spillages and common stains can be treated and removed successfully if we know what we’re dealing with.

But the real problems occur when a customer purchases and uses one of the common stain removal products that are sold in most supermarkets (no names mentioned but there’s more than one offending brand that fits the criteria here…)

I still can’t quite get my head around how some of these products can be sold as “stain removers” when they rarely actually get rid of the stain and often make it far worse and much more difficult to remove.

In fact, in my opinion and experience, they’re more likely to “set” the stain and make it look worse by discolouring the stain and the surrounding carpet fibres.

Here’s a before photo of a red wine stain that was treated and made worse with ****** by one of our customers this week:

Luckily, we managed to achieve a satisfactory result and the gentleman was over the moon:

On average, I’d say we attend at least two jobs per week where a stain has spiralled out of control and appears worse than when it was left untreated.

Some of these we manage to rectify (in the case of wool, we may be able to “re-colour” the colour damaged section of carpet) but there are some stains that once treated can’t be completely removed and in many cases can only be merely improved.

This is because some of the “stain removers” change the chemical structure of the stain and also damage the fibres.

In the majority of these cases, if the stain was left untreated by the shop bought stain remover we would have been able to fully remove all traces of the original stain.

If in any doubt about a particular cleaning product, or you’d like advice on treating a stain on your carpet or sofa, please do call us for advice.

We don’t charge for advice over the phone and we’re more than happy to talk you through a basic stain removal process with products you may already have in your home.