I just bought a house, stains are all over the carpet. I tried to google and of course it gave me a stain list and their correspondence cleaner.
I dont know what type of stains they are on the carpet, any advice on any universal stain remover that is readily available everywhere?
Construction S
Favorite Answer
welcome to home ownership, some of the best advise you can get for doing/fixing things around your house is from the middle aged employees at your local hardware shop that are working Monday-Friday between 8-5, these are the full time employees, they have probably been working there for many years and are mostly home owners. if you go to Walmart/target or hardware stores in the evenings & weekends you usually get the part time employee that don't know/care. Now to your question. you said the carpet is very stained & its your house.
The best & most expensive would be to get new carpeting, go to a local flooring store with the room size & you can see the prices, might not be as expensive as it sounds.
I would recommend renting a carpet cleaner/shampooer from the hardware store, they are usually a foot & half wide & on wheels. you pour clean water and a cleaning solution in one tank and you clean the entire carpet one strip at a time then dump the dirty water and repeat (I recommend also buy a spot cleaner in a spray bottle and pre-soak the stains) I have used these machines a couple times and they work great but it does take a few hrs. you would be surprised at how much these carpet cleaner/shampooer machines can get clean.
another option if you don't want to do the work yourself is to hire a carpet cleaning company,can be expensive.
the cheapest option is to go to the store and get spot cleaners(usually in a spray bottle, you spay wait a few min then get on your hands &knees and scrub the carpet clean.
Anonymous
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Karen L
You can buy general-purpose carpet stain remover solutions. And I also would hire a professional cleaner if there are a lot of stains. If there are that many stains, then the carpet is dirty overall anyway. They can get better cleaning solutions than you can get. They have machinery more powerful than you can get. And by the time you buy stain remover and carpet cleaning solution, rent the carpet cleaner, and spend a few hours doing a job not as good as the pro can do it, the professional cleaning is much better value. You can call it "just throwing money at the problem" if you want to. I call it getting the best value for the money you spend.
Betsy
The following combo I use @ my Mum's house on her wool Berber carpeting and costly orientals.
First I use: Oxyclean MaxForce Foam
(Usually used for laundry, but awesome on carpets....must use this foam stuff, for some reason I did not get the same results with other oxyclean products)
Last: In a spray bottle- equal parts 1. Hot water
2. Ammonia. Place a white towel over stain and spray towel to soak through to stain. With hot iron, go over area briefly (careful not to melt carpet/rug!) and watch as stain is pulled into the towel!
I highly suggest doing a small test area, in a non-conspicuous area if possible, to get the "hang" of the process.
Anne Arkey
Get an enzyme pet and stain remover. You can get spray types at the supermarket, pet store, and, of course, Amazon, and you can also get larger quantities that you add to your rug cleaning machine. No matter whether those are pet stains or not, an enzyme cleaner is going to be your best solution.
Bear in mind stains go deep, and even if the surface looks clean, the stain can wick back up to the surface from deep in the carpet.