There are a multitude of reasons why a rug’s dyes may run during cleaning. In fact, I wrote a post on several of those reasons behind how a rug’s dyes can bleed on you.

Blue dye migration on Wilton wool rug.

The careless cleaner approaches a rug as if they are all the same. “Wool is wool, what’s the big deal?”

Most don’t bother to do a dye test. Why? Honestly, I’m not sure why. It should be done on every rug, and it only takes a few minutes. This can be done with a high pH solution, or my personal preference of testing with hot water in a small area on the front AND the back.

Other careless cleaners do in fact do the dye test, but then they think if they use a dye stabilizing or dye locking solution that the rug becomes bulletproof to bleeding on them. That’s just not true, especially if the rug has colors that crock on a towel during a dry or damp towel.

The red dye crocks on to a damp towel.

When color crocks on to a cotton towel when it’s dry, or when it’s just damp, this is a serious problem. Especially if the color is a dark one.

In the case above, this is a tribal woven rug from Afghanistan. In some tribal areas, especially war-torn ones like in this weaving region, water is not always readily accessible to provide the thorough washing and scouring of the wool to remove the excess dyes and other impurities from the wool. So you have a rug that has some excess dye in the wool, that is going to move when it gets wet with a wash, so you better be seriously skilled to be able to handle that when it happens.

But sometimes the crocking is not from excess dye, but from color that has been added AFTER the rug was woven.

We call these rugs over-dyed rugs, and you will see these types of rugs come in two types:

1) TEA WASHED RUGS

A large number of rugs today, especially coming out of India, Pakistan, and China, are being given a tea wash treatment. This is a brown dye that is sometimes called henna wash, or also called having your rug “antiqued,” because it gives the rug a more muted look which makes it look older.

India tea washed rug

The tones vary from browns to golds to yellows. They make the rug darker, and also make the white cotton fringes beige or brown.

The better quality rugs are properly soaked in the dye to allow for even application, or are given multiple layers of application to ensure a good saturation and bonding of the tea wash dye to the rug fibers.

The lesser quality applications are sprayed on, usually on just one side, and it is often these lesser quality treatments that will crock on a dye test. This means that no matter how gentle you are with your cleaning process that over-dye is coming off. It’s like a spray-on fake tan… good until it’s time to take a shower.

Grin open the fibers and you see the bad tea wash job.

When you grin open the fibers you can see if there has been an over-dye treatment with tea wash. You can also see it on the fringe tassels by untwisting them to see if there is white under the beige tone.

Cleaning the fringe removes the tea wash dye on some.

And while you are closely inspecting the rug, look also for other pre-existing damage, because often a tea wash application is given to rugs to try to cover up damage such as pre-existing rug dye bleed or other stains.

It’s important to share with your client that the rug has been over-dyed with this tea wash treatment BEFORE you clean it, because likely some of it will come out no matter how gentle you are with your process. Especially if it crocks on you, that over-dye is coming off even if you choose a dry compound cleaning method.

But, at least it CAN be cleaned. You just need to share that this if it tests as a poorer quality application, that the rug has essentially been given a “spray-on tan” that needs to come off if they want it to be properly washed.

A much more perilous over-dye treatment isn’t dye at all… it’s ink.

2) INKED RUGS

Rug dealers for years have tried to hide small areas of damage on antique rugs with using India ink, or painting of worn areas to make them less noticeable.

Today this practice has unfortunately expanded to create some truly dangerous rugs.

New Hamadan rug bought on-line, and covered in INK.

The rug above is an example of one of the dangers of buying a rug on-line on one of these mass market retailers. When you buy rugs locally, at least you get the opportunity to “try it before you buy it” and take it out on approval. But more importantly you can do things like take a handkerchief and do a little dye test in the store just to make sure you are not buying inferior goods.

For a rug cleaner, this rug would be a nightmare. Every single color of this rug has been colored over with ink, which is why it has that blotchy, dark look to it. And when you grin the fibers open you can see that there is dark ink on the tips of the fibers.

Tips of the fibers are purple ink, base of the fibers are blue.

Taking a completely DRY towel to the face of this rug picked up every single color.

Dry towel picks up red from the rug easily.

Getting this rug even damp would make the inks pool together and make a mess not only of the rug, but of your wash floor.

So when you do your dye test on a rug, and it crocks, you want to investigate closely to see if it’s possibly ink applied to the fibers, because a dye stabilizing or locking solution is not going to do a thing for ink.

This rug, and others like it, is flawed product… and is not cleanable. And in the case of the rug being shown, the ink from the rug moved on to the underneath wall-to-wall carpeting which led to a much more expensive problem for the owner to handle.

Today more than ever, with the push to cut corners on production costs and get rugs to market faster and cheaper, there are more traps for rug cleaners today than ever before.

But if you are careful, and very thorough with your fiber and dye tests, and your pre-inspection checklists, then you can avoid the biggest rug disasters out there.

Happy Rug Cleaning!

- Lisa

You’re in trouble indeed…

I know he chewed the rug... but he's so CUTE!

It’s all fun and games until the valuable oriental rug in the den gets a pet urine stain that’s not coming out.

Pet urine is at the top of the “uh oh” chart of rug disasters. The stains are usually permanent. But if the field has a busy design that might not be a big issue.

The odor though… well, that IS a lingering issue, and the longer that urine sits in those rug fibers, the worse of an issue it’s going to become to the rug and the floor.

The top topic this month from cleaners who wrote me “HELP ME!” emails was how to get pet urine odor out of rugs, so that’s my topic for this post.*

(*My disclaimer here for professional cleaners is, these are my opinions from our company’s experience and the experience of students I’ve trained. Please do NOT take my word as gospel here, they are simply educated recommendations because every rug and situation is different. My advice is not meant to be a substitute for your getting actual training in this craft, and seeking out additional real world experience to enhance your own skills. For goodness sakes TEST everything in small attempts first. Every rug must always be fiber tested, dye colorfast tested, and thoroughly pre-inspected before cleaning. Always. Okay… let’s go into some recommendations on pet puddles.)

If you happen to be a rug owner, and a pet owner, here is a post with some tips on what to do and why you need to jump on pet accidents right away => Pet Accidents Happen. Now What?

Otherwise, the rest of you professional cleaners, let’s talk about odor removal.

Pet Urine Odor Removal From Rugs

Remove The Source (Woven Rugs)

First things first… you need to remove the source of the odor, so the urine needs to come out of the middle of that rug.

Woven rugs are often constructed with wool knots wrapped around cotton warps and wefts (the foundation fibers).

Rug loom. Hand tying wool knots around cotton warps.

Cotton, as you know, is absorbent. This is why we use cotton towels to wipe things up – they pick up moisture.

So when warm pet urine hits a rug, it will be suspended for a short time (because wool has a natural repellency to moisture) and then it will penetrate the wool fibers and be pulled into those cotton fibers.

This is why when you see a urine stain on a rug, you know you are only seeing the tip of the iceberg. There is a larger amount of urine inside that rug than you are seeing.

This is a much BIGGER accident than what you see...

With rugs, removing the odor source means you are going to have to wash it out. You cannot surface clean an oriental rug with a truck mount or portable and remove the odor causing elements from the inside foundation fibers. It just does not work that way. And trying to cover up your incomplete work with a heavy fragrance deodorizer is going to just make it worse. It’s like spraying Lysol in a Port-a-Potty… floral smelling sewage ain’t going to cut it on this one.

(By the way, woven oriental rugs should never be surface cleaned in the home with carpet cleaning equipment, for a variety of reasons I shared in a recent post on “Why Rugs Aren’t Cleaned In The Home.” If you are going to be a real rug cleaner, you are going to have to clean rugs properly in your facility.)

The most thorough way to get to the odor-causing contaminants out of woven rugs is to WASH the rugs.

Quick FYI: “woven” rugs are rugs where you can see the design on the back the same as on the front, like this:

Woven rug, you see the design on the back same as the front. This one is woven by hand.

Here’s another woven rug, but by machine:

Woven rug. Machine made.

Removing the source means washing it out. This is what full-service rug cleaning facilities do.

They may wash in a wash pit, or on a larger wash floor, but they WASH the rugs clean.

Rug wash pit.

Wash floor - high volume water.

If you are not experienced at washing rugs, you need to be particularly careful when pet urine is involved, because this creates a lot of dangers for rug cleaners.

Dangers From Pet Urine To Woven Rugs

It’s not just the odor that is a problem for rug cleaners, there are 3 other big dangers to be wary of:

1) STAINS

Pet urine stains are often permanent, especially if they have been there for awhile. Sometimes chemical stain removers can be used to try to strip out the yellow urea staining, but this will create damage to the fibers as a result (all bleaching and stripping agents cause fiber damage), so you need to be especially careful in any stain removal attempts or your client’s pet stain may become worse… and become YOUR stain instead of theirs.

Pet urine stain on a Tabriz rug. Haphazard stain removal could easily make this rug worse.

Often the best path to take is to state that the stain is likely permanent, and with that being the case, do they still want the rug washed and the urine removed so that the odor is gone.

If the stained area improves during the wash, then that’s great. It’s just not wise to guarantee anything besides that you will try your very best, especially if the rug’s owner already tried a bunch of over-the-counter “miracle” stain removers before they brought it to you. They likely have “set” the stain worse in their panic.

If you are truly skilled at wool stain removal, then you can of course guarantee whatever you want to. I’ve just found over the years that when we’ve said “no problem” – we’ve jinxed the job… and sometimes when we’ve said it won’t get better at all, and tried to turn the job away, it’s actually washed up great.

You just never know, so it’s best to keep expectations low in any case involving pet urine, vomit, or feces.

2) DYE BLEED and COLOR LOSS

Even very colorfast dyes on a wool or silk rug can bleed with longterm exposure to pet urine. I’ve seen rugs that would never “bleed” even if involved in a flood for days (like a 1920′s American Sarouk rug with iron-clad dyes) bleed when exposed to repeated pet urine stains.

Over time pet urine stains shift from acidic to alkaline. The problem with alkalinity is that it can cause serious damage to acid rug dyes, and those areas can release and bleed the color when wet despite using your rug dye stabilizing solutions.

Red dye bleed on a silk rug from pet urine.

This alkalinity problem is the same one that creates dye bleeding problems for on-location carpet cleaners who use their carpet cleaning machines and solutions (which tend to be alkaline because they are meant for synthetic wall-to-wall carpeting) on natural fiber rugs. This mix often creates disasters.

This Chinese rug has strong dyes, but the combination of pet urine AND an improper use of high-pH traffic lane cleaner by a carpet cleaner made the red and green dyes bleed badly.

The danger of old pet urine stains is that even if you test the rug’s dyes, and it tests colorfast, it is very likely those urine affected areas will still bleed on you. In fact, you should expect them to, and inform your client that though you are taking every necessary precaution, that is dye damage that is pre-existing from their pet.

You also may have situations where the wash takes the dye that has “dissolved” away from the fibers due to the long term urine exposure, and you end up with situations of rug dye loss, where the color just washes away and disappears, and only the yellow urea remains.

Light gray color is gone where the urine stain is.

Blue has bled on this Wilton rug. Washing will created faded away areas as a result.

3) DRY ROT

The worst danger from long-term, repeated exposure to pet urine is that the cotton foundation fibers start to mildew, and begin to become rotten from dry rot. Dry rot is not correctible. In worst case scenarios, usually seen from plants on top of rugs where moisture slowly rots the rug away, this creates large holes as a result. This rug had a pot sitting along the end, and the owner never knew she was harming her rug:

Potted plant on end of rug eventually rots a hole in it due to moisture and spills over time.

When pets repeatedly puddle in the same area of a rug over and over again, this type of dry rot risk is likely to happen. So it is important to inspect the areas of the rug where you see pet stains, and inspect the back of the rug to see if you see any signs of dry rot, such as dark mildew activity in the cotton fibers and a stiffness to the affected area.

Urine stain visible on front of this Azeri rug. We need to look at the back.

Top arrow shows dark mildew growth in foundation fibers that is the sign of dry rot, and lower arrow shows how repeated urine has bled a brown dye that is colorfast.

With dry rot you risk creating a hole during cleaning if you are not careful, especially if you use an extractor. Proceed at your own risk. When a pet stain becomes a big hole, that will become “your” problem to the owner… even though it was pre-existing damage from the pet.

Remove The Source (Tufted Rugs)

Tufted rugs present a real challenge with odor removal. Unlike woven rugs, with tufted rugs you do not see the design on the back side – you either see a material backing or a latex mesh backing:

Tufted rugs today often have material backing to cover up the ugly latex holding it together.

I refer to tufted rugs as “fake rugs” because they are a quick way to create the look of a woven rug without the quality or care. And I am not a fan of the fact that these rugs are often held together with heavy latex adhesive that can sometimes smell like an acrid rubber tire, and is next to impossible to remove that odor and any other odors that may be added to it.

The dangers for woven rugs from long term pet urine exposure apply to tufted rugs also, but you have some additional concerns as well. One is delamination which will likely get worse while you try to thoroughly wash the pet urine out of the rug. The rug may fall apart on you, or at the least need an additional application of latex to try to hold it back in shape again.

Latex is crumbling away from a combination of age, repeated pet urine stains, and repeated washings needed to remove the odor-causing contaminants.

You need to make sure the rug is sturdy enough to handle a wash. You also need to test the tuft strength, because if the latex is deteriorating, those fibers may pull right out if you try to scrub or extract water from the rug.

Recommended Cleaning Steps For Woven & Tufted Rugs Contaminated By Pet Urine:

1) Pre-Inspect and Protect

The more time you spend thoroughly pre-inspecting a rug BEFORE the wash, the less time you will spend trying to correct mistakes made by failing to fiber test, dye test, or truly look at BOTH sides of a rug for any warning signs.

One big rookie mistake is doing a quick dye test, seeing the dyes are colorfast, and being shocked when the pet urine stained areas all bleed on you DESPITE your use of dye stabilizing solutions.

Pet urine on a rug means it will have problems, so if it your responsibility to explain this to the owner BEFORE the wash, that the rug is damaged and that the thorough washing required to remove the odor causing contaminants increases risks of dye migration in these urine affected areas. You need to be released from liability on this point because the damage to the dyes (and to the value of the rug) is pre-existing.

If the rug’s owner does not want to release you from this liability, then you need to turn the job away.

2) Pre-Treat Visible Pet Urine Stains

On rugs that have a potential to “bleed” on you (obviously natural color rugs with urine stains are not a dye bleed risk, so any colorful rug IS a risk, even with colorfast dyes) – this is a strategy I recommend to those who attend my courses in order to minimize the dye migration impact on the rug.

Soaking a rug in an acidic bath helps remove the urine salts in the middle of the rug that are causing the odor.

Many professional rug plants will soak the rug in vinegar (acetic acid 6% diluted down to 3%) to flush out the urine in a wash pit or floor. For those who don’t like the odor of vinegar Sapphire Scientific’s new Dye Stabilizer & Rinse will do the same, without that odor.

But, especially with a wash pit, you risk dye migration throughout the entire rug by just having it soak in an acid bath for an extended period of time no matter what you use.

A better strategy is to flush out the urine in the specific stained area without creating risk for the rest of the rug. You can do this by pouring your chosen pre-treat solution on the stain directly, wet it down for a few minutes, and then use the Water Claw Spot Flasher to extract out the urine from the innermost fibers.

Water Claw Flash Spotter

On woven rugs, this is best done from the back side of the rug, and it helps to have a pad or other type of cushioned surface to help create the “compression” to help pull out more moisture.

With tufted rugs you will not be able to get through that latex, so you need to do it from the front side.

You want to pre-treat the area more than once if you still see yellow water (urine) coming out from the stained area.

Instead of releasing the urine – and the dye – from these areas into a wash pit, where it’s affecting the entire rug, you can control the removal of a lot of the “source” spot by spot. Dyes will bleed in these areas, but the Water Claw will remove most of it along with the urine. This means less migration risk to you during the wash process, and a better chance of success of getting the rug odor-free (if it is woven… tufted rug latex is VERY difficult to remove urine odor from because it gets inside that adhesive).

3) Wash & Deodorize/Enzyme If Needed

After pre-treating the urine stained areas to remove as much of the odor-causing source as you can, then you proceed to your normal wash process.

(I am assuming here that you know how to dye test and know how to adjust your cleaning times and strategies based on whether they dyes test as colorfast or fugitive, and what products you need to use to properly and safely clean natural fiber or synthetic rugs. If you do NOT know this, then get more education before you attempt to wash rugs… otherwise you will end up buying them when you ruin them.)

In a pet urine affected rug, even if the dyes test as colorfast, I personally would wash it like I would a “bleeder” – quick and using a Dye Stabilizer solution and a cleaning solution in the neutral pH range, or acidic.

Based on your experience and judgment, choose your wash process to proceed with, and if there remains an odor on the wash floor, you can choose to use your preferred deodorizer or enzyme treatment at this point.

Often I find that the pre-treat process with our regular wash process is all that is required to remove the odor. But on heavily contaminated rugs, or tufted rugs that have the latex holding onto the urine smell, we will use a Deodorizer.

Deodorizers that I’ve had personal experience – and success – with are Sapphire Scientific’s Area Rug Deodorizer, OdorX’s Un-Doz-It, Masterblend’s Anti-Allergen Deodorizer (I prefer this to Masterblend’s Skunk Odor Remover because it has no fragrance and the SOR has a heavy fragrance – but some rug cleaners like to use SOR), and Bridgepoint’s Hydrocide.

I am sure there are other good products out there, including some enzyme products, these are just the ones I’ve had some experience with.

Be sure to thoroughly rinse the rug. I like to use an acid rinse to remove residue as some of these products get a bit foamy on you.

4) Dry Thoroughly & Additional Work If Needed

Remove the water from the rug and drying it thoroughly. If you want ideas on different tools and equipment to use for this step, and others from the wash process, you can reference my post on Rug Shop Set-up’s. All the current options are up there, including some D-I-Y set-ups.

Many long time rug operations have a COOL old school roller wringer like mine here:

Rug through roller wringer. Safely and quickly removes the excess water and flattens out the rug for quick drying.

This is the quickest way to get most of the water out of the rug, plus there is the added advantage of it “ironing” out the rug so that it is very flat and even during the final drying process. (By the way, they do not build these wringers any more here in the US – so most of us have bought them second-hand. I have a friend here in CA who is looking to sell his large roller wringer, so if you are interested, send me an email at rugchick@gmail.com and I’ll connect you to him. It’s a screaming deal… and a great piece of machinery. We LOVE our wringer.)

Back to pets…

If despite your pre-treat, wash, and deodorizing attempts, you still have a noticeable urine odor to the rug, your last chance of success short of washing the rug completely all over again, is using the Odorox machine - which we’ve used a few times on rugs with chronic pet urine contamination (multiple dogs over multiple years).

Odorox treatment to remove odor. Rug is under the tarp.

Though we have NOT had any success removing the awful rubber odor from bad latex tufted rugs… we have had success removing urine odor from rugs where repeated washings could not get the job completely done. I’ve been really happy with this machine so far.

Those are my tips for you to help you have more success in tackling the biggest challenge we have in the rug cleaning field – handling pet damaged rugs.

If you happen to have your clients asking you for some recommendations on rugs, and they happen to have pets, here are a few tips I share with our pet-owning clients. Feel free to use them as well.

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Tips for Rug Owners who have accident-prone Pets…

=> You need to own rugs that can be WASHED, so look for woven rugs instead of tufted ones. If price is an issue, look for machine woven rugs, or perhaps synthetic rugs. Synthetic fibers tend to be less expensive than natural fibers (they also are not as nice, because the best fiber for rugs is wool… but if your pets will be puddling often, you might as well have them do it on an inexpensive machine made synthetic rug).

=> Pick a rug with a BUSY design so yellow stains will not be obvious. Rug Cleaners can wash the odor out of woven rugs, but stains will likely be permanent.

=> Use a pad under the rug even if it does not slide or buckle on you, because this will help create a barrier between your rug and your floor. If pet urine penetrates the rug and gets into your flooring, you will have a much larger odor removal problem on your hands, especially if you have specialty hardwood floors. It may not be possible to remove the odor short of replacing the floor, so a pad can help protect you from the worst case scenario… or at least delay the inevitable if your puppies aren’t trained quickly.

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I hope you found some value in this post on pet puddles. If you have any questions on this post, please post them in the COMMENTS section down below. I don’t have all the answers… but I do my best to share what I know.

Happy rug cleaning!

- Lisa

P.S. Next week the announcement for my upcoming training program for professional cleaners is being released. To receive that information, just make sure you are on my Rug Chick list. You do that by going to the top right corner of this blog, and putting your name and email into the Rug Disasters Report request box. This not only gets you my report on the most common rug disasters by cleaners, but officially puts you on “my list.” (Don’t worry, I’m not one of those “rug people” that writes you every other day with the next huge “big easy money” deal… I hate that. I just write once or twice a month with some additional *free* rug information, and I will announce my training program to these loyal readers first.)

Watering a potted plant near a rug can lead to a big ugly dry rot hole in a rug if it’s left undisturbed for too long.

If you want to know why this happens, please read this => Don’t Water The Rugs!

That’s what happened to this runner. The moisture from a potted plant was absorbed by the cotton foundation of this rug, all underneath the pot, and it began to mildew and then rotted from the inside out until it crumbled into a big hole:

Hole created from a house plant.

This damage is not reversible, or correctible. If you’ve ever seen drapes that have been so exposed to sun for so many years that they just begin to fray in your hands like paper, then you can recognize how deterioration like that is not correctible.

If the rug is an investment textile, you might consider paying thousands to send the rug to a company – perhaps in the country of origin – to reweave the area… but it will never be the same. You cannot truly “restore” a rug back to its original condition when it’s had this type of structural damage.

What you may consider doing is to have the damaged area patched. This would entail removing all of the damaged and mildew affected areas completely, and securing a patch into the hole to allow the rug to be strong and useable again. This is typically the repair choice for rug owners who uncover significant dry rot in their rug.

Another option is to do what was done to the runner shown above with the big hole, which was to shorten it in a way that made it look as if it were meant to be the size it ended up being.

Runner was taken from 6 medallions down to 5 - but it looks like it was meant to be 5 in this photo after the repair.

To see the steps taken to shorten this plant-damaged rug, visit this post => Runner Repair Post

If you are a cleaner picking up rugs to take to your facility, pay special attention to the rugs near plants. You want to look for signs of dye bleed, the sign or odor of mildew, or any stiffness to the area that you feel. These are all warning signs of water damage.

If you are an owner of rugs, you want to take care to keep the plants OFF your rugs, or at the very least elevated, and that the rugs are folded away from the plants during watering time.

As you are inspecting the rugs for any planter water damage, take a look also for any bug activity, especially with rugs that have been undisturbed for months. For tips on how to spot bug activity, and how to keep the moths and carpet beetles away, read this post => Bugs Don’t Eat My Rugs!

The damage – whether it’s from plants or bugs – only gets severe when it’s left unattended for months. If you make it a habit to check your rugs regularly, you can catch it before it becomes too expensive to repair.

- Lisa

P.S. If you are a professional rug cleaner looking for second-hand large rug cleaning equipment, I’ve been asked to locate interested cleaners for a 16-ft roller wringer ($13,500 – or best offer) and a 24-pole electric wrench dry pole system ($11,500 – or best offer). These machines are located in southern California. Wringers are hard to find second-hand these days, and to get a new centrifugal spinning wringers instead, only up to 14 ft. long, will run you around $50,000 from U.S. suppliers. A bit less from the European suppliers. The dry racks are selling for around $10,000 new for only a dozen poles. If you are seriously interested (i.e. you have the funds to purchase and ship to your location), then send me an email at rugchick@gmail.com. These will go fast, so if it’s sold by the time you write me, I apologize in advance.

With the number of home floods escalating due to severe weather, a number of rugs will be exposed to flood water.

The longer a rug remains wet the more likely it is to have dye migration that is not correctible.

Rug dyes have bleed.

Rugs that are not washed properly, and not dried thoroughly, can end up with mildew and dry rot problems.

Mildew eating away the cotton foundation.

Rugs left wet too long can lead to dry rot - it just crumbles apart. This was wet too long in a storage unit.

Here are tips to minimize the damage to oriental rugs involved in floods:

-       Extract the water as soon as possible using a wet vacuum or having your water damage restoration company extract with their professional water removal equipment.

Water claw

DriEaz Rover

(Professional equipment like the Water Claw and the Rover are the quickest way to remove water in the home from wet rugs. The Water Claw should be used on the BACK side of the rug. The Rover can be ridden and pulls much more moisture out quicker, and with the smooth lip on the extraction points, it can be used on the front or back of the rug.)

-       Make sure you wand extract WITH the direction of the rug’s fiber nap, instead of against it (this minimizes fiber damage). If you “pet” the rug, it’s like petting your animals, you can feel which direction is *with* the grain, and which is against it.

Extract quickly. Best if done with professional equipment.

-       If you are unable to have the rugs thoroughly washed right away, then it’s important to get the rugs as dry as possible as quickly as possible to lessen the risks of permanent damage. Dry them fast and wash/sanitize them later.

-       When transporting to a rug cleaning facility to be washed, wrap in towels or sheets to prevent dry from migration from one rug to another. It is very difficult to remove dye migration.

-       Do NOT hang up wet rugs. Extract and dry out flat. Hanging wet puts too much weight on the foundation of the rugs, and will pull the migrating dye throughout the face of the rug and into it’s fringe tassels.

Dry rugs flat after extraction.

Use axial fans like Airpath to speed up drying. Dehumidifiers also as needed in contained areas.

-       Do NOT dry in direct sunlight. Most contemporary rugs are sensitive to sunlight fading. If you must dry in sunlight, lay the rugs face down so fading occurs on the back side only until the rugs are taken to a rug washing facility.

Powder blue color is faded to tan when this rug was placed face up in direct sunlight to dry.

Wool and silk oriental rugs can take months, sometimes years, to weave by hand. If you have investment textiles you want to protect from a flood that has affected your home, simply follow these guidelines and you can lessen the risk of permanent damage to your rugs due to extended exposure to water.

Once you have done your best to minimize the damage, the rugs then need to be thoroughly washed and sanitized before being returned to the home. This is done in professional rug washing facilities.

Rugs in floods need to be fully washed to remove contaminants from the innermost foundation fibers.

Rugs from floods need to be soaked in a sanitizing solution and then washed and rinsed thoroughly.

Even the filthiest rugs can come out looking fantastic with a good bath.

Silk rug (before). © RugChick.com

Silk rug (after) © RugChick.com

When it comes to something as messy and dangerous as floods, it’s best to leave it to the professionals.

Print and keep these tips handy in case you have the unfortunate experience of having your home flooded. And you will know what to do in order to help protect your favorite rugs, and to make sure they are clean and safe when they are returned to your “fixed up” home.

- Lisa

P.S. If you like this post, then please *share* it so that others who might have floods will know what to do too. Thank you!

I’ve been getting a lot of emails lately on bugs eating rugs – so I thought I’d share some tips for both rug owners and rug cleaners.

Moths ate the wool, left behind the cotton foundation.

The two biggest wool rug culprits are moths and carpet beetles.

Moths: rug enemy #1.

Carpet beetle: rug enemy #2.

For some more extensive ways to get rid of theses critters from your home, visit this site for moths, and this site for carpet beetles.

For rugs, there are several steps you can take to keep the bugs from digesting your oriental rugs.

VACUUM REGULARLY

These bugs like nice, quiet, undisturbed places. You will generally find them doing their dirty work under the corner of your sofa, behind a drape, along the cracks in the planks of your wood floor, or on the back side of a rug hanging up still on your wall.

You do not need to “beat” the rug with your vacuum, just give it a good once over on the front every few weeks, and flip over the corners to see if there is anything to be wary of. Moth larvae looks like sticky lint and they do their damage when they emerge from those cocoons HUNGRY.

I like to run my vacuum upholstery tool over the back of the corners of my rugs, just to be safe, and once a quarter I completely vacuum the back side of my rugs to make enough chaos to have bugs look for another place to feast.

For rugs hanging on the walls, at least once a quarter take them down to vacuum. If they are delicate you can use the upholstery attachment instead of a beater bar or super-sucker type vacuum. Because of this needed maintenance for hanging textiles, this is why we like to suggest using velcro to hang rugs – it makes it easy to take down and put back up.

WASH REGULARLY

Rugs under normal to heavy use should be washed annually.

This means sending them out to be washed in a rug cleaning plant, and NOT having them just surface cleaned in your home. (BIG difference, especially if you are trying to avoid bugs.)

If you have moderate traffic on your rugs, and you vacuum at least every other week, that wash time can be extended to every 18-24 months. But longer than 2 years, you are asking for trouble. Not only from the abrasive grit that gets lodged into the base of the rug fibers (which is what causes areas to wear down faster), but also in regards to insect activity.

Washing helps dislodge bug activity and remove it. And for rugs with a big problem you are looking to solve, and you do not want to soak the rug in pesticide poisons, washing and giving the rug a vinegar rinse will help physically remove the bugs and their problem-causing ways.

FOR STORAGE – ALWAYS WASH BEFORE WRAPPING UP

Rug cleaners rarely offer “mothproofing” these days because those solutions are pesticides that kill things, and for something you may have your kids or pets rolling around on, that’s just not safe.

Even the odorless insect repellent solutions that professional cleaners have available and are not poisons still have some irritation risks. (Always read the MSDS to evaluate whether you want to use a particular product that requires leaving residue behind.)

But if a textile is going into storage for years, it is best to make sure you are not going to open up the package and find a rug disaster, so using a repellent is wise unless you are putting the piece in a cedar chest, or using other items that tend to discourage moths.

When I put something into storage, I don’t want to worry about it, so I use a repellent.

The most important step though is the wash and making sure you are not wrapping the rug up with any unwanted pest guests.

If your rug does have a visible insect problem right now, while it is out to be professionally washed you will need to bring in a professional cleaner to tackle your wall-to-wall carpet or your hard floors, wherever the problem rugs were, so that you can remove the rest of the problem.

Hot water extraction (“steam cleaning”) can take care of the problem in your carpeting – something the EPA lays out guidelines on for how often you should have this done as posted on the IICRC website.

To sum up, rug-eating bugs are kind of like unruly teens. They like to go hide in their space, and they don’t want you to bother them.

So you need to pull open the curtains to let fresh air and sunlight in, clean up their surroundings so they escape the fright of it all, and make a routine of that so you don’t end up with bigger problems down the road.

Your teens will come back (hey, they need to eat…), but the bugs will move on to another place with a less attentive rug owner in charge.

- Lisa

There are a variety of reasons a rug might “bleed” on you. Let’s go through different scenarios for a wool rug like this one, where the red dyes have migrated into the neighboring off-white areas:

The red has bled. Why?

What could create this type of dye migration? Several things.

FUGITIVE DYES – if the red is shown to not be colorfast during your dye test, it could bleed from improper exposure to water from a flood or a poor cleaning attempt. Your dye testing process will show you this potential risk, and you can determine what dye stabilizing solution to use and which shampoo.

EXCESS DYE or OVER-DYED APPLICATIONS – if the rug has never been cleaned before, there might be a bit of “excess” dye in the fibers that may wash out on the 1st cleaning, just as with a new colorful shirt in the laundry. Or, if additional color has been ADDED after the rug was woven to make it brighter (or to make it look older, such as with a tea-wash antiquing application) this additional dye or ink could bleed during a cleaning.

With excess dye, using the proper dye stabilizing solution you can protect the neighboring areas to keep the transfer of the “extra” dye from landing on the wrong areas – it just washes away in the bath.

With over-dye applications, especially inks like India Ink, you cannot protect the neighboring areas so you need to identify these rugs before cleaning to avert a disaster. Often these rugs crock color with a dry towel alone, and transfer a sizable amount of color with the dye test itself, so know when you need to turn down cleaning. Dye stabilizers work on DYES not inks.

HIGH HEAT or HIGH ALKALINITY – a colorfast dye may bleed even with the proper application of a dye stabilizing solution IF it is improperly combined with high temperature during cleaning or high alkaline cleaning solutions (such as traffic lane cleaners). If you plan to clean the rug outside of recommended pH and temperature ranges, then always test the dye with that temperature/alkalinity to make sure you do not create dye damage.

PAST IN-HOME CLEANING OF RUGS – the biggest problem with having a rug cleaned in your home using wall-to-wall carpet cleaning equipment and solutions (or a home-owner Bissell or Rug Doctor) is the amount of residue left behind in the fibers after the “cleaning.” This chemical residue buildup tends to be on the alkaline side, and over time can affect the acid dyes of especially wool rugs and can create a “bleeder” out of these rugs. It might clean up fine one or two times in the home, and on the third the dyes may bleed all over and you have no idea why. It’s because of the extended build-up of all of the residue NOT removed in the past.

If you have a rug of any value at all – never clean it in the home. Natural fiber rugs are meant to be washed.

REPEAT PET STAINS - pet urine starts off as an acidic stain, and then turns alkaline over weeks and months. If it is not cleaned up right away off of a rug this will create long term permanent dye damage that devalues your rug. A rug may have colorfast dyes, but all of the areas with urine exposure will bleed no matter what steps are taken to stop that. This is why pet urine is the most dangerous “spill” on rugs, and why you need to jump on cleaning it up as soon as you see the puddles especially if you have valuable rugs.

The more time you take to inspect the rug before the cleaning begins, the more problems you can avoid.

Happy cleaning!

- Lisa

If you have plants anywhere near your rugs in your home – or if you are a rug cleaner and see plants near rugs you are picking up to clean – you want to watch out for this particular problem that often is not discovered until it’s too late.

Water the plants NOT the rugs.

Even the most careful person spills at times. Either spraying the leaves, or putting water in the planter, there are spills. Small ones over time.

There is also condensation around the bottom of the planter, especially if it’s heavy and is not moved often.

The rugs may feel dry to the touch…

…but you don’t know what’s happening INSIDE the rug.

Those fringe tassels you see on your woven rug are the foundation warps of that piece. One strand runs all the way through the middle to the opposite side of the rug, and the wool (or silk) fuzzy knots are wrapped around those warps.

Here’s a rug cut open to show you the white warps inside – which on most woven rugs today the warps and wefts are COTTON.

Thick cotton warps with wool fibers twisted around them.

Cotton is absorbant.

This means with a spill on a wool rug (or silk), you can blot the area with a towel to “wipe up the spill” and a little moisture has already likely seeped down into those inside cotton fibers, and have made them damp.

You won’t be able to “feel” if the inside of the rug is dry. Only a moisture probe can poke inside and tell you that.

Every rug cleaning professional has moisture probes handy to make sure every rug is 100% dry before it is put on the “ready” shelf or placed in storage, because moisture can lead to mildew growth like this:

Mold damage on rug corner under a potted plant.

Mildew damage more visible on back side of rug near planter.

The problem with long-term moisture on cotton foundation fibers is that they begin to rot. And when dry rot sets in, the fibers literally fall apart.

If you are not careful when you move a rug that has water damage from a planter, you could literally create a hole in the damaged area. It will fall apart in your hands.

Rotten fringe tears away from a tufted rug.

Corner of Spanish rug shows mildew growth.

Closer look shows dry rot in the foundation fibers.

With a rotten corner the rug now needs to be rewoven or patched.

Potted plants are not the only source of moisture that can create damage secretly to your rugs. Other sources are water coolers, condensation from HVAC units, any leaks from a home that may affect walls or floors, and of course – pets. (Though pets have the added damage-causing element of creating stains that cannot be removed, added odors, and contamination from the waste – that’s why you need to clean up pet puddles right away.)

Help reduce the risks by keeping the house plants away from the rugs. When spills do happen, clean them up right away AND elevate the rug longer than you feel you should, just to make sure the INSIDE of the rug is truly dry. (I’ve used a hair dryer on warm to dry a spill from the back side of the rug just to make sure it was completely dry. Warm air helps the evaporation process.)

You may be super careful with your plant watering process, but not everyone in your home may have your same care. And you cannot keep the condensation from having a long term risk to your oriental rugs.

If you are worried about possible moisture risks, then flip your rugs over and see if you have any areas of concern. Cotton fibers experiencing mildew activity and dry rot will feel stiffer than the rest of the rug when you handle it. And because the foundation fibers are often white cotton, unless there are other colors being used in the wefts, you can often see when there is mildew activity due to discoloration visible on close inspection.

You also will often see dye migration visible from the back side as well, because even colorfast rugs when exposed over a long period to moisture, can bleed in those affected areas. You will see the signs if there is a problem – and if there IS a problem, make sure to stop the source of the water exposure, and handle that rug with extra care.

Dry rot damage is not reversible. Take care to make sure your rugs do not experience it.

- Lisa

P.S. Thank you Rug Chick readers for another wonderful year! I hope you and your families have an amazing 2011. =)

Every professional rug cleaner knows how to test a rug to see if the dyes are colorfast or not. At least they should know how to. =) Especially since a good percentage of new rugs today have dye colorfastness “issues.”

I walk through the steps in my post on dye testing, and the video on how to do it is down below.

Click here ==> How To: Dye Test

I mention in the video to dye test the front AND the back – why?

Because you are not just testing the fuzzy face fibers to see if they may bleed during cleaning, you also want to see what the INSIDE foundation fibers may do when wet.

You remember the loom of a hand woven rug, and how every knot is twisted around two warps threads, with weft threads used to hold the rows of face fiber knots in place? Here’s a loom photo to remind you:

It can take months, even years, to weave a large rug.

The construction basics come down to this (NOT to scale here):

Diagram of cotton warps and wefts with wool symmetrical knots.

With many rugs the warps (which end up being the fringe tassels on rugs) and the wefts are cotton, often white cotton – which you can see peeking out of rugs from the backside.

See white horizontal wefts peeking through the back.

When the warps and wefts are white, or a very light color, there are no worries. But sometimes the wefts are NOT white. They might be blue, gray, black, red, purple – and they may bleed on you.

Here’s a hand woven rug with light gray wefts (will not bleed) next to a machine-made rug, which has knots wrapped around the wefts so you do not see them at all. (By the way, this is how you identify the difference between hand woven and machine woven rugs – knots wrapped around the warps are hand woven, around the wefts are machine – we will touch on that another time in more depth.)

Hand woven next to machine woven.

Here’s a photo of a Pakistan rug that was recently sent to me, and the side had torn away a bit to expose its pink weft threads. In fact, some long time pet urine exposure had caused the rug to bleed pink into the edges of the rug.

Loose weft threads have pulled away from this rug.

You can see where is has bled pink into the usually white edge design of this rug.

Pink line where it should be white.

Normally these pink wefts are not a problem with washing. In fact most rugs are not a problem under regular circumstances. These conditions though of long term wet exposure from pets made them bleed. If this had been a rug with no pets around, and washed regularly, that pink would never be visible on this rug from the front.

But some rugs are in fact a problem even under normal circumstances. They have DARK wefts. Here’s a potential problem:

Red wefts on a new Gabbeh.

So you make sure to test the BACK of the rug for colorfastness. If it tests fine – you can clean stress-free.

You also need to pay special attention to any existing spills (especially pet accidents) to identify existing dye migration that might wick up and be visible in the cleaning. The dye may test strong, but in these damaged areas (by the pets) the dye will release and bleed out – that is what happens when pet urine damages rugs over time.

Many rugs are washed before being exported for sale. It’s the ones with cut corners that present the problems today… problems that can averted through thorough inspection of the front and back of each rug, and dye testing both sides, BEFORE the cleaning begins.

Simply making your wash quicker, and using the proper dye stabilizing solution will keep the lurking danger from rearing its ugly head. But the worst thing to happen will be when you test the top side for colorfastness, it tests fine, and then you wash as normal and some UNEXPECTED color rises up from the base of the rug to scare the heck out of you because you did not test the back.

Seeing rising lines of red, blue, or black dye in stripes all over a rug appear as you clean is a frightening experience. One that is entirely avoidable with the right pre-wash inspection skills.

Happy cleaning – and HAPPY New Year!

- Lisa

P.S. Those of you who are professional cleaners, my training schedule is coming out soon, so if you are interested in working with me this year be sure to opt in to the Rug Disasters Report in the right column of this blog. Then you will get notified as soon as openings are available. Looking forward to working with you!

Red wine, soda, food, mud, and with all those guests making your pets NUTS…

…inevitably pet puddles on your rugs too. ‘Tis the season….for RUG SPILLS!

So, before you go to grab that horrible spot remover you bought at the grocery store, or try to remember that old wives’ tale you once heard… just stop, drop, and roll out this handout on what to do with a spill on your rugs so you do not RUIN them this holiday.

Quick simple tips for your unexpected spills.

CLICK HERE ==> Holiday Rug Care Tips

Print and keep it handy this holiday season. Enjoy!

- Lisa

P.S. Just to be safe though, why don’t you ask Santa for a hand woven wool rug for Christmas anyway. =) Look at the cute little Chinese Fette rug (circa 1940) and hand crank wash wringer I found at my local antique shop. There are lots of wonderful little “old world” goodies to add to your new year…just need to go exploring once in awhile.

Just needs a little cleaning, and good as new!

Tea-washed rugs are rugs that have had a brown “tea-like” dye solution applied to the rug to make it appear darker, older, or to hide some underlying flaws (like past dye bleed damage).

The “tea wash” solution, tends to be on the basic pH side, so that it will “hold” to the acid pH original rug dyes better. This can make things tricky if you need to put the rug on the acid side to “stabilize” the original rugs non-colorfast acid dyes, because this leads to even more “removal” of the after-weaving application of the “tea wash.”

This makes cleaning tea washed rugs a challenge for rug cleaners, and a problem for any owner of a tea washed rug who ever spills ANYTHING on it.

Here is a photo of a tea washed rug – notice how the fringes are more beige, just as the field of the rug is:

Obviously tea dyed fringe is a telltale sign of a tea washed rug.

Sometimes you can grin open the fibers and visually see that a “tea wash” dye has been applied:

Grinning open the fibers can show the tea wash application.

But to be safe, you need to dye test these rugs to see if they are in fact “tea washed” because these rugs often lose that additional dye in even the most gentle cleaning.

If a tea washed rug transfers brown on to a DRY white towel easily when you brush the towel along the fibers, then you WILL lose this brown color during cleaning no matter what you do. Even low-moisture and dry-compound cleaning methods will remove dry that easily crocks onto a dry towel.

If a tea washed rug transfers brown to a damp towel, or in a hot water test, then you will lose color during cleaning as well.

You might even not be cleaning the rug, and accidentally remove this dye, like this cleaner who was cleaning a sofa and over-sprayed the solution on to this tea washed rug…

The cleaner should have put a tarp UNDER the sofa to protect the rug. Very expensive mistake.

…and ended up having to buy the client a whole new rug.

These rugs can be identified easily through proper pre-inspection and dye testing. And then you can choose to turn away the job, or get a release of liability to proceed with the cleaning.

This is a TEMPORARY application to the rug in about 95% of the cases. This means it will clean off.

Clients who buy these rugs should be told this BEFORE the purchase, so that they know that this rug will not look exactly the same after its first cleaning. It is a manufacturing flaw the buyer should be made aware of.

There are a lot of these out in the market right now – so keep an eye out.

And if you want to see some other common Rug Disasters to watch out for, here’s my latest report on exactly this topic of the most common Rug Disasters.

The strongest skill any professional rug cleaner can develop is the skill of pre-inspection. Most “ruined rugs” I am asked to inspect have come from not paying really close attention to the textile they have in their hands.

A specialist knows that the more time you spend BEFORE the wash inspecting the front and back of a rug very closely…

…the less time you will spend AFTER the wash fixing rookie mistakes.

Happy rug cleaning!

- Lisa