Oriental rug cleaning is much different in many cases than cleaning wall to wall residential carpet. You need to hire a company that can actually clean your oriental rugs safely and effectively.

So what is considered quality oriental rug cleaning? Let’s take a look at the differences between wall to wall carpet cleaning and PROPER oriental rug cleaning.

Oriental Rugs are made out of natural fibers, which can lead to problems not typically associated with cleaning wall to wall synthetic carpeting. Because the fibers are natural; usually wool, cotton, and silk the tendency for trouble when cleaning these fibers is much higher. It is very important that you hire a professional to clean your valuable oriental/area rugs.

Oriental Rug Cleaning- Area Rug Cleaning

One of the other MAJOR differences in cleaning oriental rugs and synthetic carpets is the amount of soil a oriental rug can hold. Synthetic wall to wall carpets can hold a lot of soil but a wool area rug can hold a HUGE amount of soil. Much more soil than you might imagine. In order to get this soil out of the carpet you need to flush the carpet aggressively, which is something that is harder to do with wall to wall carpet because of dry times.

With oriental rugs they can, and should, be taken offsite and flushed aggressively and then properly dried. Because oriental rugs are mostly made out of natural fibers there are cleaning issues that can cause problems. Below are some of the major cleaning issues when dealing with oriental/area rug cleaning.

 Fiber Distortion: Much like natural fibers in upholstery, when cleaning oriental rugs the chance of fiber distortion is much higher than with synthetic fibers. You simply have to be more careful with fibers such as silk and cotton than you would have to be with synthetic fibers. Some of the spotting agents that will easily get out stains in synthetic carpet cannot even be used on natural fibers.

Color Bleeding: Color bleeding is when the colors from a fiber want to move into other areas of the carpet during the wet stage. Many older oriental rugs are made with dyes that are much less stable and the chance of the color moving is much greater. This is a very serious problem and one that can be EXTREMELY difficult to correct.

Shrinkage: This is just as it sounds. The carpet shrinks in size! This is almost impossible to correct. The proper cleaning and post drying of oriental rugs is very important.

Fringe Cleaning: Most fringe is made out of cotton, and at times can be very fragile. Fringe can get extremely dirty and should be cleaned with the proper tools and cleaning agents in order to get the clean and NOT damage them. Many times cleaners simply do not pay much attention to the fringe so you left with bad looking fringe. Or…they clean the fringe much too aggressively and do damage. Either way, the proper cleaning of fringe on oriental/area rugs is really important.