With what seems like perennial droughts, water conservation’s on the mind of many, especially the residents of Los Angeles. Carpet cleaning, like many other home-maintenance tasks, may fall by the wayside because it requires too much water. But some companies that do carpet cleaning in Orange County and Los Angeles County use a method that uses significantly less water than traditional hot-water extraction. How it works to clean carpets is fascinating stuff.

Dry carpet cleaning may be somewhat of a misnomer, but it’s the official term used by those in the industry. Like dry cleaning for laundry, dry carpet cleaning usually utilizes some kind of liquid, but its low-moisture techniques reduce the time you have to wait to rub your face on the nice, clean carpet.

One of the most popular methods for dry carpet cleaning is encapsulation. Rather than saturate a carpet with hot water and detergent, then suck up that water and the dirt, encapsulation lets chemistry do the heavy lifting. With a regular carpet-cleaning machine or a compression sprayer, technicians push a polymer solution, mixed with a minimal amount of water, deep into the pile of the carpet where the most tenacious dirt particles live. The solution surrounds each bit of grime, freeing it from the fabric, and promptly locks it into a crystal. The crystallized substance quickly dries into a powder that vacuums away with ease.

Before vacuum cleaners, housewives sprinkled their rugs with damp bits of paper, fresh grass clippings, or tea leaves, and then swept them back up in the hopes that they’d absorbed some of the grime. Luckily for you, modern-day care falls to the experts at companies like Imperial Carpet Cleaning, who promise to never put tea in your carpet.