Choice of:

• Carpet Cleaning for One Large Room for Up to 400 Square Feet
• Carpet Cleaning for Three Rooms for Up to 250 Square Feet Each
• Carpet Cleaning for Five Rooms Up to 250 Square Feet Each

Dry Carpet Cleaning: Attacking Dirt from All Sides

Some cleaners prefer to use dry carpet cleaning. Follow along with Groupon’s introduction to the method to learn how it gets results with less water.

Drying time is one of the most important factors when choosing a carpet-cleaning method—it can take hours or almost no time at all. Like dry cleaning for laundry, dry carpet cleaning usually does use liquid of some kind, 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 back up the water and the dirt too, encapsulation lets chemistry do the heavy lifting. Using a regular carpet-cleaning machine or a compression sprayer, cleaning technicians ensure that a polymer solution, mixed with water, gets deep into the pile of the carpet where the most tenacious dirt particles and mutant cookie crumbs live. There, the solution surrounds the bits of grime, freeing them from the fabric, and promptly forms a crystal, locking them inside. The crystalized substance dries quickly, letting cleaners vacuum away the powder with ease.

Though the encapsulation process relies on modern chemistry, the principle of using a slightly moistened substance to draw out dirt from carpets isn’t new. In the centuries before carpet-cleaners and vacuums were invented, housewives were commonly advised to sprinkle their rugs with dampened bits of paper, fresh grass clippings, or even tea leaves, then sweep them back up in the hopes that they’d absorbed some of the grime.