Just as no two stains are the same, no two carpets are the same either. A spot removal method that worked well on your synthetic carpet likely won’t work as well on your wool carpet. And sometimes, in attempting to clean a stain, you can actually make it much worse.

For example, scrubbing instead of blotting can permanently damage the carpet and press the stain even further into the fibers.

You can also make the situation worse if the solution or cleaning product you attempt to use causes the color dyes in your carpet to bleed and spread across the stain and further out. This can cause permanent damage, but it can be avoided too. In order to be sure the dye in your carpet won’t bleed when a cleaning solution or chemical is applied, test a different area of the carpet first.

What you are testing is whether your carpet is Colorfast or not. Colorfast carpet dyes are able to retain their hue even if exposed to moisture, light, heat or cleaning products.

The best option, if possible, is to test a carpet sample if you have one in your home. Sometimes there is excess carpet left behind from the installers that you can keep in your basement or another storage area in your home. If you still have remnants of the carpet in your home, use that for the Colorfast test.

Otherwise, you will want to find a more discrete area of the installed carpet to test. Perhaps in a corner of a room or under a piece of furniture you are unlikely to move very often. While the hope is that the carpet will be Colorfast, if not, you won’t damage a focal point of the carpet as part of your test and it’s better to see bleeding occur in a discrete area of the carpet rather than in the traffic area the original stain likely occurred in.

To perform the test, apply a couple of drops of the solution or cleaning chemical to the test area and then hold a white cloth or paper towel on the area for about 10 seconds. Examine both the cloth and the carpet. If color transferred onto the cloth or if there is a noticeable color change or damage to the carpet, don’t use that product and test another one.

If you aren’t confident in your ability to remove the stain, stop and call a professional carpet cleaner in Kenosha. Nature’s Way Chem-Dry of Burlington guarantees that “if they can’t remove a stain, no one can!” and is confident in their claim after nearly 20 years in the industry.

Nature’s Way Chem-Dry has seen fantastic results with wine stains, coffee stains and even pet urine odor removal and uses green cleaning and industry-recognized methods to achieve their results.