Looking after a rug day to day

Vacuum in the direction of the pile

Run your hand flat over the rug, one way and then the other. One way, the pile lies down, the surface becomes smooth and the colour lightens. The other way, it stands up, the colour darkens and you feel resistance. The first is the direction of the pile: that is the way to vacuum and to brush, always. Vacuuming against the pile stands the fibres up, opens the scales of the wool and brings the dust back up instead of taking it out.

Two passes a week in a living room, one elsewhere, are amply enough. What counts is not the frequency but the slowness. The dust that wears a rug out is not the dust you see on the surface: it is a mineral, sandy dust lodged at the base of the pile against the foundation, and it takes several slow passes over the same spot to draw it out. At every step it cuts the fibres from within. A living-room rug can hold more than a kilo of it.

Turn the rug over two or three times a year, vacuum the back, then the floor underneath. Some of the dust goes through the foundation and gathers there. It is also the only moment when you see moths arriving: white cocoons along the selvedges, wool falling as powder, tunnels under the furniture. You see them on the back well before they show on the face, and that is the whole point of doing it. What follows is set out in the guide on carpet moths.

The beater bar and the fringes

The rotating beater bar, the cylindrical brush that turns in the head of the vacuum cleaner, is made for fitted carpet. On a hand-knotted rug it tears. On the fringes it swallows them, twists them and breaks them — and a broken fringe is not a decorative detail: it is a warp thread, and therefore part of the structure. A broken warp lets the first knots go, and the loss does not stop of its own accord.

Switch the beater bar off, or change to the flat nozzle. On the fringes, do not vacuum at all: comb them by hand along their axis, with your fingers or a wide-toothed comb, and fold them under the rug while you vacuum the field. If they are already damaged, it is better to act before the loss reaches the pile; that is the subject of fringe rebuilding.

Turning the rug, choosing the underlay

A rug wears where people walk and fades where the sun falls, and those two areas never move. Turn it through half a turn at least twice a year: it is the most profitable thing you can do for a rug, and it takes only two minutes. Under a dining table, chairs pushed back hollow out a ring of wear that becomes very visible within a few years. Move heavy furniture a few centimetres from time to time as well: a sofa foot crushes the pile permanently, and the mark eventually stops rising again.

An underlay does three things: it stops the rug slipping, it cushions the traffic, and it lets a little air move under the foundation. Choose a needled felt, or a felt backed with natural latex — underfloor heating aside, where the question arises differently — cut two to three centimetres shorter than the rug on each side so that it does not show. Avoid cheap PVC foams and adhesive films: after a few years they break down, stick to the floor as much as to the back of the rug, and leave a yellow deposit that does not always come off. On waxed parquet or a vinyl floor, that deposit marks the floor as well.

Light, humidity, heating

Ultraviolet light fades colours, and it does not fade them all at the same speed. Madder reds and vegetable yellows go first, indigo blues hold better: a rug left for years in front of a picture window does not fade evenly, it changes palette, and the area near the window ends up no longer matching the rest. Nothing puts that right afterwards. A net curtain, a blind and turning the rug twice a year do most of the work.

Wool is happy between 40 and 60% relative humidity. Too dry and it becomes brittle and builds up static electricity, which attracts still more dust. Too damp and without ventilation, you open the door to mould and give moths the conditions they prefer. Do not put a hand-knotted rug directly in front of a warm-air heating outlet, and do not leave it in a cellar, even rolled. If you have underfloor heating, that question has its own rules and its own guide.

How often a professional wash is justified

In the workshop we think in orders of magnitude, not in fixed rules. A rug in a little-used room, with no animal and no young child, goes several years without a full wash. A living-room rug in normal use is typically rewashed every three to five years. A rug in an entrance hall, a corridor or a dining room, or a rug that lives with a dog or a cat, calls for a shorter interval, of the order of one to two years. These intervals count only as markers.

Three signs are worth more than a calendar. The first: push the edge of your hand into the pile and rub the base of the yarn with your fingertips; if they come out grey, the dust is settled in and the vacuum cleaner is no longer reaching it. The second: colours that have lost their depth without any stain to explain it — that is a grey film veiling them, not the dye that has faded. The third: a smell that comes back as soon as the room is heated.

Washing a wool rug is done flat, by hand, with a neutral soap, below 30 °C, with rinses until neutral and drying flat in under 24 hours. It is those conditions that explain why it is not done at home, and not some workshop recipe.

What you should never do

The injection-extraction shampooer, hired or bought from a supermarket, brings together on its own everything that has to be avoided: hot water, an alkaline detergent, and a soaking of the foundation that no domestic drying can put right. The rug stays damp at its core for days; the cotton of the warp oxidises and browns, the dissolved soiling comes back up to the surface as it dries, and a ring appears where the wet area stopped.

The steam cleaner is worse, because it looks clean. The steam comes out at around 100 °C; wool felts above 40 °C in the presence of water and agitation. Heat, moisture, possible alkalinity and the agitation of the brush: these are exactly the conditions for felting. A felted pile becomes stiff and board-like, the surface shrinks, the rug no longer lies flat, and there is no treatment that will open entangled scales again.

That leaves shop-bought dry cleaning products and household products. Solvent powders to be scattered and then vacuumed up leave a residue in the pile: the rug looks clean for three weeks, then soils faster than before, because that residue catches the dust. Dry-cleaning solvents dissolve the lanolin, the natural grease that protects the wool, and the rug is never rinsed anyway. As for laundry detergents, degreasers, all-purpose cleaners and carpet shampoos, they are alkaline, often well above pH 8, whereas wool is washed between pH 5 and 7: they lift the scales, yellow ivory grounds and can make the dyes let go.

Where day-to-day care stops

You can vacuum, turn the rug, keep it out of the light, comb fringes, blot a fresh stain, and air it outside in the shade in dry weather. You cannot wash it at home. A wash means mechanical dusting of both faces before any water, a colour fastness test, a bath below 30 °C, rinses until neutral and drying flat on a rigid surface. A wool rug dried hanging up distorts under its own water-laden weight, and that cannot be put right either.

Then there is what care never puts right: wear down to the base of the knots, a broken weft, felting, fading from the sun. Better to spot these early, while the repair is still consolidation rather than rebuilding. That is the only reason we insist on vacuuming the back twice a year: it is not the cleanliness that matters, it is what you see while doing it.