Fitted carpet cleaning in Brussels

Why hot water extraction suits this, and not a hand-knotted rug

A fitted carpet is a fixed covering: stretched over underlay, fully bonded, or laid as tiles. It cannot be rolled, immersed or spun. Washing therefore takes place on site, and the only way to get clean water into it and straight back out again is hot water extraction: the nozzle sprays the solution into the pile and takes it back up a few centimetres away, in the same movement.

On a hand-knotted oriental rug, that same movement would be a mistake. The foundation is cotton, the dyes are often vegetable, and water driven in under pressure goes down into the weft with no way of getting back out: the colours migrate, the foundation swells, and the rug buckles as it dries. A hand-knotted rug is washed by immersion in a bath, spun in a centrifuge and dried flat. A fitted carpet, never — its pile is short, its back all but watertight, and the water stays where it does its work.

The order of operations

Deep vacuuming first, and at length. The mineral dust lying at the base of the pile is abrasive: with every step, it saws at the fibre. It is also the part of the soiling that comes out best dry — put it in water and you turn it into mud.

Pre-treatment next, but only where it is useful. Trodden-in grease concentrates in the entrance lobby, the circulation corridors and the square metre in front of every lift. We spray on a detergent at a pH suited to the fibre, leave it to work, and brush.

Then the wash. Hot water extraction when the drying window allows it; rotary shampooing on dense piles saturated with grease; encapsulation when the area has to reopen quickly — a polymer crystallises around the soiling and is picked up by the vacuum on the next pass, using very little water.

Accelerated drying to finish: air movers at floor level, a dehumidifier if the room is closed. A fitted carpet left damp smells after two days, and that smell cannot be corrected with fragrance.

The real constraints of a commercial job

A building does not stop for its floor. We work at night or at the weekend, on a badge, with security informed and the alarm disabled for the zone. A floor is treated in halves: the first dries while we wash the second, and nobody finds their desk out of reach on Monday morning.

Furniture is either moved or worked around, and that is decided beforehand, not on the day. Pedestals roll, tall cupboards stay in place and we clean around them — a carpet under a cupboard has never been soiled.

Carpet tiles have a logic of their own. They are cleaned like a continuous run, but a tile burnt or stained through to the backing is replaced on its own. When the reference no longer exists, we lift the replacement tile from under a cupboard or in an archive room: it has the same patina as its neighbours, which a new tile never will.

The maintenance contract

A fitted carpet in a building deteriorates in stages. It holds up, then one day the traffic lane becomes darker than the rest. At that point it is no longer only dirt but flattened and abraded fibre: cleaning revives, it does not rebuild.

Hence the value of a periodic maintenance contract — onderhoudscontract: a deep wash at fixed intervals on the traffic lanes, a full wash at longer intervals, and short stain-removal visits in between, triggered by a phone call.

The pages that follow set out the four cases we handle most often: office floors, hotels and the horeca trade, staircases, and one-off stain removal. The area in square metres, the type of fitting and your available time slots are enough for a costed answer within 48 working hours.