Office fitted carpet cleaning

The map of the foot traffic decides everything

On an office floor, the dirt follows feet. It comes in through the lobby, works its way up the main corridor, stops in front of the lifts and in front of the coffee machine, then stops dead. Two metres away, under a desk that nobody walks round, the carpet is still the carpet of the first day.

We draw up that map before we take out a machine. It decides everything: where we pre-treat, where we simply vacuum, and how long the job really takes. Washing a whole floor evenly means wetting the greater part of a clean surface for nothing — and lengthening the drying by as much.

Two kinds of soiling turn up everywhere. The rings under castor chairs: the castor crushes the fibre and twists it, so the mark is as much mechanical as it is dirt. And coffee, which is a tannin: it turns brown as it dries and anchors itself all the more firmly the longer you have waited.

Carpet tiles or broadloom

Most recent office floors are laid in carpet tiles, loose-laid or on spots of adhesive. They are cleaned exactly like broadloom: we do not lift them to wash them, we do not turn them over, and we do not wet them any more than the rest.

Their advantage shows when a tile is lost — burnt, stained through to the backing, swollen by a leak. It is replaced on its own. But a credible replacement tile is still needed: a new tile of the same model jars in the middle of neighbours that have worn in. So we take the tile from under a cupboard, in an archive room or under a pedestal unit, and put the new one there, where nobody looks at it.

On broadloom glued down over its whole area, that option does not exist and any repair shows. All the more reason to deal with a stain while it is fresh: with this kind of laying, the delay counts for more than the product.

Working when the building is empty

We work at night or at the weekend. That means settling three things beforehand: access — badge, code, security staff informed —, the alarm on the zone concerned, and the sockets available. An extraction machine and two fans do not get plugged into the supply of a server rack.

The floor is treated in halves. The first dries while we wash the second, and we keep a usable route to the exits at all times. Light furniture rolls out of the way, tall cupboards stay: we clean around them without emptying them.

Before the job we list what moves and what does not, and we put every workstation back where it was. A plan photographed before anything is dismantled saves every discussion on Monday morning — screens, cables, bins, each one back in its place.

Periodic maintenance, and why it costs less

An office fitted carpet does not die of dirt, it dies of abrasion. The mineral grit brought in on soles acts like sandpaper at every step; weekly vacuuming removes part of it, never all of it. What remains works away at the fibre continuously, at the base of the pile, where the eye does not go.

A maintenance contract — onderhoudscontract — organises what follows: a deep wash at fixed intervals on the traffic lanes alone, a full wash at longer intervals, and short stain-removal visits in between, triggered by a telephone call rather than by a purchase order.

The arithmetic fits on one line: replacing the floorcovering of an entire office floor remains by far the heaviest expense. Anything that pushes that deadline back pays for itself. Send us the area in square metres, the type of laying and your available time slots: a costed reply within 48 working hours.