I have finally lived somewhere long enough for this to be a thing for me. My goal before we turn on the heat for winter is to deep clean the living room. So Ive been looking into the hows and the answer seems to be steam cleaner, yes. I too have an area rug, and it may take some time and water dumps, but I plan to purchase the smaller bissel steam cleaner, and hit both the couch and rug with it.

What I have done in the past, if you have the outdoor space for it, is bring the rug outside, hang it on a fence or something, beat the piss out of it (to remove dust) and let it hang in full sun for at least a day. The sun does good things, truely, there is a reason this has been done this way for so long. And then yeah, bring it back in and hit it with the stream cleaner with less water changes Id imagine. In the past Ive left the rug hanging through a heavy rain day, then wait til its sun dried to bring it in, and the rug does feel fresh. I am odd though so Im not sure thats normal practice lol Also, if you got a cleaner… or you know? a powerwasher? can you use a power washer on it in the driveway? then sun dry it?

Maybe someone else has a better solution, but I think you know what youre doing it seems

Thank you! l do have outdoor space but it’s humid af. I guess leaving the rug out isn’t different than leaving clothes on the clothes line so it’s probably okay. It’s a pretty big rug so not sure I have the strength to haul it outside and beat it, but I can certainly spend a few hours with the steam cleaner 😅

I have a few of those washable rugs too, but I don’t love them so I think I will resign myself to a rug cleaning day once and a while.

Yeah, probably one of those chores that its better to spend a few mins on more often, than making it a whole ordeal once in a while. Id help you drag it outside haha, maybe someone could help you?

Its not much different than hanging clothes no. I think, and I could be wrong, but the sun is like disenfectant this way too. I cant tell you how excited I am to purchase a steam cleaner. I feel so lame, but my excitement beams. More stoked to do the couch, tbh, but rugs deserve attention too!

I was also looking into the washable rugs. I thought about getting one, surprised you dont like it, is there a reason? Im just curious as I was thinking about getting one

I can confirm steam cleaners are extremely satisfying.

Washable rugs (at least the one I have) is very thin. It has to be to be washable! Because it is thin it is a nightmare to vacuum. It just gets sucked into it. I have to put my foot down right behind the vacuum to keep it taut.

I believe there are types you can get that have a lower layer you detect before washing. To be honest the one I have was an impulse purchase. I liked the colours, the price was right and I wanted something to go below my office chair that wasn’t a plastic mat, so the incredibly low pile was a pro not a con. I think the two part ones are considerably more expensive and I’m not interested in paying that much to find out it doesn’t solve the problem.

Because it’s under my desk I don’t really care too much about wear, but the one I have has the print applied to the top, not created by dyed fibres being used. So when the pile is disturbed it doesn’t quite look right and I don’t think I could brush it all perfectly in line again.

Here is a cross section, I have washed this once.

Maybe I just bought a cheap and shitty one?

In the old days, the common practice with rugs was to hang them out on a clothes line dry and whack the shit out of them. There was a specific tool for that called a rug beater–you can find them on ebay. An amazing amount of dirt will come out if you do that.

Anyway that method does not require a steam cleaner, nor does it matter that your area is humid. It may be a bit of a workout though.

Havent looked into this because by the time you wanna deep clean carpet its better to rip it up. A hard floor and rugs are far superior.

House had new carpet when we moved in 7 years ago. Its shit now (cheap hardware store carpeting no doubt ), ripping, holes, etc. Amazingly didnt stain very bad tho, modern carpet doesn’t stain if it isnt white.

For rugs yeah I still just Beat It

Also have heard deep cleaning ruins carpets and actually makes them get dirty faster and harder to clean. Not sure if true.

Thank you I lol’d at the capitalization and reference 🤭

Proud of that one :)

Im a custodian, we deep clean carpets once a year. What you wanna do is go to home depot/lowes/ect and rent a carpet extractor also called carpet shampooer, you can purchase at home one’s that are good for spot cleaning but they dont do as good as the larger ones you can rent. If they have one, you’ll get the best results from a steam extractor, but usually its just the normal extractor. For my own house i have a small one for spot cleaning and rent a big one like once a year or so

Thank you, I have a mental barrier about renting equipment for a few rugs but there is no basis for it. They aren’t going to clean themselves!

i just take my rugs to an outside space and hit it until it feels better than sun it for a while but as far as actual carpet the only way to actually get it clean is to rip it out and replace it with either hardwoods or click together depending on budget.

i am currently ripping out my carpet because i managed to find some very cheap flooring and carpet causes issues with both me and my partner’s breathing.

Thanks, I’m probably just going to have to get over the mental hurdle of taking the fuckers outside 😅

My current house doesn’t have rugs, except for some large textured mats covering most of my entryway and kitchen. Plus a couple small carpet mats in the bathroom.

The entryway/kitchen mats are rubber mats with thin “office carpet” fibers on top. They have a thick textured design for collecting dust/debris from your shoes when you come inside. Which is great for that purpose, but makes them difficult to clean because a vacuum won’t get into the crevices.

Every couple weeks, I vacuum them the best I can (mostly with just the hose attachment), then hang them outside on a clothing line and beat the crap out of them until they stop dropping dust.

For the bathroom mats, I just run a vacuum over them. Once every couple months, I’ll throw them in the washer to deep clean, then hang to dry.

Outside of that, most of my house is carpeted. I used to vacuum weekly because I had two dogs that shed frequently. Once a year, I’d rent a carpet cleaner and soap/wet vac the carpets.

But a few things have changed in recent years.

1.) My dog that shed the most passed away, so we don’t have tumbleweeds of dog hair roaming around the house anymore. We have one dog left, a short-hair who sheds very little.

2.) My wife’s monthly allergy shots are finally working, which means she’s not constantly sneezing in the presence of our dog anymore. So keeping a hospital-sterile house isn’t so much of a priority anymore.

3.) My wife is turning into a bit of a hoarder lately, which means we have piles of things she’s been stacking in every room. Various projects she’s interested in, but not fully investing time into, so they’re turning into clutter.

It’s hard to vacuum when you only have narrow paths everywhere. I keep telling her to put things away so we can reclaim the floor space and I can do a full, proper cleaning, but she’s having trouble getting the motivation. And she gets upset if I mess with her stuff, so I can’t help her do it.

So our carpet cleaning has been significantly reduced in recent years. I give it the best vacuum I can maybe once a month currently and we’re basically just waiting on our last (elderly) dog to pass away before tearing out all the carpets and redoing the floors from scratch. It’s not really worth it to soap and wash the carpets now. They’re old and a bit torn and stained in a few places. They really just need a full replacement, and we don’t want our dog to embed hair/dander in new carpets shortly before he passes away.

I’ve always been a huge advocate for carpeted floors. I don’t like how hard and cold the hardwood/laminate/tile floors are. But I guess I wouldn’t be opposed to changing out carpet for mostly solid wood floors.

We have plans for major renovations one day, which involve actually changing the layout of the house a bit. But we don’t currently have money for such a project, so investing in small improvements is always weighed against the overall cost of tearing everything apart and starting fresh.

Would it be worth it to replace a window now if we’re gonna tear down that whole wall one day? Should we replace a faucet if we’re going to replace the entire bathroom counter and sink? Should we replace the carpets if we’re just gonna tear out the floors and rebuild them later? These questions have kept us from acting until we have money saved up for such large-scale projects.

Thank you, it does seem like the consensus is that people are still beating their rugs.

(Empathy on the household decision making process.)

I clean my carpets every couple of years.

The only “rugs” i have are door mats, i just throw those out.

We currently only have rugs, but with dogs and toddlers we invested in a fabric cleaner. It’s a little wet vac that sprays water for you you lather up and suck up. It’s used on average once a month to spot clean stuff.

I’ve got an oldskool rack for beating mats in the yard, but I give them a going over with the pressure washer instead of beating them. Twice a year.

We had carpet where we lived when the dogs got potty trained. We hired a professional to do both the carpets and couch after each dog.

Thank you. Is there a proper name for such a rack? I have a clothes drying rack I use indoors for delicates that I don’t want to put on the clothes line but it would crumple under the rug I think.

Hell yeah to the pressure washer! I think I used mine on a woven entry way rug in the past but I’m not sure if I did that or just used a deck brush + soap attachment for the hose.

I’m not sure I want to saturate the pile rugs but I guess I can use the steam cleaner vacuum attachment to suck up the water and let it dry from there.

Seems to be “rug beating rack” or stand in English.

My grandma had one in their apartment complex, and we bought our house from old people who had one cemented in the back yard.

if you shake the rug so it snaps like a whip you don’t have to beat it with something. with how come off about dust you’ll want to stand upwind of the rug and maybe wear PPE when you do it

Rent Bissell rug shampooing machine at the local hardware store and knock yourself out. You have to buy a bottle of carpet cleaning fluid for it too. There are a bunch of different kinds and I got whatever one they recommended, idr specifics. Only did it once while getting ready to move out.

Not terribly often (yearly+), but we do own a small carpet cleaning machine and we don’t wear shoes in the house. We also have a vacuum that can suck a golf ball through a garden hose, so that rug stays CLEAN. I’ll probably hit the rug with the carpet cleaner again sometime before winter.

Pets, errant eating, and shoes are a major source of debris in home. Controlling those keeps places immaculate with monthly cleaning and Friday tidying.

I also hate carpet because of how dirty it gets and how impossible it is to clean properly and how much it would cost to replace regularly. I am a hardwood / vinyl plank kind of person with rugs everywhere. My smaller rugs, specifically the runner ones that are like 2 ft wide and 8 ft long-ish I fold in half hot dog style and then roll them up and throw in the laundry machine. I run the sanitize cycle with enough soap for a heavily dirty item, if you’re using your standard high efficiency soap in a standard high efficiency front loading washer like me I use something close to 5 tablespoons split between two washes, 2 on pre-wash 3 on the main, I also add full scoops of borax and oxygen bleach to each wash cycle. Then extra rinse at the end. The sanitize cycle should have the hottest water with the most intense wash cycle and the most intense spin cycle. For the little runner rugs I do this 3 to 4 times a year.

As for my large rugs, I have tried different carpet cleaning machines over the years but I find that I spend so much time and effort and soap and water trying to clean them and they never feel actually clean. What I ended up trying was I found a laundromat in my city that has the super duper extra huge mega washers. The way people measure washers is weird but the ones I used said they could handle 100 lb worth of clothes. There was one that I liked but they added their own predispensed soap and fabric softener which I don’t like and doesn’t wash out thoroughly enough so I found one that allowed me to bring and use my own soap. These machines cost about $20 per wash but even for my 8-ft by 12 ft rugs they fit. You can then throw them in their huge mungus tumble dryers, though I suggest standing in front of the dryers to keep the doors from popping open unless they have a solid lock on the dryer door. I would dry on low just so you don’t accidentally melt anything. Because of the expense and the hassle I probably only do this one to two times a year and have my robot vacuum/ mop go around every day to make it last as long as possible. Word of caution, I only use quite low pile rugs because I had a very long pile of rug that I took to the laundromat once and it ended up disintegrating and leaving a big old mess behind. I ruined to the rug and put the laundry machine out of commission for the day so it could be deep cleaned. I felt very bad about it so I warned you in advance if you have very long pile rugs I’m so sorry your best bet is probably to take them outside and beat them. When I say long I mean like these were 3 in Long fibers, very very fluffy.

I mean, most my family has done with our rugs are vacuum them because we ain’t great at upkeeping them.

Though, quite a few people at our apartment complex just taken there’s outside onto some place and thoroughly brush them down with soap and water and then take them to dry by hanging over their balcony railing. Either the railing, or I’ve seen some people just put them on top of their vehicle to dry.

We vacuum the house almost daily with a little shark hand-held unit, mostly because we have 2-3 dogs at all times. In the weekends the good vacuum comes out for a deeper session. We bought a carpet cleaner and we use that maybe every 6 months or so. Little to no shoes in the house helps a lot.

The big thing is to not let them get too dirty with more frequent cleanings. It’s a lot easier to do that than it is to try and clean a heavily soiled rug or carpet on fewer occasions.

Carpet cleaners can be rented for pretty cheap, but if you use it more frequently, it’s better to just bite the bullet up front since it will pay itself off.

I pay a guy. It’s been 6 years since I had the carpet replaced and I just had it professionally cleaned for the first time. I should have been doing it every two years

Beating the shit out of them. Use a big stick or special tool. If you have a rack nearby you can use it, but otherwise a sturdy fence or railing works as well. Clotheslines will not work.

Between beatings I’ll vacuum topside often, and sometimes turn them over to vacuum underside as well. Your vacuum may have a vent (likely somewhere on the pipe, near where you hold it) you can open for more airflow, to make it easier to vacuum without sucking up the fabric itself.

As a yearly/seasonal cleaning you can scrub them with snow (if you have snow) and a rough brush. Quite fun!