Rug Cleaning Class

Last week I attended a Rug Cleaning Technician certification class with eighteen other company owners and employees. Readers of this blog know that I have been enthusiastic about the subject of diversification for some time now, but after having attended the class, I am even more convinced that this is a service more cleaners should consider offering.

Many of your customers own handmade, true oriental area rugs worth thousands of dollars and that, frankly, they feel uncomfortable having just anyone clean. Conversely, there are machine made rugs that are only a fraction of the cost, but that the customer places a high value on. While it may take years of experience to learn the wide variety of imported, hand made rugs, the attendees at this class learned simple and reliable ways to identify high value rugs, as well as "problem rugs" of varying value.

For me, the highlight of the course was the "hands on" training section. We were able to obtain a hand knotted, chinese oriental rug that was made of a blend of wool and silk, and was also saturated in urine. We also had two small, machine tufted Chinese area rugs and a Wilton rug. The students were able to properly identify each rug, qualify the limitations and risks in cleaning the rugs, and then successfully clean the rugs, including complete urine odor removal from the Chinese wool/silk blend rug that was valued at over 5000.00.

Pictures of this class and the procedures used to clean these rugs follow.