Is it Wicking or is it Sticking?

What do you do when you get called about a spot that has been discovered by your customer after you have cleaned their carpet?

Before you show up with an arsenal of products, you need (and your customer needs) an answer to these three questions:

1. Did the stain remain after cleaning?
2. Did the spot come back when it dried?
3. Did the spot show up over time?

The reason that these questions are so important is that they speak to three different types of problems.

1. "Did the stain remain after cleaning?"
   If you've done everything you could to clean the carpet and a stain remains, you might need to use reducing or oxidizing agents with some of your advanced skills to remove this stain. And, in some cases, there are stains that cannot be removed regardless of your skills and available stain removal chemistry arsenal.


2. "Did the spot come back when it dried?"
   If spots disappear during cleaning, but reappear after the carpet dries, the problem is probably wicking. This needs to be treated with an absorbent powder or sprayed with an anti wicking agent


3. "Did the spot show up over time?"
   This is more likely a sticky residue than a wicking problem. When adhesive residues (such as from tape) or clear sugary drinks spills, the soil that was attracted to the sticky residue comes up easily, leading the cleaner to believe the spot is gone. If it comes back, you need to follow more extensive spotting procedures to remove the sticky residue that in the case of a spill is likely deep within the carpet yarns, and will require extensive flushing to remove.

Each of these three different circumstances requires cleaning, spotting, and stain removal skills to correct. But those products and skills are not of much use, and can sometimes even work against you, if you don't know the difference between the three.