This is the beginning of a series of presentations I’ll be giving about how your cleaning products work. I was struggling to come up with a way to begin this series, and my good friend and fellow trainer Jim Smith shared this idea with me, and I’d like to share it with you.
“In order to remove soil and stains from carpets and fabrics, you need to change those soils to a free flowing nature. An example of something with a free flowing nature would be sand or water running through your fingers.
If soil behaves like sand, it can be readily vacuumed away. If stains behave like water, they can be blotted or extracted from the textile.
Where we need cleaning chemistry is where a soil or stain is not free flowing, but instead it is sticky or oily, and therefore no longer “free flowing”. Sticky can include, by the way, the process where electric charges hold very fine particles to fibers that otherwise resist vacuuming.
Once we understand what chemistry is needed to break those sticky or oily bonds away from the fiber surface, we can better choose what products are needed.
“In order to remove soil and stains from carpets and fabrics, you need to change those soils to a free flowing nature. An example of something with a free flowing nature would be sand or water running through your fingers.
If soil behaves like sand, it can be readily vacuumed away. If stains behave like water, they can be blotted or extracted from the textile.
Where we need cleaning chemistry is where a soil or stain is not free flowing, but instead it is sticky or oily, and therefore no longer “free flowing”. Sticky can include, by the way, the process where electric charges hold very fine particles to fibers that otherwise resist vacuuming.
Once we understand what chemistry is needed to break those sticky or oily bonds away from the fiber surface, we can better choose what products are needed.
