Can You Steam Clean Hand Made Rugs

Yes, you can sometimes steam clean hand made rugs.

But proceed with caution. 

To avoid most of the common risks, you could use a carpet cleaning company on the Gold Coast or carpet cleaners in Mandurah.

To avoid damage, there are a few best-practice approaches that you should take. 

The first step – testing a spot for dye bleed – is something you should do on any type of carpet or rug before you proceed with cleaning, and it’s all the more important when you’re dealing with a rug worth thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Spot testing is best done on a very small corner of the rug, or in the case of carpet, in the corner of a room, perhaps somewhere that would usually be hidden behind furniture. Whatever process you’re planning to use – do it first on this little spot. 

The most likely problem you’ll run into with steam cleaning a hand made rug is issues with the dye. Especially red and purple dyes. They seem to bleed far more than lighter dyes like blues and greens.

Depending on the process used by the rug maker, the dyes may not be colour-fast beyond a certain temperature, and, applying steam can spike the temperature beyond that point. So, test, test, and test – those three rules will keep you from disaster. After testing for colour-fastness, the second thing you need to look out for is shrinkage and pile damage. The pile damage gets a bit technical, but the shrinkage is easy enough for anyone to understand. If it’s smaller – maybe looks wrinkled or distorted after you’re done testing – you shouldn’t proceed. Shrinkage is when the fabric shrinks (duh), but pile damage is when the individual strands behave differently in relation to each other than they did when the rug was new.

Cotton is the worst for this – often it can become hard, and look almost like it’s been brushed with glue or a gloss coat. This is reversible (often with an acid spray), but this gets technical and is not in the realm of home-cleaning.

The best way to clean a hand made rug is to send it to the rug washers.

Check out rug washing videos on youtube for the process – it’s half amazing, and half mesmerizing.