Allen Rathey: Hi! I am Allen Rathey, President of the Healthy House Institute and today we are talking about green cleaning methods and now we are going to show you some methods of removing soil without using any chemistry.

We will start with dry vacuuming. The critical thing to remember with vacuuming is that you are removing the particles of soil from the carpet. This is important, because dry soil actually is abrasive and if don't blow it out with a vacuum, it can actually abrade the fibers and create some problems with the carpet.

So we are going to go ahead and vacuum that surface using this fairly high suction vacuum. So we have vacuumed all the dry soil or as much as we can get out of the carpet with the vacuum and now we are going to switch to a wet process.

In this case, it's what we call activated water and this particular device uses plain tap water. It runs the charge through the water that will impart a little bit of sanitizing property to the carpet. We are going to go ahead and saturate the carpet with the activated water. Then following our process, we are going to bloat to remove through transference as much of that dirty soil as we can. So you can see we have extracted pretty much all of that soil on the carpet.

We are going to now take our pre-stained carpet with grape juice which is tough stain and we are going to steam vapor on that. Stream vapor is a great technology, because it uses water only and we apply the steam to the surface to saturate the fibers and that allows the grape juice to be held in suspension. Then we bloat that surface with our cloth and we get it as much transference as we can to that cloth.

We continue to apply that steam vapor and then as a final step to get the residual, we use this triangle brush. We apply the steam directly to the surface with our white terry cloth towel touching the surface, we go back and forth. We then go left to right. I might even do a diagonal, again these are round fibers, so they have a full circumference, and cover all those exposed surfaces with our cleaning agent which in this case is stream.

Now we have finished up with the steam. We have removed the grape juice from the carpet. Now I would like to talk about how steam can actually be used in conjunction with vacuuming, because as we apply steam to the carpet, there is no wetting of the fibers and it dries very quickly. We actually fluff the nap of the carpet. We are not cleaning the carpet and we are opening up those fibers so that when we follow up and vacuum, we remove even more soil from the carpet, because the fiber is now opened up.

Let's say there is a party and you spill wine on the carpet. What do you do? Well, one thing you can do is use a portable carpet extractor and that allows you to quickly vacuum out that liquid so it doesn't penetrate deep into the fibers. A portable extractor will get more the solution more quickly and prevent that wine spill from becoming embedded in the carpet. The advantage of using a portable carpet extractor is that it also rinses, so you have the ability to go back and rinse.

That's it for our extraction process. Here is our cleaned carpet, cleaned with just water and a portable carpet extractor. We've covered a range of green cleaning methods for removing spots and spills from carpet from the home-made variety to the retail store variety to the non-chemical interventions such as steam vapor, activated water, and just vacuuming to remove soil.

So we hope those methods have been helpful to you and that it will help you be more sustainable in the way that you clean your carpet.