When facilities managers think of protecting floors from rain, snow, ice, salt, soil, and other contaminants during the winter, they typically think of protecting their hard surface floors.
However, carpeted floors—known as soft surface floors—can also take a beating during the winter months. And because so many of us spend more time indoors during the cold winter months, soiled, contaminated carpets can pose a health concern for the entire facility.
Here’s why…
One of the benefits of carpet is that it hides soil. It absorbs airborne dirt, dust, and airborne contaminants. Think of it as a sponge covering your floors.
However, one of the negatives about carpet is that those same contaminants can be stirred up and become airborne with foot traffic. If they contain germs, bacteria, or viruses and are inhaled by building users, they can cause disease.
This situation is made worse in the winter months because of two things. One we already mentioned—more people are inside during the winter months.
The other is that ventilation is minimized during winter to keep the cold air out. With reduced ventilation, airborne pathogens are more likely to stay indoors and around more people, allowing them to be inhaled.
Fortunately, there are ways facilities managers can protect the health of their carpets and their facilities during the winter months. It starts by taking a proactive approach to carpet care and not a reactive approach.
This is important because cut-pile carpet can hide as much as a pound of soil per square foot before it even looks dirty. This means waiting until the carpet looks soiled is usually too late.
While the carpet can still be cleaned, at this stage, it’s likely the soiling will have damaged the fibers, reducing the carpet’s lifespan.
Key Components of Proactive Winter Carpet Care
Now that we better understand why winter carpet care is so critical, how do we implement a proactive carpet care program? Here are some key steps in the process:
Identify Traffic Patterns
The first thing we need to do is identify key traffic patterns in a facility. For instance, first-floor walkways and the lower floors of a multi-floor building usually get the most soiling due to foot traffic. These are also the carpeted areas that become the most soiled. Managers and cleaning professionals should spend most of their time keeping these carpeted areas clean and healthy, so as to prevent soil from being walked into other areas and other floors in the building.
Types of Facilities
If you manage a school, realize that carpet in a school with young children can collect more soil, and a wider variety of soil, than other types of facilities.
Carpet in a medical facility, on the other hand, will likely not get as soiled as the carpet in a school. However, it may contain more pathogens, which is a serious concern.
In an office building, as mentioned earlier, it will be the main floor walkways and lower floors that get the most soiled.
Install Entry Mats
Entry mats are crucial throughout the year, but their importance in protecting the carpet and the facility’s health becomes paramount during the winter months. When it comes to mats, building managers need to know there are three types of entry mats. These are:
- Scraper mats installed outside a building.
- Scraper/wipers installed directly inside a building.
- Wiper mats, installed beyond the scraper/wipers.
Each type of mat should be about five feet long. Longer if possible. In fact, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) reports that the length of the mat is key to its performance and effectiveness. Studies by the AIA report the following:
- Five feet of matting captures 33% of debris entering a facility
- Ten feet of matting captures 52%
- Twenty feet captures 86%
- Twenty-five feet captures 100%
Carpet Cleaning Methods
When it comes to carpet cleaning methods, we can narrow this down to two types: dry and wet.
A dry carpet cleaning method typically involves sprinkling crystals or encapsulates on the carpet. These contain cleaning agents. Often, they must be worked into the carpet using a floor machine. After that, vacuuming is all that is necessary. With each vacuuming, more crystals are removed, and with them, the top layer of soil in carpet fibers.
We say the “top layer of soil” for a reason. The dry carpet cleaning method is quick, requires little training, and can be performed throughout the year. However, its shortcoming is that it does not provide a deep clean of the carpet. Therefore, a carpet extractor, preferably a hot-water extractor, is needed. The extractor will release cleaning agents using hot water—heat is one of the key elements of all cleaning—into the carpet and then extract the solution along with soil in one pass.
What facilities managers and cleaning professionals can do during the winter months and throughout the year as part of a proactive winter carpet care program is to clean carpets two times using the dry method and then the third time using the extraction method. This is usually effective and much more cost-effective.
Select a Distributor
One of the many things facilities managers learned during the pandemic was the necessity of listening to and working with experts. When it comes to cleaning and health, avoid misinformation and disinformation—and this applies to carpet cleaning as well. The best expert managers and cleaning professionals can turn to is a knowledgeable janitorial distributor.
For instance, while the floor mats we discussed earlier may look the same, construction quality and performance can differ significantly. A well-informed distributor can help facilities managers select quality mats that are the most effective—and practical—for your facility.
Astute janitorial distributors can also recommend the types of carpet cleaning methods and equipment used to clean carpet and the types of cleaning solutions. This eliminates “trial and error” purchasing, which is invariably wasteful.
As to cleaning solutions, in some situations a sanitizer or disinfectant may be necessary to protect health. The distributor can recommend which would be most useful. Note: sanitizers and disinfectants are designed to eliminate specific pathogens. Follow the distributor’s guidance on disinfectant selection.
Following these suggestions, your carpet should hold up well during the cold winter months and help protect the health of building occupants. The critical thing to remember is to be proactive. Along with protecting the health of the carpet and building occupants, being proactive will help increase the life span of the carpet as well.
Michael Wilson is Senior Vice President of Marketing at AFFLINK, a distributor-based company specializing in marketing packaging, cleaning products, and technologies that improve building efficiencies as well as help protect human health and safety. He has been with the organization since 2005 and provides strategic leadership for the entire supply chain team. In his free time, Michael enjoys working with the Wounded Warrior Project, fishing, and improving his cooking skills.