Have you ever noticed dark lines near your baseboards, underneath doorways, or maybe you moved a piece of flat furniture and noticed there are dark lines around it. What you’re experiencing is called filtration soiling. In case you haven’t read our post on how important vacuuming is, we urge you to do so. If you’ve been keeping up with our carpet cleaning tips, you’ll notice a trend where we mention how important vacuuming is whenever we can.
Your Carpet Is A Filter
Your home’s indoor air quality is typically more polluted than the outside air. We bring in dust, soil, and other pollutants in our home. As these particles find a place to land a good majority of them settle along the side of the room. The reason this happens is because your HVAC system pulls air from the edges of the room. Think of it as your home breathing – air comes out through the supply vents and back in through the return vents. Over time the dust particles accumulate and you can begin to see the physical lines begin to form. Vacuuming the edges of your carpet great help reduce the chance of these lines forming. But let’s be honest, there are very few people who vacuum their room edges regularly.
Another note about filtration lines – if you love burning candles in your home you’ll likely see these filtration lines form more quickly. The reason for that is, you’re atomizing the fragrance oils into the air. As the home breaths, those oils will also settle where they’re able to.
Now You Have These Filtration Lines, Now What?
The last major point about filtration soiling that we want to make is that once you start to see the physical filtration lines. That means that there is an immense amount of soil load in those lines. Filtration lines from from the bottom of the carpet fibers and make their way to the top. This soiling is often statically charged which can make it stubborn to remove. We do have special cleaning tools and special cleaning solutions that are designed specifically to remove filtration soiling. In most cases we have great success in removing these lines but there are situations where we can only improve the appearance as the soiling has damaged the dye sites of the carpet and permanently stained them. The extreme cases happen when there is poor air flow in the home, along with frequent candle burning, and little to no vacuuming or carpet maintenance.