Vomit is one of the worst substances that can make its way onto your carpet. Whether it's a sickness bug, a young child, or a party that got out of hand, sick on your carpet is the last thing you want. Here are our top tips for how to get vomit out of carpet.
If you're ill, cleaning is probably low on your list of priorities. However, it's much easier to clean vomit out of carpet while it's still fresh. When dealing with bodily fluids, ensure that you wear gloves to protect you from bacteria.
Any solids should be scraped up. Blunt tools like spatulas and spoons are best for this, but make sure that you disinfect them afterwards. If you don't have something like this to hand, you can use a paper towel to collect any fragments.
Next, it's time to treat the liquid. Combine equal parts white vinegar and water and apply it to the stain. If you have a spray bottle, you can use this to apply the mixture. Otherwise, you can soak some into a paper towel and blot the area with it.
However you apply the solution, you will need a towel for the next step. Gently blot the area, working towards the middle of the stain to avoid spreading it. As tempting as it is, you should never scrub carpet as this can damage it or drive the vomit further into the fibres.
Keep repeating steps two and three until the stain has lifted. If this does not work, it's worth contacting a professional cleaner about how to get vomit out of carpet.
There are all sorts of reasons why you might not be able to clean vomit right away. While it's not ideal, it doesn't have to be a death sentence for your carpet.
Just like fresh vomit, dried vomit is likely to contain chunks. Use a blunt tool or a paper towel to collect any solids. If they have dried into the carpet, continue to step two.
Dried vomit is so difficult to clean because it's dry. To fix this, use a small amount of warm water to dampen the area. Be warned that this will reactivate the smell, so ventilate the room as much as possible!
You can then treat the vomit as if it were fresh, using steps two and three of the above method.
If you have a stubborn vomit stain on your carpet, the best action is to call a professional carpet cleaner. The National Carpet Cleaning Association (NCCA) makes this easier with a network of accredited, experienced carpet cleaning contractors.
Use our directory to find a cleaner who knows how to get vomit out of carpet while protecting your carpet.
Chocolate is a favourite treat for adults and children alike. Its rich texture makes for an excellent snack, but a difficult stain on the carpet! Luckily, we can help you with how to get chocolate out of carpet in three steps.
You should always work as quickly as possible to have a high chance of success.
If the chocolate on your carpet is melted, you can put a handful of ice cubes in a bag and hold them against the area for a few minutes, allowing it to harden for easier cleaning.
However, don't put ice directly on your carpet, as you could drench it, making the mess worse.
Getting chocolate out of carpet should start with manually removing as much as possible. Grab a spatula or a butter knife and scrape the chocolate away from the carpet. Be careful not to be too rough, or you could damage your carpet. You can then pick up or vacuum all the pieces that you break off.
If you're lucky, this may be all that you need to do. However, if there is residue left behind or even some ingrained chocolate, you should try the next step.
After you have removed the scraped fragments, you should try applying a small amount of cold water to the stain. It's important to use cold water as too much heat could melt the chocolate further into the carpet or bind it to your carpet fibres.
Next, add a dash of dish soap or laundry detergent, blotting it in circular motions towards the centre of the stain. Make sure that you don't get your carpet too wet, as it could take a long time to dry. You should also try a patch test on an unseen area of carpet, just in case the product you use discolours your carpet. Keep the dish soap to a minimum as too much will result in the carpet re-soiling.
If there is still some stubborn chocolate on your carpet, you can try mixing one part white vinegar with four parts cold water. Gently apply this solution with a cloth or towel, leaving it to work for five minutes. Remember to carry out a patch test first to prevent damage.
Once the vinegar has had time to break down the stain, blot it away with a towel. Work in gentle, circular motions to avoid driving the chocolate in further.
If you're struggling to get chocolate out of carpet, the best option is always to call in a professional.
With the National Carpet Cleaning Association, you don’t have to worry about an unsavoury cleaning service when removing sweet stains from your carpet. All our members are fully trained, rigorously vetted and highly experienced, so you can simply select one that’s close to you.
Find a local NCCA carpet cleaner to get chocolate out of your carpet with ease.
Christmas is a great time to give your house a thorough clean. If you’re hosting, you’ll want your home looking at its best for your guests. But even if you’re not having everyone round in one go, you can expect plenty of friends and family popping by over the festive period.
However, with so much to think about, most people don’t know where to start when it comes to Christmas cleaning. Below, you’ll find the ultimate Christmas cleaning checklist to make things easier. It’s even broken down into a few smaller checklists, so nobody goes into panic mode!
It's a good idea to start cleaning before you decorate – it's much harder to clean around decorations! If your decorations have been up in the attic for eleven months, it's likely that they will also need a clean before you can put them up.
Even with our handy checklist, Christmas cleaning is a considerable undertaking. Fortunately, you can take some of the weight off your shoulders by hiring a professional carpet cleaner using the NCCA’s directory of accredited cleaners.
Simply enter your postcode to find a cleaning company near you that’s been vetted and approved by the National Carpet Cleaning Association. Then enjoy fresh, clean carpets for Christmas and long into the new year.
Christmas is coming and you want your home looking its best. Whether you're hosting the big family dinner or just expecting guests throughout the festive period, nothing dampens the Christmas spirit like a grotty carpet.
Read on to find out more about this important part of the festive cleaning calendar.
More than any other holiday, Christmas is a time when carpets are in the spotlight. Here’s why…
With all the extended family gathered around the Christmas tree, it's common for a few people to be cross-legged on the floor. Keeping your carpet well-maintained makes sure that it is soft underfoot, perfect for a cosy evening.
Children are often found playing with new toys across the carpet, so it's important to protect them by cleaning your carpets and rugs.
In the winter, all sorts of bugs spread, from sickness to flu. This can make everyone more vulnerable to any bacteria living deep in the carpet.
The cold weather also creates the perfect conditions for mould to grow, releasing spores that impact the whole family, but particularly people with allergies. Staying on top of cleaning is the best way to prevent health issues and sniffles at Christmas dinner.
Apart from the health benefits, cleaning a carpet leaves it looking and smelling fresh. You may have grown used to any foul smells trapped in your carpet, but your guests certainly won't have!
After splashing out on the holiday season, a Christmas carpet clean may seem like an added expense, but it will actually save you money. Regular carpet cleaning increases the lifespan of your carpet and decreases the long-term impact of heavy traffic – lengthening the time before you need to find money for a whole new carpet.
Christmas is a popular time for carpet cleaning, so you should get booked in as early as you can!
November is usually a good month to start booking, but you may need to book even earlier for particularly jam-packed businesses. Once the festive adverts start appearing on TV, it's definitely time to start thinking about your Christmas carpet clean.
However, if you are reading this in December and worrying about your dirty carpet, it may not be too late! It's still worth enquiring with local carpet cleaners to see if they can squeeze you in before Christmas. Even if there are no spaces left, they may be able to keep you in mind if they have a last-minute cancellation.
You might also consider booking in for a post-Christmas clean. This is another opportune time for your annual clean, ensuring that stains from wine or even your Boxing Day curry are removed effectively. It will also prepare your carpets for next Christmas, well ahead of time.
Choosing the right company is a vital step to get the best results from Christmas carpet cleaning. The National Carpet Cleaning Association (NCCA) makes it easy with a directory of accredited carpet cleaners all over the UK. Trained and insured, every carpet cleaner in our directory follows our code of conduct to ensure a smooth experience with long-lasting results.
Find a carpet cleaner near you to get booked in for a pre- or post-Christmas clean.
If your New Year’s resolution is to grow your business, it's time to start planning. Businesses need care and attention to develop, but with the right know-how, you can foster a bigger, stronger company. Here are our top tips for scaling your carpet cleaning business in 2025.
The first step of progress is knowing where you want to get to. Think about what you have to offer and what you want to achieve, then use this to set a roadmap with short-term and long-term targets.
This will allow you to allocate your resources in accordance with these goals. Above all, planning ahead can help prevent hasty decisions that lead to losses.
Expanding your business only works if there is a demand for it. If you find yourself turning down work, then a simple way to scale up is by growing your team and taking on more jobs locally.
However, you can also expand to new locations to get more business when demand isn’t there close to home. Another option is to target more customers with different services. Take a look at what other cleaning companies offer and try to spot gaps in the market. That brings us onto…
If you identify a gap in the market or trend that you can take advantage of, you can either hire someone new or train your existing staff.
Becoming responsible for another person’s salary is not something that should be taken lightly. Do you need to hire a new person, or can you upskill an existing employee? Investing in your employees’ skillsets can boost productivity and improve staff retention.
As tempting as it can be to dream big and stretch as far as you can, this is often unwise when managing a business. Make sure that you have the cash flow to support any growth, or you could find yourself having to scale back.
It's better to expand gradually and check that your income increases accordingly than to make an oversized investment with minimal return.
Social media is a useful tool for developing any modern business. You can use your social media profiles to introduce yourself and your business, showing potential customers what you can do. With the right approach, it can generate lots of leads to help you scale up your business.
Looking at content uploaded by similar companies is a simple way to find your feet online. You’ll also find social media on any good marketing course – like the specialist marketing training offered by the NCCA.
Generating leads is the first part of the sales puzzle. But there’s still so much to do if you want to convert leads into customers, which will make it quicker and easier to scale your business:
All of this and more is covered in our exclusive one-day sales workshop, Improving Your Sales Success.
By joining the National Carpet Cleaning Association (NCCA), you gain exclusive access to invaluable training courses for yourself and your team. We can help you upskill your workforce to offer a wider range of high-quality services or just fine-tune your sales and marketing skills to make growth easier.
You've probably heard someone recommend rice to soak up moisture from places it shouldn't be. From soaked phones to wet carpet, people will recommend rice to dry all sorts of things, but is it really as good as they say? In this post, we’ll discuss whether wet rice on carpet is a helpful hack or just another piece of carpet cleaning misinformation.
Rice is very good at soaking up water – just think how much water you have to put in the pan to cook it. The logic applied by many people is that rice will therefore absorb the moisture from other places. However, you may want to think twice before trying this for yourself.
Rice doesn't instantly absorb all the moisture from your carpet, so you would need to leave it there for a few hours. In that time, mites, moths, silverfish and ants will smell the starchy snack and make a beeline for your carpet. These creatures lay eggs and breed incredibly fast, leaving you with much bigger problems than a wet carpet.
Once you pour rice onto your carpet, it doesn't magically tidy itself up - you then have to deal with picking up hundreds of mushy grains. Due to its size, it can block or damage vacuum cleaners, so you need to find a manual way to tidy it up. The starch that coats rice also spreads into surrounding water, leaving a sticky coating on your carpet.
When rice absorbs moisture, it expands to up to three times its size. This makes it harder to clean up, as it is even more likely to block a vacuum than dry rice.
We can't grow rice in the UK, so most of our rice has travelled a long distance to get to our kitchens. Using rice on wet carpet wastes these emissions and your money. There are so many alternative methods that are cheaper both financially and environmentally.
Your kitchen cupboard is likely to contain a much more helpful product – baking soda. This powder soaks up the moisture and can then be vacuumed up afterwards.
Both paper and cloth towels are a better solution than rice. Gently press towels into the wet area, making sure that you regularly change them and don't leave wet towels on your carpet for too long.
Once you have soaked up as much as you can, shutting the door and using a dehumidifier is an easy way to collect water from wet carpet. Many dehumidifiers also have a setting that warms the room, encouraging the water to evaporate faster.
For a hassle-free solution to a wet carpet, hire a professional. Instead of leaving you with the starchy mess of rice on wet carpet, a professional carpet cleaner takes care of everything. The National Carpet Cleaning Association directory is full of insured, experienced cleaners all over the UK that can dry your carpet for you.
Search our carpet cleaner directory to take the first step towards a clean, dry carpet.