Tag Archives: cleaning

Great Carpet Cleaner Shampoo Substitute

Posted on by September 7, 2021
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Carpet Cleaner Soap

Save Money:

You can make your own great carpet cleaner shampoo substitute cheap and easy. You can even make substitute de-foamer to keep the water picked up in the recovery tank from foaming up.  I did it and it is easy. You can use what you already have. Also known as carpet shampoo, solution, soap, detergent- it is all the same.

I have a Hoover carpet cleaner that I use several times a year to clean  high traffic areas. Works good  and I like the results. The price of the fluid adds up though, at $12 or more a bottle. Then you add on  the de-foamer and the spot treatment, it really adds up. I knew there must be a cheaper way, so I searched the web and saw it mentioned you can use laundry detergent. Made sense to me, since you are cleaning fabric.

Make your own:

After using it for a couple years, this is what I do. I use a teaspoon or less of powdered laundry detergent to a gallon of hot water. Think about how much you use in the clothes washer to a gallon of water. I don’t see why you couldn’t use liquid soap instead. If you use scented, your carpet will smell like your clothes do. You wouldn’t use something with fabric softener in it. May attract dirt. As always put some of the solution on a rag and test a concealed part on the carpet for color fastness.

Defoamer and Spot Clean too:

For de-foamer in the recovery tank, just put a small piece of bar soap in the tank. Fish it out and use it again. Works great! For the spot pre-treatment, I just spray some Formula 409 cleaner on the spot and rub it a little before going over it with the carpet cleaner. Spray some on a cloth first and rub a carpet area to make sure no color from the carpet transfers to the rag.

These are the three ways I save some money cleaning my carpets. It adds up over time.

Stop Vacuum Smell

Posted on by June 4, 2014
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How to stop vacuum smell. You have one of the new vacuum cleaners that doesn’t use bags. Nice not to have bags, but now you have to clean filters. You get them all clean and put everything back together, ready for next time. A week, later after starting to vacuum, you smell a stench in the air. Your clean vac is now putting a bad smell in the air.

The problem is, when the pleated filter was rinsed, it provided moisture for mold and bacteria to grow. That is what it did while the vacuum sat and you smelled the result. To prevent this, you need to sterilize the filter. The pleated filter is almost impossible to get completely dry, unlike the foam one, so it must soak in a sterilizing solution. Fortunately everyone has it- bleach. Bleach kills microbes.Cleaning vacuum filter with bleach

 

Simply take your filters, place in a container and cover with water. Add a couple tablespoons of bleach and swirl around gently. Keep it out of your eyes! let set for 5 minutes, drain and rinse. Don’t over do it with the bleach, as it could damage the filters.

Sterilizing home vacuum filter in bleach

After rinsing, squeeze out the foam filter and let them dry. Preferably in the sun, as it kills bacteria too.

Drying home vacum filter

Doing these simple steps should stop the smell.

How to Clean a Dryer Vent Easily

Posted on by June 9, 2013
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Rotary LintEater Kit RLE202

 

This is how I clean a dryer vent quickly and easily. When they designed this house, the dryer was a long way from the outside wall, so they put a 10 foot plastic pipe in the concrete foundation. It has been a headache from the start. Lint collects on the walls of the pipe and has been impossible to clean effectively. Even worse there are two 90 degree bends. The best I could do was scrape the sides with an 8 foot long stick and blow the lint out with an electric leaf blower. Happily I found a solution on Amazon that really works. A Gardus RLE202 LintEater Rotary Dryer Vent Cleaning System. Not a catchy name for sure, but I love it. Here is a link to it on Amazon. It is an affiliate link but costs you nothing. Gardus RLE202 LintEater 10-Piece Rotary Dryer Vent Cleaning System

I dreaded trying to clean the vent, but when it takes forever for my clothes to dry and you know they are wearing themselves out – something had to be done.

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The LintEater comes with an 2 brushes, a cutter tip for rain gutter use, 4- 3′ flexible rods and 2 adaptors to fit to a standard 4″ dryer vent.  I used the adaptor to hook my shop vac to the dryer vent while brushing it out. A clean way to do it. No dust in my face. If you don’t have a shop vac, you could turn on the dryer to air dry and clean from the outside. A dryer doesn’t blow very hard though. You can see from the pictures the rods are very flexible and when screwed together reach 12 feet. You do need to attach the rods to a power drill to spin the brush. This gives it the great cleaning action. The instructions suggest you wrap some tape around the area where the rods are screwed together. This is to prevent them from unscrewing if you accidentally switch the drill into reverse.

IMG_1475IMG_1473Cleaning Dryer Vent

 

In the pictures above you can see the brush fed through the dryer vent plug, then it is inserted into the vent. This vent was cleaned several months ago so the buildup is not bad. Not like when I first did it!

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I attached my shop vac to the vent and then fed the cleaner, attached to my drill,  into the vent. Since I vent wasn’t too dirty, I did all twelve feet at one time . Feed it in slowly, with a back and forth motion to scrub the vent. The first time I did it, I added one three foot section at a time. Making sure that each section of the vent was clean before adding on another rod. When the vent is caked with lint, it causes friction on the brush. The rods are flexible and want to whip. Adding one rod at a time reduces this.

The brush is short so can get around elbows. This is where it really shines for me. At the far end close to the dryer there are 2 elbows. This traps lint. When the cleaner hits that area, I can really hear the lint being sucked into the vacuum. You can see the collected lint in the picture above

After years of my dryer vent being half-way clogged, it is clean. This product makes it easy. Now I clean it whenever I feel the dryer is taking too long to dry clothes. This saves wear and tear on my clothes and energy. As you can tell I am real happy with this product.
Gardus RLE202 LintEater 10-Piece Rotary Dryer Vent Cleaning System