Cleaning your carpet - Out of the car

While in preparation for dying my carpet:

http://www.mkivsupra.net/vbb/showthread.php?t=104244

I thought I'd see how good I could get the carpet clean before I did this. A test really, to see if either I would spoil the carpet for good or bring it up a lot cleaner.....I was thinking of other cream carpet owners and thought, I could take the risks for them and show the results since, I would be dying it black anyway.

Well, my carpet is the most embarrassing part of my car, it looks like the previous owner had spilt bleach or something in the passenger footwell which, had removed some of the carpet fibres but, I have been able to hide this for the last 5yrs with nice new car mats.

So, here you can see the carpet out of the car, dirty, I then used a solution of VAX machine carpet cleaner with a ratio of 2 caps of cleaner to 1.5ltrs of warm water. I then poured (don't use a spray bottle/gun, you will be their all day - don't be shy, splash it all over) the mixture onto the carpet in small sections and used a stiff brush to rub it in, the brush really takes a lot of the hard word out of it and it foams up very well.

I then used a normal garden hose to rinse it out and left it to drip dry in the sun/wind.

The next photo shows one side done and the other not. I then did the other side and looked at how good the carpet was looking.

However, I did notice that after the first half had been done and got some overspray off the water hose the night before, this had seeped into the foam backing and brought up a nice pink colour where my heater matrix had leaked a few years back. Something to watch out for.

So, I decided to have another go on the troubled areas since, I had nothing to loose. This only took 10mins and with another complete hose down, you can see the final results in the last few photos. I have to say, the carpet came up very well in the end, although, it was a little lighter in some areas than others and the pink had gone.

Drying time takes 24hrs for it to be fully dry but, after 5hrs or so in the sun, most of it is good. It's the foam backing that you are waiting to dry out really. You might find that the carpet smells the next day and this got me worried a little but, it was not fully dry so, back out in the sun it went and so did the smell 100%.

Was it worth it ?

YES