The dangers of DIY upholstery cleaning

How hard can it be? After all its just  upholstery cleaning after all. There are lots of products on the market that will help you with DIY upholstery cleaning. It seems so simple – all you have to do is put the product on the dirty or stained furniture. By some magic it will be instantly clean. What could possibly go wrong?

How did that happen?

Well you could end up with your chairs looking like this. The difficulty is that different materials react differently to cleaning chemicals. Its why fabric identification is a vital part of a professional  upholstery clean. Its why we always insist on inspecting your upholstery prior to quoting so that we know what the fabric is and can advise you of any difficulties. It also allows us to choose the correct cleaning solution for the fabric. We have a  large range that we have access to.

The second issue when cleaning any fabric is that its very easy to add a chemical but very hard to remove it. In the above case the repeated application of a supermarket cleaning product initially made the chairs appear cleaner. Soon these dark marks appeared. Following another clean the went away but again soon returned but worse.

How did you do that?

Fortunately having established what the material was, in this case a polyester cotton mix, and choosing the correct cleaning solution, an enzyme cleaner with an acidic rinse to leave the material in a neutral state, the chairs were returned back to looking how they should . The cleaning solutions were extracted out using our high power truck mounted machine ensuring that no cleaning residues were left in the material.

What now?

So if you have badly stained or soiled upholstery you can clearly see the difference between professional and DIY upholstery cleaning. You choose which is best for you  – we are waiting for your call