Dry foam Carpet Cleaning
Yesterday I mentioned how much I love my Kirby. It is seriously the greatest vacuum that I could have purchased. It does just about everything and they last forever. The one thing about the Kirby that isn’t great though, is it’s price. Aside from the machine itself, the price of bags and soap can add up.
Using the Kirby as a carpet shampooer is fabulous. It has worked so well for me and taken care of all of my nasty high traffic areas. A couple of weekends ago I offered to shampoo my friend’s carpet because her parents were coming to visit and her toddlers had wrecked the floor. About halfway through I ran out of soap. It’s a bit expensive to order so I didn’t have a backup and Jenn’s carpet was still crappy looking.
Like I always do, I took to Google to see if there was something else that I could use for the carpet. I ended up finding this recipe to make my own dry foam Kirby shampoo. There was only one issue though, no ammonia to be found. Anywhere. We search high and low at all sorts of stores, but for whatever reason, no one had ammonia. I suppose it was for the better, because we were cleaning in a house full of kids.
Anyway, I replaced the ammonia with alcohol. I’ve used water+vinegar+alcohol to clean my couches and it’s worked great so I figured why not..?!
The recipe that I ended up using to make the shampoo was:
- 3 Tbs Dish Soap (Dawn, Palmolive, etc.)
All you have to do is add the dish soap last to avoid creating too many bubbles, mix well and pour directly into the soap tank. There is no need for diluting or adding extra water or anything. This recipe will make about enough to fill up the tank one and a half times. *Test a small area to make sure there are no issues with your carpet.*
The mix smelled just like the shampoo that I’ve purchased and worked just as well. The stubborn stains all came up and by the time I was done, the carpet was white again. I have no idea why I never thought to try something like this before. I love cleaning with vinegar so it’s like a double win for me.
