NO MORE STICKY MESSES

HERE’S HOW TO CLEAN COMMON HOLIDAY CARPET STAINS

Holiday parties are messy. People stand around your home chatting and drinking, snacking on finger foods or full-on meals, and indulging in desserts like pumpkin pie and bûche de Noël. Until splat! One of your guests drops a slab of turkey and gravy or spills wine on your carpet. Are you the type to freak out or just go with the flow? Either way, it’s

● likely you’ll want to get that stain out – pronto. The longer a stain sits, the harder it is to remove. We challenged three

● popular carpet cleaners to clean cranberry sauce, mulled wine and more.

The carpet stain challenge

We bought a brand new 8-by-10-foot white shag rug and smeared it with common stains you might encounter while entertaining at your home over the holidays. We used pumpkin pie filling because its bright color makes it a potent stain; whole berry cranberry sauce for its sticky consistency and lumpy texture; and charcoal soot to represent fireplace or barbecue debris. We also used two ubiquitous seasonal drinks: hot chocolate and a zinfandel-based mulled wine, both of which have high sugar content, leading to stickiness and dark stains.

We then used three common carpet cleaners and their corresponding cleaning solutions to clean the carpet, not pretreating any stains. (Would you have time with 20 people still partying in your home? We think not.)

Our challengers were the Little Green HydroSteam Pet Portable Carpet Cleaner with the Pet Pro Oxy Spot and Stain solution, the Hoover SmartWash Pet Complete with its Spot Cleanse Oxy Solution, and the Shark CarpetXpert EX44UPG1 with its Oxy Cleaning Solution.

The results

When we test products, we like to push them to their limits. In this case, we selected stains that could commonly happen, only extreme versions of them. As in, we really mashed that pumpkin into the white shag.

Our pumpkin and wine stains proved to be the hardest ones to remove, probably because of their coloring. Of these two, the pumpkin stain was harder to get out than the wine.

In the end, the Hoover Smartwash was able to lift the soot and chocolate stains completely from the rug. It also did the best at removing the other stains, although the pumpkin ultimately showed it was there to stay.

Between the cranberries from the sauce and the long shag texture, the Shark CarpetXpert jammed during cleaning in upright mode, but it did better when we switched over to the handheld unit. Likewise the portable Bissell Little Green Hydrosteam did OK as a handheld unit and cut through most of the wine and chocolate stains.

Senior lab manager and one of our testers, Jonathan Chan says, “I think pretreating would have helped every single one of these stains. However, each one would have required a different tactic. For example, pretreating wine with salt is a known tactic. It helps draw the wine that’s soaked through. Then use the carpet cleaner.”

He also suggests using warm water to rehydrate the hot chocolate stain to make it easier for the carpet cleaner to lap up.

Yeah, but if you don’t have a carpet cleaner, then how to get stains out of a carpet?

If you don’t have a carpet cleaner, but you do have a vacuum, you may want to pause before using it to clean up common holiday stains, particularly wet ones.

As Chan explains it, “A carpet cleaner is a device that mechanically applies soap and water to a carpet from a clean water tank, scrubs, and then suctions up the byproduct into a dirty water tank.

A vacuum cleaner has a small and compact fan that blows air out of one end and creates a vacuum effect on the other that pulls debris and dirt out of the carpet. A vacuum cleaner is designed for dry debris and a carpet cleaner is for stains.”

So, where does this leave you? What will take bad stains out of carpet? Depends on the stain.

Soot is our only dry holiday stain. In this case, the best approach is to avoid water and just vacuum up the residue.

For red wine, you’ll want to blot it with a clean cloth immediately. Then use water or a two-to-one-part mixture of hydrogen peroxide and dishwashing liquid to blot again, and then wipe it up with a damp cloth. Be cautious on a colored carpet with the peroxide as it is a mild bleach.

For the pumpkin and the cranberry sauce, both tannin-based, chunky stains, you will want to remove any solid debris first, using your hands. Then mix dishwashing liquid with hydrogen peroxide and warm water (or just water) and use a sponge to clean the stain from the outer portion to the middle. Then rinse with water and repeat as necessary.

You can always try a carpet stain remover, too.

Does vinegar and baking soda remove stains from carpet?

When it comes to home remedies, vinegar and baking soda are effective cleaners; combine them and you’ve got a wonderfully easy way to remove stains from carpets.

Chan says, “Vinegar and baking soda do work as stain removers because they are slightly acidic and alkaline respectively, so they can dissolve grease and proteins.”

First, remove as much of the stain as possible by blotting. Then, sprinkle baking soda onto the stain and then wet it with white vinegar and warm water. The foam that this creates will work to pull up stains from the carpeting – even old stains! Let it dry overnight and then vacuum up the dry baking soda. This will also neutralize any odor.

How do you get Christmas tree stains out of the carpet?

’Tis the season for Christmas trees, and with that, comes the potential for sticky pine sap on your carpet.

To get pine sap off the carpet, Chan suggests dabbing the affected area with an ice cube.

“The combination of moisture and cold will help it be less sticky,” he says. “After that, it’s a matter of plucking the sap out of the carpet fibers with either a paper towel or gloved hand.”

The remaining residue can be cleaned off with an all-purpose carpet cleaner.

Reviewed’s chief scientist David Ellerby, PhD, says that the best remedy for removing sap from carpeting is rubbing alcohol, which softens and dissolves the sap.

“You’d need to do a patch test on the fabric, though,” says Ellerby. “Just like hydrogen peroxide, it could damage a more colorful rug, in this case, by dissolving the dye.”