Carpet Cleaning Facts For School Administrators, Facility Managers

Carpet Gets an “A” For Savings

The Facts about Carpet Cleaning and Maintenance for School
Administrators and Facility Managers

This is the 11th in a series of 18 articles designed to share some of the Carpet and Rug Institute’s (CRI) best online assets – a collection of downloadable fact sheets. Developed as easy-to-use, one-page position statements, the CRI Fact Sheets cover four main carpet-related topic areas: Indoor Air Quality, Asthma and Allergy, Cleaning Products, and Environmental Sustainability.

Each of these topics is addressed from the perspective of various market segments: carpet dealers and consumers; architects, designers and builders; school administrators and facility managers, and healthcare administrators and facility managers. There are also separate fact sheets explaining CRI’s Green Label Plus Indoor Air Quality and Seal of Approval carpet cleaning standards – 18 fact sheets in all.

The fact sheet on cleaning products for school administrators and facility managers begins,

“For educational institutions, budgets are always going to be an issue. That’s what makes carpet the ideal flooring choice. Not only does it deliver better health and safety benefits, it’s also much more economical over the long term. It’s time schools got educated on the benefits of carpet.” It continues:

What You Should Know About Carpet Cleaning Facts For School Administrators & Facility Managers:

• Carpet is cost effective. In fact, it can be 65 percent less expensive to maintain than hard surface flooring. While buying and installing hard surface flooring appears less expensive than carpet in the short run, the true cost of labor, supplies, and equipment over an average 22-year lifespan makes carpet a more cost-effective choice.

• Hard surface floors require 2 1/2 times more cleaning than carpet annually, increasing maintenance time and impacting limited human resources. Hard surface cleaning supplies are also nearly seven times more expensive than carpet cleaning supplies.

• To preserve the life of your carpet, clean it with supplies that have the CRI Seal of Approval. CRI created the Seal of Approval program to help customers identify carpet cleaning products that clean effectively without harming the carpet. For a list of these products, click on Seal of Approval at carpet-rug.org.

• The CRI Seal of Approval is especially important because independent testing shows that many cleaning detergents and spot removers clean no better than water. Worse, they can leave a sticky residue that attracts soil at a faster rate. There are also big differences in the soil removal capability among vacuums  and extractors.

• Vacuuming is the single most effective means of keeping carpet clean; 90 to 95% of all dry soil by weight can be removed from carpet by following a routine schedule. Choose vacuums that bear the CRI Seal of Approval for assurance of effective soil removal and good air quality.

• Seal of Approval now offers test of vacuum energy efficiency that measures cleaning effectiveness in relation to energy consumption. Making product choices with this knowledge can lead to significant energy reduction and substantial savings over the long term.

• Carpet also requires periodic deep extraction cleaning. Seal of Approval deep cleaning extractors and systems (equipment and solutions) effectively remove soil and also recover most of the water or solution from the carpet.

CRI wants to be known not just as the science-based source of information about carpet, but as the first stop for any and all questions about this useful floor covering.

Click on this link for the complete list of Downloadable Carpet and Rug Institute Fact Sheets.

Next – The facts about cleaning products for healthcare administrators and facility managers.

~Bethany