Dealing With Flooded Carpets – Cleaning and Restoration Insights

There’s no denying that it’s been a pretty rotten summer in the UK in 2021, with rain leading to serious floods – several times. The flash floods saw multiple parts of London getting a right dousing, with road closures and even Tube closures, especially right near the Thames.

Even if your home or business escaped the effects of this past summer’s floods, your carpets aren’t immune to becoming flooded. If there’s a leak in the roof, all that heavy rain can soak your carpets. Rain can also come in through open windows or by accident on people’s wet weather clothes or even shoes, and end up on the carpets. Even if the weather’s fine, carpets can still get a bit soggy if someone forgets that the tap’s running into the sink or if the kids get a bit overenthusiastic in the bath – or if someone spills or splashes water inside (I remember reading about one woman who discovered her daughters having a water balloon fight in the living room…).

Why Carpets Don’t Like Water

There is a reason why carpets and water – or any other sort of liquid – don’t play nicely together. The main reason is mould. Mould likes to grow in the same sort of conditions that you do – somewhere where the temperature is just right, and where there’s plenty of food and drink. Your home or office is already the right temperature for life, and carpets already contain at least a little bit of dirt, dust and debris, which are the perfect food for mould. Add in liquid, and you have the perfect conditions for growing mould.

Usually, carpets are too dry for mould to grow easily. However, when water lingers in them, this allows the mould spores to proliferate. Because the last ingredient needed for a real mould problem is time, the faster you can act to remove water from carpets, the better the odds of you defeating the mould are. However, the catch is that some of the natural fibres used to make carpets are very absorbent. If your carpet has a natural jute backing – which a lot of them do – things can get particularly problematic, as jute is very, very absorbent and hangs onto the water as few other natural fibres do.

In short, if you get water or other liquid on your carpets, you have to act quickly to ensure that all the water gets out.

The other problem that can occur if a lot of water gets on your carpets is that the liquid can float all the deep-down dirt to the top of the carpet, making it look hideous. The principle of using moisture to loosen trapped dirt from the carpets is how professional carpet shampooing and steam cleaning work, but if the water got on the carpets by accident, nothing’s taking that loosened dirt away.

Lastly, if it wasn’t water that got onto the carpets but some other liquid, there can be problems with staining (in the case of liquids like red wine or colourful soft drinks) and with bad odours (in the case of milk or urine). These problems can occur even if the spill wasn’t exactly a flood but was only a little bit.

First Aid For Flooded Carpets

If you’ve come across a flood on your carpets, what do you need to do? While it’s true that you probably won’t be able to get all of the water out of your flooded carpet without professional help, there is a lot that you can do. Think of this as first aid in the case of an accident. If you know first aid, you might not be able to do everything, but you can do a lot of good before the professionals with all the gear come along to make everything right.

Here’s what to do if you come across a flooded patch in your carpets:

Step 1: Stop It at the Source

The very first thing you should do is to make sure that the source of the water that’s flooded your carpets is cut off. This means that you remove the thing that’s blocking the drain, turn off the tap, close the window – or in more serious situations, put a bucket under that leak or find something that can act as a sandbag to stop the floodwater coming in. In very serious cases of flooding, you may also need to ensure that nothing electrical is in the spot. Turn the power off at the mains if you have to. The last thing you want is to get yourself electrocuted while trying to salvage a flooded carpet. You’re worth more than even the most valuable antique Persian carpet.

Step 2: Soak It Up, Buttercup

You now need to absorb as much water as you possibly can. Do this by finding things that are more absorbent than your carpet fibres. Newspapers and towels are obvious solutions, but anything dry that’s made of cotton will do the job in very serious situations. Anything that can be thrown into the washing machine so the dirt can be used in extreme emergencies. Soak up as much as you can and take the water away. Keep on going until you can’t blot up any more liquid from the carpets or until you run out of absorbent things.

Step 3: Ventilation is Good for You

If you’ve got out as much water as you possibly can, then you need to let the natural principle of evaporation help get the water out of your carpets. Open the windows to let the breeze through (but not if this will allow more rain to get onto the carpets), turn on a fan, turn on the ventilator, turn on the heaters, open the door… anything that will move the air and/or warm it. If there’s just a small spot of flooding, you can use a hair dryer set to medium to help dry the carpet fibres.

Step 4: Book In a Professional

If the flooding in your carpets was anything other than minor (i.e., smaller than an A3 sheet of paper), then it’s probably best if you call in a professional carpet cleaner to remove the rest of the moisture. You may want to get the rest of your carpets deep cleaned at the same time. However, if you live in an area (in London or elsewhere) that has experienced flash floods, the demand for professional carpet care services may be heavy.

How Professional Carpet Cleaners Can Help Save Your Flooded Carpets

The reason why professional carpet cleaners are able to get more water out of your flood-damaged carpets than you can is because they have better equipment. Most carpet care gurus who do it for a living have powerful truck-mounted vacuums that extract huge amounts of moisture from absorbent carpet fibres. The strength of these vacuums goes way beyond what’s possible with a towel, a wet/dry vacuum cleaner or one of those hired DIY carpet cleaning machines.

What’s more, because carpet cleaning professionals are trained in everything to do with carpets, they’ll be able to give you good advice about how to finish drying your carpets and how long you need to avoid walking on them (if possible). The thing is that even if you think your carpet is perfectly dry if a bit of moisture lingers right down the bottom where you can’t feel it, this can still be enough for mould to grow in. If you put heavy furniture on that spot, then the carpet won’t dry out properly, and you can wind up with mould problems. Even walking on carpets can add extra dirt to a carpet that’s not properly dry.

In the very worst-case scenario, a professional carpet cleaner will be able to let you know if your carpets are too far gone to salvage, which will help if you have to put in an insurance claim.