How often do we clean our carpets? Considering that they are the most ill-used items in the house, with so much foot traffic to soil them, we don't really pay them enough attention. We tend to relegate them to the realms of maintenance-free items. Till we suddenly become aware of the fact that they are not. Many of us call in the professionals when carpets look really bad and then forget about them till the next time they are in the same state. The thing is, when you clean your carpet more often, you are extending its life. Isn't that reason enough? How on earth does that happen? The more soiled a carpet gets, the more cleaning agents are needed to get it back into its original state. Not just more, stronger agents may also be needed. This affects the durability of the carpet material and very soon, you'll end up with a frayed carpet that needs to be changed.

Prevention as far as your carpets go, is infinitely better than cure. What's more, you can do the cleaning yourself. Do it yourself or DIY carpet cleaning is getting to be more and more popular thanks to the range of carpet cleaning materials available in the market today. You can do a combination cleaning program. Call in the professionals once in a while and clean regularly in between. Or, you can handle the whole thing yourself. All you need to remember is to always follow the instructions down to the last letter, especially the dilution ratios. Take care never to over-wet your carpets and make sure they dry in 24 hours. This might need a bit of help like drying fans, heaters or extra drying with the equipment used for cleaning. If you don't pay attention to this, you could be laying yourself wide open to problems of odor and microbial growth.

Is the abuse we heap on our carpets unwittingly warranted? Let's look at a typical day. People walk into the house several times and each time, the dirt and soil from their footwear get deposited in the carpet pile. In any home, it will be observed that the most soiled carpet area lies in a 7-foot radius from where you enter the house. Besides cleaning regularly, it would do well to minimize this. You could do that by placing scrap mats or Astroturf runners at every point of entrance - be it the front door, the back entrance or the garage-to-home entry point. These trap a lot of the soil and will lessen the wear and tear on your carpets inside. If the outside mats get too dirty, you can simple throw them away and get new ones. Or, just hose them down if they're the washable kind.

Where do you begin? Start by vacuuming and doing a good, thorough job of it. Stands to reason that the dry dirt and soil are better removed with dry cleaning methods. This helps the cleaning detergents to work very well. If there is a lot of soil in your carpets, the detergent particles will attach themselves to it and will be left in the carpet as residue. So wet cleaning of the carpets after a well-done dry cleaning by vacuuming will be good for your carpet.

Like we said before, clean your carpets often and do regular cleaning. If your carpets get too soiled, you will have to call in the professionals who will probably advice you to do a restorative cleaning job. This lessens the life of the carpet.