Addressing Some Customer Concerns: Rug Doctor vs Steam It Gone

Customer after customer has raved and raved. Finally, I met the not so elated customer. She was still satisfied with how things worked out for her in the kitchen but had a major concern that I would like to address.

Just a little background, I spent a lot of time on the phone and in person explaining the machine to this customer, even though she saw the video. She reminded me that I need to re-dub the videos into more appealing bites that are better labeled.  If a client forgets how to do something, they can then go back to just the part of video that addresses how to do that thing, instead of wading through the whole video again. I thank her for reminding me to do that. I am working on the re-dubs as we speak and I should have them up in a weeks time.

More importantly, this customer rented the Steam It Gone steam cleaner in place of her annual Rug Doctor Rental. What the customer was most disappointed by was that there weren’t buckets of dirty water to show her how clean her carpet was getting. I completely understand. I’ve used the Rug Doctor in the past. The buckets of dirty water makes you feel like “wow, I’ve been living with all this dirt in my carpet.” But the truth is, the dirt you are pulling up is not necessarily in the carpet. It’s dirt mostly from under the carpet.

The Rug Doctor is essentially a water spraying wet-vac. The water goes down through your carpet, through the carpet mats and down to the floor underneath. All the dirt that accumulated there from you walking on the carpet and shaking that dirt down to the bottom is being lifted back up through the carpet mat and through your carpet. And I agree, it’s a great feeling to get rid of that dirt.

But is dirt really the problem? There is dirt below your house too. Do you really feel the need to suck up all that dirt and get rid of it too? It’s not the dirt under your carpet that’s the problem, it’s the dirt in your carpet fibers that make your carpet look dirty.

Also, aside from the dirt in your fibers, Steam It Gone customers are more concerned about germs: dust mites, mold, mold spores, pollen, mold mites, and bacteria. The Rug Doctor cannot make those things go away. As the Rug Doctor’s lukewarm water dilutes the dirt under your carpet, it pulls a percentage of it away. But anyone who’s ever used the Rug Doctor knows that it takes about 20 passes of the machine to see water that doesn’t look black or dark grey. Just washing your carpet once doesn’t cut it! So the dirt is an indicator of what percentage of those other things the water is really carrying out of the carpet. Then when you stop, the percentage that remains gets to fester in an incredibly hospitable environment for producing more dust mites, mold, mold spores, mold mites, and bacteria (not pollen). Meanwhile you have just pulled some dirt from where it was quietly sitting under your carpet and redistributed some of it right into the fibers of your carpet.

What Steam It Gone’s Ladybug XL2300T with Thermo Accelerated Nano Crystal Sanitation (TANCS®) technology offers you is a system that doesn’t go down under your carpet to grab and redistribute that dirt, but vapors that kill anything down there that could harm you. Meanwhile, using extreme heat, and the towel around the brush head, you manage to pick up the dirt,  oils, pollen and debris that are living in the fibers of your carpet. Picking up the oils in the fibers of your carpet, which the Rug Doctor cannot do without using other agents, helps keep your carpet cleaner longer since the oils are no-longer there to attract more dirt and other particles to stick to your carpet fibers.

I hope this was helpful to everyone in deciding if a Steam It Gone steam cleaner is a good replacement for your annual Rug Doctor rental.