My colleague Dawn rents the Rug Doctor from Argos out every few months and cleans her stairs and hallway proper with it. So committed is she to this concept that when I said I’d picked up a reasonably sized wool rug from a house clearance for £11 she just replied “run the Rug Doctor over it” like that was self evidently the answer to a question I hadn’t actually asked yet. I said nothing of course because I was far too busy being smug about my £11 bargain. But it gnawed at me for days afterwards, the little niggle of ill-advised impulse purchase questions do when you have nothing better to distract you on the bus home.
The thing is rug and carpet are not the same fabric wearing a fancy dress version of each other’s uniform. Carpet is glued or tacked down to a subfloor, it stays there, it can be soaked and had water dragged through it by a machine because it’s essentially become part of the property at that point. A rug is a discrete object with it’s own backing, it’s own goddamn fringe if you’re unlucky, it’s own complicated relationship with water that has nothing whatsoever to do with whatever’s beneath it.
Expecting them to behave similarly is the kind of assumption that costs you £30, not because the machine is inadequate, but because it was built with carpet in mind, not rugs.
The job a Rug Doctor is actually built for
I worked out how much that was in actual carpet before I allowed myself to have an opinion though because that’s how disciplined I have to be about this sort of thing.
If I don’t do the maths then I find myself railing against wildly expensive stuff just because it feels wasteful. Hiring one of these machines for a day costs around £22 locally, add the cleaning solution into that and you’re looking at £30 all in if you let yourself, and it’s engineered to soak carpet then suck that water back out through a wet vacuum head thats pretty much built like a small tank. It’s fantastic at what it does on carpet that’s stretched tight on underlay and not going anywhere.
The heft of the machine, the volume of water it pushes around, the heat aren’t an issue when something’s designed to be walked on for ten years. An area rug won’t necessarily have anything like underlay supporting it, not usually anyway, and certainly not enough to also act as ventilation beneath it once it’s saturated with water. So that water that your carpet easily shrugs off ends up held against the backing of a rug, trapping itself in place even more with anything jute or cotton based holding the rug together. Jute loves holding rugs together too by the way, and goes from “nice sturdy natural fibre” to “uck it smells like someone’s left a wet dog in their cellar” quicker than you’d believe. Just me and a jute rug hangayire on one occasion.
I tried cleaning it with a smaller portable carpet cleaner, again because I thought I was being pro-active but just made a damp patch that wouldn’t dry for days because the backing was insensing everything. This wasn’t even a Rug Doctor, that was a smaller machine doing broadly the same thing, but this wasn’t made to cope with it either. Imagine that but scaled up to the size of an actual vacuum, designed to push vastly more water through a rug than an ersatz carpet cleaner will ever handle, on a rug with GOD FORBID any fringing, dye that may not have been colourfast and a backing that might not even be natural fibre like jute does but latex instead. Then try and paint me a picture of why that isn’t going to go horribly wrong.
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The last thing everyone seems to talk about enough is drying times. Carpet can dry in place, it’s got airflow through the pile and isn’t going anywhere so if you’re unlucky the funny smell as it does isn’t great but it won’t grow mould like a saturated rug will. Leave a soaked rug on the floor and you’re trapping water against whatever’s underneath it, be that carpet or, far more likely your actual floorboards which is an entire headache of its own. Try to pick it up while it’s sodden and heavy and you risk tearing the backing or pulling the fringe right off depending on what’s attached. In either scenario you’re still left with a rug that’s going to take at least two, maybe three days to dry out properly if the weather co-operates, and a flat that smells like somebody washed everything in it with wet wool scent cleaner for months.
When, if ever, does it make sense then?
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that because of the above you should never put your rug in a Rug Doctor because I don’t work like that and that isn’t realistic. Heavy duty synthetic rug? Something shiny and nylon or polypropylene that was clearly designed with pointed sweaty booted hobbitses in mind and has a rubber back sitting hiding coins like a good mat should?
That’s not a rug you’d throw in the Rug Doctor, that’s a rug you feed into it and hope it makes itself useful.
The fibres don’t hold onto water the same way natural fibres do and rubber is at least pretending to do the job carpet backing does by keeping water out.
I’ll even concede that on that one I might cautiously go and check a corner first. Not the middle of the rug, god no, check the corner where nobody looks if your rug comes that way, give it good few days to fully dry and if it seems alright then you can worry about the rest of it. Might work, might not. Doesn’t apply to myrug I bought for £11 though because yes it is wool.
I have landed on the idea that the question of Rug Doctors and rugs isn’t actually about a piece of useful amateur vacuum cleaner at all though. It’s about knowing what your rug is made out of before you decide how sacrilegious you can afford to be with it. My cheap-as-chips wool rug is avoiding the Rug Doctor at all costs until the day I own a building with adequate outside space, because instead it’s getting a gentle hand wash outside on a dry day. Nothing to pay there but my time and the avoidance of having to be the person downloading every scent thingimaginable from Dyson to work out why my flat smells of walkthroughs asking why the hell I’ve hung towels over every heater in sight.
Dawn’s stair runner though… fair game. Same answer, opposite rug and we’ve got everything we need to untangle this problem right there.
