My carpets are pretty salty and muddy from the winter and it's a wonderful day, so I was considering taking the big can of Woolite cfoamy carpet cleaner I have, spraying it on, letting it soak then using a clean nylon brush to work the crud out.

After I scrub enough, I was gonna take my shopvac and suck the carpets dry. How well do you think it'll work? I don't have a proper carpet shampoo machine because I only have 5 feet of carpet in my entire house.

 

It should work great.
Any carpet/upolstery shampoo will do.
The wet vac will do nicely at extracting the dirty water.

 

What you're doing is exactly what a shampooper would do anyway. If you have one of those wide mouthed rectangular attachments, that would help.

 

Yeah, I have the narrow and the wide one. I also have a round one with a brush.

Any other tips for doing this? I have washed the rear carpet and side carpet pieces this way in my basement, just not the main stuff. It is foam backed, so I should have to worry about anything soaking through and getting trapped underneath and rusting my floor pans out, should I?

 

As long as it's a strong shop vac, just keep sucking till you get no more liquid out of the carpets. One nice thing about shampooer attachments, it that they're clear, so you can see when you've got all of the crap out of your carpets.

 

I would take all the removable mats into the bathtub and soak them, scrub them, then you can suck the water out or just rinse them good in clean water and let them air dry.

As for the carpet, it's NOT just like a carpet cleaner would do, as carpet cleaners use hot water to clean better. You wont be, but what you are wanting to do is the next best thing to taking all the carpets out, washing and drying them, and then putting it all back in.

Good luck.

 

If you are using a shampoo concetrate, mix it with very hot water. cleans better that way. Once you have scrubbed and sucked as much out as you can, soak them again with plain hot water and re-vac. By pulling all the soap out that you can, your carpets will stay cleaner longer.

 

our detailer uses tide with downey.