Recently I made a scathing comment about Berber carpet on my Facebook page. This was prompted by our latest adventure in carpet cleaning. When we moved into this house 15 years ago, it came equipped with beige carpet throughout. In the hall and bedrooms it was the regular cut pile carpet, in the living and family rooms there was Berber carpet, in a nicely textured pattern. This is a direct quote from a carpet info site:
“Berber carpet is a popular style because of its wool-like and rugged look, its durability, and its economic cost. Berber, also called high level loop, is a weave of tight yarn loops that stand upright in a nubby texture. Looped carpets like the Berber weave help hide footprints and vacuum marks and are easier to clean than cut-pile or plush where the loops are cut and exposed to accumulate more dirt.”
This quote came from a site run by Service Magic, and is not essentially different from any of the other numerous sites I visited in my quest for a definition of Berber carpet. I’m not sure about that “economic cost” statement, since when I looked at carpets a few years ago Berber carpets were some of the most expensive ones available.
There are many different styles of Berber carpet, but the more popular ones are textured, the pattern formed by different heights of yarn loops. The style in this house is highly textured. This is what it looks like clean and basically unworn, where it lived under a couch most its life.
The large square in the center is roughly 7 inches wide. The very first time I vacuumed this carpet I would have immediately disagreed with the “easy to clean” definition. I guess it depends on what you mean by easy to clean. Does the dirt stay mostly on top of the weave and vacuum out easily? That is true, so I guess in that sense it is “easy to clean.” However, all the grooves in the texture grab the front edge of the vacuum as you push it and it is sucking the carpet up towards itself, and it requires quite a lot of oomph to push the vacuum cleaner over the floor. Also, as it goes, the vacuum bounces because of the catch and release of the texture, which means you can’t just go over a section of floor once or twice and expect to get most of the dirt up. You really have to cover the same ground four or five times. These two things combined mean that in my opinion, even just vacuuming textured Berber carpet is not “easy.”
Now remember, the definition is a closed loop weave. Yes, this does wear like iron. My carpets are over 15 years old and except for the wine and coffee stains, and dirt in the traffic patterns, look pretty good. It would have been better if they hadn’t been light beige in this country of red-brown mud.
But, and this is a big but, the loops are closed. This is not an asset. You have to imagine what my feelings were after the first time we had a Christmas tree in the living room. When it was removed and I began to try to vacuum up the fallen needles, I got a very unpleasant surprise. The rotating brushes of my vacuum head very neatly drove the fallen needles into the loops of the carpet. This had never happened to me in the past, since all my previous carpets were of the cut pile variety. After trying several other alternatives, I wound up spending most of a very unpleasant afternoon armed with tweezers pulling all those needles out of that carpet. Now I have learned my lesson, and we bring the shop vac in and suck the needles off the floor without the “benefit” of the rotating brushes.
The most unkind part of the “easy cleaning” Berber carpet is when you actually break down and decide to really clean it with a rug shampooer. The sites dedicated to Berber carpet indicate that it is best to dry clean it. It has been my experience that dry cleaning a Berber carpet is an exercise in futility. Unless you are the sort of person who cleans their carpet every month or so, dry cleaning is a complete waste of time and money as it doesn’t do any cleaning that I can see. Believe me, the first time I cleaned it I tried that method. Actually, I paid a great deal of money to have a professional try that method.
Okay, so we have that lovely rug doctor or upright wet carpet cleaning system from Hoover or Sears or Eureka. They all look the same, pretty much, and they all have a head with rotating brushes that is supposed to clean your carpet and then suck the cleaning solution back out into a tank. You can see one in my post here. The machine itself is not light weight, and then you add the gallon of water that it carries, and you are pushing a substantial amount of weight around. You can imagine the language and frustration when the way one of these items “cleans” a textured Berber carpet turns out like this:
Notice that the high loops are clean and the low loops are not. Now you not only have textured carpet, you have two toned textured carpet, only half of which is actually clean. Not only that, but the low lying loops are also quite wet when you are done “extracting” the cleaning solution.
So, in order to actually get a textured Berber carpet clean, this is what you do. First you run the carpet cleaning machine, distributing cleaning solution and sucking up maybe 60% of it. Then you do this:
Notice the line of clean carpet under his right foot. That was the section we had completed cleaning. Oh, you can do this scrubbing part on your hands and knees if you don’t have a long handled scrub brush. (That is how I did it the last time I shampooed these carpets, which is why it has been about three years since I did it. At that time I swore a mighty oath that I was never cleaning the (expletive deleted) things again, holding the belief that there would be sufficient money to replace them with some sort of actually easy to clean floor.)(The money is yet to appear.)(However, our mortgage is paid off, so I guess you can guess our priorities from that.)
Okay, after you scrub the floors manually, which actually allows the cleaning solution to penetrate and clean the low loops in the texture, then you extract the solution with the hand held vacuum head of the machine.
This is an upholstery cleaning attachment, and is not meant to be held down on the floor with your full body weight, and about halfway through the process we broke it. Fortunately they only cost $7 to replace. As you can see, I felt the need to wear work gloves, since during the first day of work I did not and managed to acquire a blister.
After you have extracted the dirty cleaning solution, you then fill the tank of the machine with clean water (we added bleach to it) and rinse the carpet. Once again, you must extract the solution using the hand held attachment, since the texture of the Berber carpet does not allow the suction head of the machine to adequately pull out the solution, since the flat suction head loses contact with the carpet because of the texture.
If you have a really dirty spot (and we did, in some of our traffic patterns), you can rinse and extract a second time.
Easy to clean? I think not.
As far as I am concerned, there is a special place in Dante’s Inferno reserved for the person who invented textured Berber carpet, and marketed it to unwary house owners as “easy to clean.”
Special thanks and inexpressible appreciation go to my darling spouse and mate for the invaluable assistance he gave during this process. Without him it probably would not have gotten done. Frankly, I don’t know of another man in the immediate area who would have helped his wife do this insanely difficult job.
This is my berber rug, which hangs on the wall in my hallway and is no trouble at all…
Yours is actually looking much better now.
Your berber rug is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Funny how rugs on walls are no trouble. . . Ours is looking much better, and I am looking forward to the day when there are NO CARPETS anywhere in my home.
The only rug I have that falls in the Berber category is a skid-backed kitchen rug which goes in the wash. It does have that closed loop thing going. Now I know I will never get one that can’t be run through the Maytag.
I have squeegeed polyester Orientals in my driveway and that’s as far as I want to go. I had to dry them on my porch roof.
I’m just trying to imagine hauling an Oriental rug onto the roof of a porch.
Most of our house is polished floorboards but my bedroom has an awful plain brown carpet that shows every speck of light coloured dirt, fluff, threads etc. I hate it 😦
I have come to hate all carpet. If it is light, it shows dark stuff, it is dark it shows light stuff. The only carpet that I ever knew didn’t show stuff was the carpet that my mother chose for our house in Colorado. It was a rather pale grey embellished with garlands of blue roses with green foliage and you don’t even want to know exactly how godawful that was. My mother was never known for her taste. . .
Whoever said that carpets were easy to clean has never lived in the ozarks nor Northern Georgia!! But then I used to clean carpets at resorts at Lake of the Ozarks (not my favorite job!!!). At least nobody ever locked 3 dogs in your room for whole days. It wasnt Berber thank the Goddess, but it was bad enough. Maybe next time it gets dirty you can just rip it up and have a raging bonfire!! Just kidding about the bonfire part. Well, kind of.
Hire a professional next time, Berber is way easy to clean. I have owned a carpet cleaning business for 11 yrs. now and I am very pleased to walk into a home to discover they have Berber carpet. What took you hours would take me minutes with at-least 95% solution recovery. Carpets stay cleaner, dry faster and last longer with proper cleaning. The brown you’re seeing is called “wicking” usually caused by over wetting and prolonged dry times. The machines you can buy at the store are only good for emergencies. Expect to pay $15,000 or much more for a machine that will actually clean carpet. Or simply hire someone.
Spoken like a true professional. So how much do you charge, anyway? I’ve had my carpes professionally cleaned and they weren’t clean when finieshed, weren’t any drier than when I did it and they reeked of some sort of scent even though I told the guy not to use scented product. I’m sure you would be much better, but I’ll bet you aren’t located in Lebanon Mo .
Thanks much for your work to post the details behind this enjoyable task. Yes, looks like my pattern and also my problem. When the pros come in and can’t clean it to my satisfaction, they say it’s damaged from wear. This is the first post I have seen that actually gets down to the problem and offers a solution albeit hard work. Oh well, after 20 years, it looks like brushes and blisters to remove my traffic patterns.
Interesting and informative article. I’m looking to buy replacement carpet and am trying to decide on what kind. My current yucky, very old carpet is cut low pile nylon. As for beater bars on berber, I think beater bars are not supposed to be used on loop carpeting or rugs, since they’ll tear up the loops. Supposed to use a vacuum with a power brush that has adjustable height and adjustable suction. I think that’s what I’ve read. I was also considering large braided rugs instead of carpeting, but there again, not supposed to use beater bars on them. When I was house hunting years ago, I remember that berber carpets (which were “in” back then) were the type of flooring that always looked the worst. They were usu. light colored, so maybe that was the reason they showed the dirt more.
I know nothing about beater bars on vacuum cleaners. I haven’t seen a vacuum with those for years and years. My vacuum and the carpet cleaning machine both have brushes. My vacuum cleaner does indeed have adjustable height, not that I have noticed a hill of beans bit of difference between high and low…
If I was you, I would go for some sort of hard flooring: tile, hardwood, laminate, vinyl roll, and use area rugs for places I wanted “softening”. In fact, that is what I am holding out for in this house. The carpet I wrote about is still on the floor, and I swore a mighty oath that I was never going to clean it again other than vacuum, so it is looking mighty poor right now. If I wait long enough, it will all become a uniform grey/tan……
anyway, that is the plan for The Havens. Good quality laminate and area rugs. Just as soon as we get the solar system installed and pay for the Jim’s dental repairs… As always, we have more projects than money.
I am trying to find this exact carpet. Do you know what brand it is and where I can find it. (Pictured)
I have had the exact same berber carpet since 1990. When it was first installed our natural gas forced air furnace caused a chemical reaction in the carpet and areas covered by furniture turned yellow. There was a lot of discussion and going back and forth with the manufacturer to figure out what was going on. It was solved with a professional cleaning. It’s held up and cleaning pet accidents has been a cinch. However, my biggest complaint is the matting down as years have gone by with no recoil. For the customer having difficulty when vacuuming, it can be solved just by adjusting your vacuum height.