We've all seen them in the supermarkets, DIY stores and hire shops. Compact carpet cleaning machines that you can hire for the day, buy the detergent and a range of stain removal products, pop them in the boot of your car and away you go to clean your expensive carpets. 

The adverts and videos make it all look so easy to get professional results with very little effort, but just how good are they?

The picture on the left is part way through a job we did recently. You can clearly see the difference between the complete and incomplete sections and how much brighter the cleaned section is. 

You will probably be thinking that's only to be expected when you clean a carpet and that's true, except that this carpet had only been cleaned a month earlier by the clients, using one of the best known brands of rental machine.

The clients were not impressed by the rental machine results so they called us in to to the job properly. 

As they say, "buy cheap = buy twice"  

Now look at the picture on the right. See the colour of the water in the red buckets? Apart from a month's worth of soiling between the two cleans, that's how much dirt we extracted that the rental machine left behind. 

The rental machine adverts and videos make it look so easy, but the truth is that carpet cleaning is hard, physical work, even with the top end equipment that we use. Rental machines try to do the whole job with a single piece of equipment, which is simply unrealistic if you are to achieve good results.

Doing the job properly requires high quality equipment, a great deal of patience and knowledge plus a wide range of specialist products to treat all kinds of spots and stains. OK - so the rental firms offer a selection of stain treatment products, but if you're looking to clean your carpets on the cheap, you're hardly likely to buy them!

But the real big issue with rental machines is their lack of power. Because they are designed to be light and fit easily in the boot of your car they use small, lightweight pumps and vacuum motors. This means that they squirt detergent into your carpet and because the vacuum motor is under-powered they leave your carpets very wet and they can take a couple of days to dry, depending on conditions. 

When the carpet does eventually dry there's a significant amount of detergent residue left behind which then attracts dirt faster than ever.

At Powerclean Carpets we use the latest generation of detergent free products, which are then rinsed and extracted with powerful equipment to safely clean your carpets and furnishings and get them dry quickly with no sticky residues left behind.