Menu
A truck mount is a collection of carpet cleaning equipment that is too heavy to move out of a van so it operates in the van using a long 2″ vacuum hose and ¼” solution line to bring the cleaning service to you. The two hoses snake through your house connected to a “wand.” The carpet cleaning wand is a steel or graphite stick that attaches to both the vacuum hose and solution line. Normally truck mounts use heat for the source of “energy” for a better clean then if using cold water with no other techniques to increase the chemical energy (such as agitation).
Historically the alternate method to clean carpet over the truck mount has been a portable version of it. Usually a machine as small and weak as a Rug Doctor that “squirts and sucks” or a more powerful portable (porty) extractor (sprays cleaning solution flushing dirt out of carpet and then vacuums up) that even includes heat such as the Truck Mount.
Very low moisture cleaning methods for carpet have existed since the 1960’s or probably even earlier by using devices such as a floor buffer and carpet bonnets to clean carpet with very little moisture. The buffer method works by applying friction (300 rpm), weight (about 50lbs on carpet area) to transfer dirt from your carpet to wet bonnets. Historically VLM techniques (we use both the buffer and cylinder method (more on that in another article) have been considered inferior methods to clean carpet. With the development of modern ecncapsulation (encap) chemicals this is no longer true. In fact carpet cleaned with VLM hardware and chemicals usually results in equally clean (to a Truck Mount) carpet that dries even faster. So stay tuned as I will be posting more on carpet cleaning trends and go into detail on VLM and the various hardware methods used. Currently we use three types of hardware (buffer, orbital, and counter rotating brush) combined with encap cleaning chemicals and they have worked so well we only keep a few truck mounts around (sold rest) for flood extraction emergencies.
205-409-0140
