Interior Stain Trouble

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OnTheSpotMobile

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I've recently started doing some work for a small dealership in my area and he's got me doing interiors. I've been using this little carpet extractor I borrowed from my supplier and today is the first time I had some issues. He showed me a van that I did for him last week and the drivers seat looks worse than when I started! Most of my experience is with buffing and polishing boats and vehicles so I'm pretty much new at carpets and upholstery. Anyway here is what I did:



-spray seat with spray on shampoo and let it sit for about 5 minutes

-scrub it with a nylon brush

-go over it a couple times with the extractor and then a third time without the trigger on to suck up all the water it missed



Now it looked fine when I was finished last week but apparently when it dried fully it all turned brown. It looks like someone sat in the seat every day for a month after laying underneath cars all day?



It took me about 1.5-2 hours just to do the carpets and upholstery alone in this van it was so filthy but the rest of it looks fine. The carpets don't come as clean as I would like but I can't do much else for the price I'm getting. I told him I would go get some different products and fix my mistake. Now can anyone recommend something lol? The shampoo I'm using now is a pretty standard Carbrite X3 carpet and upholstery shampoo and protector.



He even said "the guy I used to take it to would have had it looking spotless" so I really want to get this thing clean, any help is appreciated!
 
I'm not sure that switching cleaners will help much...I find that when heavily soiled seats get wet from shampooing this will often happen. I'm not exactly sure why it happens but my guess is that the foam acts like a sponge and absorbs the water/shampoo and then as the seats dry the fabric will wick the dirty water back up from the foam causing it to turn brown. One way to help prevent this is to run the car with the heat on for a while to start the drying process and then use a clean rag (I use and old MF) and rub down the seat with a lot of pressure. If the seat dries and still looks bad I would use some spray foam upholstery cleaner (Carbrite has it) and mist the surface of the seat then use a terry cloth to clean up the seat...don't get it too wet or you will have the same. problem.
 
This is something I had suspected. Remembering this van the seat was only slightly browned on the side bolstering on the seat when I started. It now looks ten times worse than when I started. I'll try it again and try drying it out better this time and if that doesn't work I'll have to use something that won't make the seat wet.
 
JPostal said:
I'm not sure that switching cleaners will help much...I find that when heavily soiled seats get wet from shampooing this will often happen. I'm not exactly sure why it happens but my guess is that the foam acts like a sponge and absorbs the water/shampoo and then as the seats dry the fabric will wick the dirty water back up from the foam causing it to turn brown. One way to help prevent this is to run the car with the heat on for a while to start the drying process and then use a clean rag (I use and old MF) and rub down the seat with a lot of pressure. If the seat dries and still looks bad I would use some spray foam upholstery cleaner (Carbrite has it) and mist the surface of the seat then use a terry cloth to clean up the seat...don't get it too wet or you will have the same. problem.
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This is pretty much dead on IMO. Go back over it with a foam cleaner or APC and a towel and don't get it too wet. I rarely use an extractor on seats for this very reason. ;)
 
This happened to me when I first got my extractor.



I had a little stain that ended up covering the entire bottom area of the seat because I got it too wet.



I was able to get it to come clean by misting it with APC a couple times and scrubbing it with a towel.
 
also when a seat is real bad add a cap full of vinger to the water it helps with wicking or browning.The best prespray I have found is made by p&s sales enviro clean 10 to 1 spray wait 10 min extract. Do slow pulls with extractor try to suck up as much water as possible take towel rub over to help with drying move to next section repeat. any slight brown stain you encounter try lacker thinner on a rag rub over should take right up.
 
So yesterday I fixed the bad van seat. I found a spray foam can made by bissel. Sprayed it on and agitated with a microfiber cloth, dryed with another cloth and put the heater on in the van to completely dry. That got most of the brown out but with the brown gone there were a couple spot stains that apparently didn't come out before. He was happy with it anyway. I'm still experimenting with the different interior chemicals. The Carbrite cleaner I've been using just doesn't remove the type of stains I've been dealing with so I'm going to a carpet upholstry machine rental shop to try out some of their pre-treatment sprays. This interior stuff really frustrates me sometimes. You can't just clean one spot on a seat because when your cleaner, or even just plain water from the extractor dries it leaves an ugly outline and makes its own stain. So to clean one little spot you have to clean the entire seat so that it won't leave outlines. Is that normal?



A final thought: The drivers seat was the only one that turned brown, I believe when he sat on the seat to move it the dirty water in the foam under the seat was pushed up into the fabric causing it to stain. My extractor seems better suited to carpets, it seems to have too much flow and pressure, saturating the seats. It's a beat up piece of junk anyway, looking to get a heated extractor in the spring to replace it.



I had a guy from an industrial company ask me if I could do the interiors on his fleet of 15 or so pickup trucks. He said the floors and seats are covered in oil and grease as you can imagine from industrial use. My little extractor has its work cut out for it!
 
The problem with seats is the stain goes deep into the foam and if you don't get all the spill out of the foam (and not just the surface) the stain comes back as it dries. Just got to keep after it until the water you are extracting comes up clear.
 
Scottwax said:
Just got to keep after it until the water you are extracting comes up clear.
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Scott's correct. I just keep extracting over and over, saturating the hell out of the seat and then sucking it out, seems to work for me for the most part. I suspect that van's seat had had something spilled on it, going into the foam, hence why it kept coming back up.



And while David Fermani's PT Cruiser is an awesome detail, I'd be careful pressure washing seats. If you get seats TOO wet, the boron will start coming out, which is a safety issue.
 
Scottwax said:
The problem with seats is the stain goes deep into the foam and if you don't get all the spill out of the foam (and not just the surface) the stain comes back as it dries. Just got to keep after it until the water you are extracting comes up clear.
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It had been my instinct to get as little water as possible on the seats. But it seems to be best to just totally saturate them by going over and over the seat with the extractor, and then drying them out as necessary. One problem I have is that I'm mobile and I have to leave it up to the customer to dry their vehicle out properly. That means I don't even see the end result in most (shampooing) cases, other than this dealership that I've been working for every week.



David Fermani said:
Any pics?
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Unfortunately I haven't been taking many pics lately since I'm between cameras and my phone pics aren't the greatest. I have actually done some vehicles lately with seats comparable to your power washed PT Cruiser thread! Not quite as bad as that sideways pic, but pretty close to the rest of the pics.



The van in question here had a fairly clean seat to begin with, except some light browning on the bolstering. Once it dried after I was complete it all turned a dirty light brown.
 
I've ran into some pretty NASTY seats and my LGM and some carpet stain remover have all worked great. I do exactly what Scott said though. Keep going over it until the water extracted comes clean. If the water isn't clean the seat isn't clean. Off topic but Big Lots has Meg's carpet stain remover for $2 a bottle right now. And the stuff works great.



One tip that I have read all over the place on here. Do the interior first. Gives the seats some time to dry to make sure everything looks ok when delivering to customer. I'd say 8 times out of 10 the seats are dry when I deliver the car. The seats should not be WET....they should be damp when you are done with them. A test I do.....when done fold a microfiber towel twice and put it on the seat with good pressure(palm of your hand). If I get moisture all the way through the 4 layers of MF within a couple of seconds I need to extract more water.
 
David Fermani said:
Boron will come out of where?
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The seats. The foam inside vehicle seats is manufactured with boron as a flame retardant. Soak the seats too much and you risk bringing it out of the foam. Seen it happen once in a shop I worked in.
 
Additionally, the boron will cause 'water rings' on the newer, inexpensive microfiber upholstery. Rinsing and extracting with an acidic browning agent such as Prochoice CSS will neutralize the boron. On some microfiber fabrics, simple condensation from a water bottle will cause a ring.



Wicking is frustrating, and correction is time consuming. Extract, dry extract, dry extract...



Professional interior cleaning requires professional equipment and training (=$$$).

For those who wish to upgrade, a great source of supplies, information and equipment is your local Prochoice or Bridgepoint distributor.



As my departed Dad was mighty fond of saying, “It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.”
 
WAS said:
The seats. The foam inside vehicle seats is manufactured with boron as a flame retardant. Soak the seats too much and you risk bringing it out of the foam. Seen it happen once in a shop I worked in.
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Jimmy Buffit said:
Additionally, the boron will cause 'water rings' on the newer, inexpensive microfiber upholstery. Rinsing and extracting with an acidic browning agent such as Prochoice CSS will neutralize the boron. On some microfiber fabrics, simple condensation from a water bottle will cause a ring.



Wicking is frustrating, and correction is time consuming. Extract, dry extract, dry extract...



Professional interior cleaning requires professional equipment and training (=$$$).

For those who wish to upgrade, a great source of supplies, information and equipment is your local Prochoice or Bridgepoint distributor.



As my departed Dad was mighty fond of saying, “It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.”
Click to expand...



Great information WAS & Jimmy. I wasn't aware of this prior. Good to know.
 
RaskyR1 said:
This is pretty much dead on IMO. Go back over it with a foam cleaner or APC and a towel and don't get it too wet. I rarely use an extractor on seats for this very reason. ;)
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100% agree with you.

I dislike extractors because instead of helping me to solve problems, it could be adding more problems for me.
 
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