What we were looking at
A large glue-down carpet covering a Herne Bay garage floor — the kind of surface that gets walked on every single day in outdoor shoes and, because it is “just the garage”, never gets thought about. It had never been professionally cleaned.
Glue-down changes the job before you start. There is no underlay to act as a buffer and nowhere for moisture to sit, so it wants heat and proper extraction rather than volume of water. Get that balance wrong and you have a damp floor bonded to concrete.
What we did
Dry soil first. A HEPA rotary vacuum over the whole floor before a drop of anything wet went down. On a carpet this soiled, most of what is in there is dry — and every gram you take out dry is a gram that never turns into mud when it meets water.
Then the chemistry, and then we waited. A garage carpet is not the same soil as a lounge: it is grease, oil and traffic, not spilled wine. We pre-sprayed Bridgepoint Bio-Break, an enzyme product built for grease and protein, and gave it real dwell time. That waiting is the part people skip. The enzyme does the work if you let it; rush it and you are just scrubbing.
Then heat and extraction — the machine cranked to 90°C and above, worked through in passes, pulling the soil back to the van rather than pushing it deeper.
How it came out
The honest measure on a job like this is not the carpet, it is the greywater — and it came out very dark. That is years of embedded soil that is now out of the floor instead of in it.
The client was very happy. On a carpet nobody had ever cleaned, that is the result you hope for: not a miracle, just a floor that finally got the attention it had been owed for years.