What should I do when my carpet floods?

The first ten minutes belong to you, and they change what we can save.

Most of what decides whether your carpet survives happens before anyone professional gets there. Not because there’s some trick — because water spreads, and every minute it sits it goes further down into the underlay and the floor beneath it.

Here’s the order that matters. Safety first, and it is not a formality.

1. Power off before you step in it

Water and electricity share a room badly. If any wet area has power outlets, appliances, extension leads or floor heating, switch that circuit off at the board before you walk in.

Not the wall switch. The board.

If you can’t reach the board without crossing the wet area, or you can’t tell what’s live, don’t guess — stay out and call an electrician. Carpet is replaceable.

2. Stop the water at its source

A burst pipe or a running overflow will out-pace anything else you do. Find the toilet isolation valve, the tap, or the main. Every household has a main shut-off; if you don’t know where yours is, this is the day to find out.

If it’s storm water coming in from outside, you can’t stop it — skip to step 3 and concentrate on limiting what it reaches.

3. Get furniture up off the wet carpet

Two separate problems, and both are permanent:

• Wooden furniture legs bleed stain into wet pile. A dark ring around a table leg is often not dirt — it’s the finish leaching out, and it doesn’t come back out of the fibre.
• Metal legs and castors rust, and rust marks on carpet are one of the hardest things in this trade to shift.

Lift what you can lift safely. What you can’t lift, slip aluminium foil or a plastic bag under each foot. That five-second job saves marks that outlive the flood by years.

4. Lift what’s easy, and stop there

Rugs off the carpet — a soaked rug on top of soaked carpet keeps both wet and can transfer dye. Books, boxes, anything cardboard: cardboard wicks water upward and collapses.

Then stop. Pulling carpet up yourself usually does more harm than good: it stretches, it tears at the gripper, and it makes the re-lay harder than it needed to be.

⛔ What not to do

Don’t run a household vacuum over standing water

This is the one that can genuinely hurt you. A domestic vacuum is not a wet vacuum. It has an electric motor sitting in the airflow path, and pulling water through it can put mains voltage where your hand is. It will also destroy the machine.

Wet extraction takes a machine built for it. Ours is in the van.

Don’t walk on it more than you have to

Every footstep presses water down through the backing into the underlay and the floor. Foot traffic is how a surface problem becomes a subfloor problem. Walk the route once, do what’s above, then keep off it.

Don’t put a heater on it and shut the door

It feels productive. It isn’t. Heat without airflow and without dehumidification raises the humidity in a sealed room, and the moisture just moves from the carpet to the walls, the skirting and the air. Open windows and get air moving instead — that genuinely helps until proper equipment arrives.

Don’t reach for the carpet shampoo

Detergent on a flood is a residue problem stacked on a water problem. There’s nothing to clean yet; there’s water to remove.

🚱 If the water is contaminated, stop at step 1

There’s a line that changes everything, and it’s about where the water came from, not how much there is:

Water	Examples	What to do
Clean	Burst supply pipe, overflowing bath, roof leak through clean surfaces	The steps above apply
Grey	Washing machine, dishwasher, shower waste	Limit contact, wear gloves, keep kids and pets out
Black	Sewage, toilet overflow past the trap, flood water off the ground	Stay out. Don’t extract it, don’t dry it, don’t handle the carpet

Black water carries what you’d expect it to carry. It is a health job before it is a carpet job, and it needs the right disinfectant and the right handling — not a mop and a hopeful afternoon.

Sewage and toilet-overflow water is exactly the scenario our disinfectant is registered for, and it is the one category where we would rather you did nothing at all until someone’s on site.

Then call, and say four things

When you get hold of us, the four things that let us load the right kit before we leave:

1. Where the water came from — clean, grey or black
2. Roughly how long it’s been sitting
3. How many rooms, and whether it’s gone under a wall into another one
4. Whether the power is off

You can text us any hour — the emergency line is answered round the clock, and we’ll talk you through the rest while we’re on the way.

The short version

• Power off at the board, then water off at the source, then furniture up.
• Foil or plastic under any leg you can’t lift.
• Never a household vacuum on standing water.
• Air moving, not a heater in a closed room.
• Sewage or ground water: stay out and wait.

The rest is ours. The faster we’re extracting, the better the odds the carpet stays — and whether it can be saved is mostly decided in the first day.