Continuing on with my moving theme, I would like to tell you how you can actually remove juice (and I imagine wine) stains from carpet. Even if the stain is set in.
I have a couple of juice stains on my carpet in my old townhome. You would think my problem would be pet stains, but I don’t actually have any of those. Go figure.
Anyway, I’ve been fretting over a couple of juice stains in my old place for a while. I wasn’t sure what to do about them and figured I would be in for a big bill when move out time came along. I searched the web and found a trick involving a wet towel and an iron, but that only sort of worked. Well, I found the third ingredient, and it is called Juice Out.
Removing Juice Stains
First, if you spill juice, you should clean it up right away. Get up as much juice as you can. Then blot. Never rub. You will most likely still have a stain. Sometimes you will think you got the juice up, only to have it come back later. I learned this is called wicking. This is the problem I had. I used all sorts of stuff to try to remove my juice stains, including pulling up as much of the juice as I could with my carpet cleaner. I would think I got rid of the juice only to see stains return when my carpet dried. Then I would curse. But I digress.
Here is what you will need:
1. White towel(s)
2. Water
3. Steam iron
4. Juice Out
Here is what you do:
1. Test your carpet for colorfastness first. Do this in a corner somewhere. Don’t do the rest until you are sure Juice Out will not remove the color from your carpet.
2. Put the Juice out on the stain. Be generous in how much you use. Use a spoon to gently massage in the chemical. You can also just use your fingers, which is what I did.
3. Take a towel and wet it. Then ring it out. (Be sure it is a white, clean towel. I find thinner towels work much better than thick towels. I used the cheap rag type towels you can get at Home Depot. When I tried thick towels, it didn’t work well at all. It would probably just take longer to work with a thick towel.)
4. Put the towel over the stain.
5. Fill the iron with water. Turn on steam, and turn the iron on low (silk setting is good.)
6. Put the iron on the towel. (Never put the iron directly on your carpet.)
7. Allow the iron to sit between 2 and 5 minutes. Check as you go. You can change the position of the towel as you go as well. (Remember, the towel will be very hot. Don’t burn yourself.)
8. Lift up the towel and see if the stain is gone. Gently sponge the area or use your carpet cleaner to pull up the liquid.
9. Repeat if necessary. I found that sometimes two tries were necessary. If it didn’t work, the towel was too thick and/or the iron didn’t sit long enough.
If I remember, I will take a picture of one of the towels I used to pull up a very bad stain. It is very cool to see the juice move from the carpet to the towel in the shape of the iron. It is like a reverse iron-on.
Amazing.
Updating
I am updating to tell you about another solution. It is called Goof Off. This is a general cleaner that works miracles on carpet stains of every kind. Spray it, put a wet cloth on top, put a steam iron on top of that, and let it sit for maybe 2 minutes. Stain, gone. If it isn’t gone just repeat. This works better than the Juice stuff and costs less. I got it at Home Depot and at Lowes (I ended up using two bottles for everything.)