lisa, about rug beater

This would be cool, as with respect to Dusty and the Rugbadger, not all of us can jusitfy the price of one and need to look for alternatives. I have been using an upright vac with a beater bar and it's the best I can come up with so far. It "sorta" works but you have to spend a LOT of time on it.

I keep hoping and praying they will come up with a smaller, more affordable rug beater.

Tons of rug plants use simple vacuum cleaners - some even choosing some cheaper Hoovers because they SHAKE back and forth so much they can shake out soil well.

I've seen tests of every method after one another - compressed air after a vacuum, badger after vacuum, and all mix and matches. I can tell you from my experience that EVERY time without fail, a follow-up "and is there more in it!" attempt ALWAYS got more soil out. Not one was "complete."

We did a full month test of vacuums and the badger in particular... found some rugs that the vacuum worked better on... others the Badger did. It was not an overall big enough difference to warrant buying the bigger equipment - and we also were not fans of the noise. But, we are generally cleaning rugs that are overall better maintained. Our clients don't wait a decade to clean their rugs.

And... if anyone has ever had their rugs surface cleaned in the home, dusting won't matter, because the residue will be holding onto the soil no matter how much you "beat/shake/blow" the soil in the rug. I wrote about that in my blog => Why Rugs Aren't Cleaned In the Home

If someone is running a one-man op, getting the badger will cover more space in less time, and considering how valuable an owner's time is, for that reason alone I would recommend getting it - but to be VERY careful with delicate or thin or very pliable rugs. You will still need a vacuum though to suck up the soil... because the badger beats only.

I lay out the different options for equipment, with dusting options all laid out with links and prices in my most recent post on equipment => Rug Shop Equipment

Hope the information in both detailed posts are helpful to you. Dusting is VERY important to the cleaning process.

Lisa

P.S. I'm doing a free webinar in a few weeks on rugs and fabric. If you are interested, that's here => Rug & Fine Fabric Webinar

P.P.S. Wherever you buy your Sanitaire, ask them for the metal slide in plates. We set ours at "normal" when we do it, but with those smooth plates you could also do "low" - just be careful with the suction. And it does help to have a grate underneath to allow more soil to shake out the opposite site, but I am not a fan of the metal ones. I like the interlocking tiles because I've never had them "scar" the front as I had happen with a metal grate on a fuzzy Chinese rug when I used the badger on it over a metal grate. Of course a vacuum is not as heavy as a badger or a wolverine... so it likely would not be an issue.

Mike, the webinar in May 11th - it's free, and people are submitting their questions. The link is here => WEBINAR

The time is 6pm Eastern and 3pm Pacific on that Wednesday.

Have a great weekend,
Lisa

after running vac on both sides of rugs,i use an argo towel machine on back to vibrate soil out,then a leaf blower under neith to blow out dust,repeat process.

Hi Everyone

Just wondered if anyone could post a pic of the sanitare brush unable to purchase one here in the uk but have a friendly metal fabricator who may be able to make one to fit into a old kirby vac which has a rug restorer brush attachment but need to have some idea what we are trying to achieve.

Also any info about the interlocking tiles to make a grate would be appreciated any websites that sell them for example.

Kind Regards

Eddie

Hi Eddie,

The "mother of all rug equipment posts" that I made on my blog has links and keyword recommendations for the interlocking tiles, you can find that here:

CLICK HERE => Rug Equipment Post

When I'm in my shop tomorrow I'll see if my phone can take some decent photos of our Sanitaire brush for you. Though, you know, I did have a student of mine who just bought a cheap Hoover, pulled the brushes out, but it vibrated so much that it worked on the back of the rug fine anyway. You don't need suction - you just need some shaking. =)

I'll post more tomorrow, hope that helps,
Lisa

Rob, here is an early "campy" video I did years ago to demonstrate a RugBadger prototype VS the Sanitaire upright vac. Note that we ran both for exactly the same amount of time to be fair to both.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXdoBMIynEI

btw, the upright vac is still a fantastic way to dust rugs when you are just starting out and in some isolated instances we find that it can work almost as good as a RugBadger EL, but certainly not as fast or reliably as a Pro model. If you are worried about damaging a rug with the RugBadger, just use nice big piece of TYVEK over the backside of the rug and it will then not get sucked in or damaged. Here is a link for the right type of Sanitaire vac if you are not ready for a RugBadger. http://www1.epinions.com/review/pr-...ial_SC888_Upright_Vacuum/content_169591279236

Richard, just wondering, what would the "ideal" price be for a smaller RugBadger?

Eddie, I have a number of friends in the UK that are using the kirby for dusting rugs and they are decent. If you want to take a RugBadger Pro for a demo we have an excellent distributor in the London area and I am sure he will be thrilled to let you take a unit for a test drive, then you can do your own head to head test with the Kirby VS the RugBadger Pro
Here is my distributor list and you will find him on here.
http://rugbadger.com/distributors.html

Hi Dusty,

I don't know if it would be "economically practical" for your engineers to design a smaller unit, but I strongly believe it might be worth looking into. As Lisa has been describing metal slide in bars for upright vacuums, few of us will actually be able to source such equipment, especially those of us from outside the country. Take note of how many perked up and took an interest already just from this post. But this gives the idea that perhaps you could make and market something similar, smaller, the size of an upright vacuum with a beater bar design rather than brush.

These upright units would be cheaper to ship and could sell for ... $500 - $800 ? Just a guess at this point.

Think about making an upright vacuum, without the vacuum. Just a really effective beater bar.

Just my opinion, but I believe most solo operators will spend up to $1000 on basic tools and equipment and around $3000 for major equipment such as the rugbadger or a cimex.

I have always wanted to try a rugbadger but the cost of not only buying one, but shipping and tax on top, just keeps bumping it to the back burner in lieu of more pressing equipment needs. Something smaller, obviously not as "heavy duty" or effective as your rug badgers, but more affordable might be appealing to a far greater number of owners such as myself as most of us have very small shops or none at all as far as room even to store a big machine. Such a machine would have a much greater chance of making us owner operators "bite the bullet" and try one out

Just promise me one thing Dusty, if you decide to do this one day, PLEASE dont make them out of cheap chinese plastic! We dont need another Drimaster! Im picturing something that looks more like a Kirby.

I also think a smaller version, especially if it is MUCH quieter, would be a plus. Besides not much of an actual performance difference in our own testing with our Sanitaires (with the converted metal slide plates) - the noise was a huge problem. My team hated it. Plus you had to vacuum it again anyway because it had no suction.

A souped up vacuum cleaner - some type of hybrid of the two - in the $800 range would be great. Something that did not just "beat" the rug like the Badger - but also vibrated it like the Sanitaire - would outperform either on their own.

Of course, if you kicked in compressed air, you'd hit the trifecta! But compressed air dusting is out of the price range for most in this business. =)

Lisa

Hi Lisa

Any chance of a pic of the head of the sanitaire showing the metal bars, as Richard said these type of beater bars appear unique to US vacs, nothing really like that on vacs here in the UK.

Regards

Eddie

The vacuum I grabbed at our plant did not have the slide in plates - it was a specially shaped beater bar, here is the link to various bars for the Sanitaire => Sanitaire Vacuum Parts

The one you want to grab is the Sanitaire Alumimum VGI-16" Brush Roller. This is a slimmer design, and does a great job at beating/vibrating the back of the rug. Works better than the round regular one - the vacuum guy I got it from said it was designed for rugs... don't know if that's true, but it works well.

Hope that helps,
Lisa

Got an email from a cleaner who said the metal slide in brush replacements can be found at Jon-Don, to ask for Fernando and he knows exactly what you are talking about for your Sanitaire.

Lisa

I posted this here before but the post seemed to disappear, so we will try again. For years we used the SC899 model with the VG1 alum rush roll and it did a good job for us, or so we thought. In a side by side comparison with the Badger there was an amazing difference. The machine designed for for dusting simply out performed the vacuume in every manner, except vacuuming of course. The noise is not really much more than the vac, but the performance was. Even spending 3-4 X's as much time with the vacuume as with the duster we still removed close to double the dry soil with the duster. I highly doubt anyone would try the duster and then go back to the vacuume for performance, it just doesn't add up.

We will try this again, maybe I'm doing something wrong, but my post seems to keep disappearing. For years we used the sc899 with the VG 1 alum. beater bar. We felt that it was doing a great job, until we actually put it up against a rug badger in our shop.
Hands down the duster removed far more soil than the vacuum and did it in a fraction of the time. The noise is not very much more than the vacuum and we have to listen to for less than half as long as we would the vacuum. The duster out performed the vacuum in every aspect, except for vacuuming of course. If your doing more than a few rugs a week I would say definately get a duster to dust rugs, use a vacuum to vacuum rugs, kinda simple really. If you want to give your clients the bestp ossible cleaning I would use a rug duster plain and simple. Every class on area rug cleaning highly emphasises the importance of dusting and if you are doing more than a couple of rugs per week you will thank yourself for getting one.