This came to mind after I read a post where the man was asking if it was safe to use this type of encap in a day care center with children playing on the carpet. If you have been a cleaner for a long time, you might remember back in the mid-nineties that some companies used to offer a duct cleaning/sealing service. Well, you don’t hear about duct sealing anymore as the sealer would dry out and crack and blow into the airspace to be breathed in by the buildings or home’s occupants. It sounded great on paper, but in the real world it wasn’t so hot.

This got me thinking about crystallizing encaps that dry out and self-shatter. To me this must release the soil back into the carpet as well as leaving the carpet unprotected and poses (at least in theory) the possibility of encap dust as the self-shattered polymers are trampled into smaller particles and even dust that could become airborne. Think about that for a moment. The last thing anyone would want to get is a call saying the carpet cleaning made a child sick. These types of allegations have happened in the past. Think Kawasaki’s disease. To me it is a risk not worth taking with children and pets.

I say that type of encap leaves the carpet unprotected because of this. Several manufacturers claim to have a carpet protector built into their product. I have a problem with this. Some protectors come pre-mixed but most mix 1:1 or 1: 3. That’s one gallon of concentrate at a cost of $40 to $50 dollars per gallon of concentrate on average.

Now a cleaning product manufacturer wants you to believe that their $30 dollar a gallon product, that mixes only 6 ounces of concentrate into a gallon of water, has enough chemical protector in it to be effective. Don’t forget they also need room for the polymers, detergents, surfactants and so on. Even the straight six ounces of concentrate would not be enough, let alone reducing it further by adding the other ingredients and water that’s already in the encaps formula before it is diluted into the gallon of water. The math simply does not support this if you think about it.

But back to the original topic. I think an encap that leaves a longer lasting, slower releasing polymer is a safer and better choice. One that will hold the soil until it is vacuumed away over the next several vacuum cycles and will leave a mono-layer of polymer to help resist dry soils and protect the carpet from rapid resoiling.

The fact is, Surround with its T2H polymers won’t self-shatter and we are priced lower than the major competitors. Surround smells much better and will also out clean them. We hear on a regular basis from our new customers that they have tried everything else and that Surround blew them away. See what Surround will do for you. Let us save you time and money and do it without worries.

by John H. Klucznik, Founder of Bonnet Pro and Key Floor Care

Watch this video on Crystallizing Encap Dust.