How Often Should You Clean Your Carpet With Pets?

Pet parents and owners may wonder how often should you clean your carpet with pets?

Maintaining a clean carpet and house with pets and kids alike can prove to be a daunting task, nonetheless possible. 

If you know the right way to clean with your pets around, and how often you need to carry out those cleanups, then your tasks will be made easier. That ease is exactly what you will get from this article.

Having a pet comes with its responsibilities because they track all manner of dirt back into the house, leaving you with that task. Cleaning at least twice a week is acceptable.

Why You Should Clean Your Carpet As A Pet Owner

It is interesting how we show love to our pets despite their many shenanigans.

We must love them still despite their many little messy accidents from time to time.

One thing is certain for you as a pet owner, you’d have to clean up every other time. This is due to extra dander, the hair from pets, mudded paw prints, and dirt tracked into the house and on the carpets.

Not cleaning the carpet puts you and your household at health risk due to contamination caused by pets.

These are the types of contamination that can occur if you fail to clean:

Shedding Contamination

Their hair falling off is one major source of contamination.

There is also danger if you try to argue that your pet has short hair or is a non-shedding pet.

They roll on the carpet, their body oils will also get caught in the carpet. This is why it is important to clean, get rid of such, and help yourself and your pets.

Odor Contamination

Even with frequent visits to a grooming center (or you do it yourself), pets can and will still get a little smelly.

There’s also the time they go out and behave like, well… pets. They would roll around in the dirt or mud, socializing with other pets, etc.

This odor can stay on, get caught on, and stay on your carpet for a long time. Proper cleaning will get rid of such.

Feces And Urine Contamination

A runny stomach with pets can cause a toilet accident. The same goes for an aging pet that may encounter those episodes from time to time.

Or it could just be sheer spitefulness and laziness from the pets that make them carry out their business inside the house.

Urine, for instance, can damage the carpet fibers if not attended to immediately.

Does the health implication of not cleaning up properly after your pets need any more trashing?

Note: Carpets can be 4000 times dirtier than an average toilet seat. This is more reason to be more committed to the overall state of your carpet.

How To Minimize The Dirtying Of Carpets By Pets

This is more of a preventive measure. Basically, just try to keep your pets as clean as possible and pre-empt their behavior in and around the house.

By doing so, you’d be saving yourself a truckload of stress cleaning frequently.

Here are some of the things you can do to keep them clean and minimize dirt.

• Brush off falling hair regularly
• Clean and dry their paws
• Pet cleaning supplies  should be handy for unexpected accidents
• Identify their favorite spot and cover it

Brush Off Falling Hair Regularly

A good hack to get your furry friends to shed less hair is by brushing them often. Frequent visits to a grooming center will work wonders as well.

Doing this will leave their skin and hair healthy as it removes weak hair. Less hair shed means the carpets stay clean.

Clean And Dry Their Paws

Keeping pets indoors (some pets) is nearly as impossible as cooking a stone until it becomes soft.

They would want to go out and on their return, you can be certain that they will return with the company.

They will return with dirt on their paws, and this means extra work for you.

Keep a towel at all entrances/exits of your home. And ensure that their paws are wiped clean before they are let in.

Note that pets can be trained to clean their paws on those towels all on their own before coming in.

Keep Pet Cleaning Supplies Handy

One can only be too careful. But we cannot take 100% control of everything and how events pan out.

That being said, accidents happen with pets, and you should be prepared when such happens.

It will be wise to have handy pet cleaning products so that stains can be pretreated before proper cleaning.

Identify Their Favorite Spot And Cover It

Pets have this thing where they pick out a particular place in the house and it just becomes theirs like it is a safe zone for them.

If this happens to be on the carpet then try to identify such a spot and cover it up with something much easier to clean frequently and at short notice.

Note: How often to shampoo carpet with pets? This should be done at least every twelve months but again, the frequency depends on the number of pets owned and the kind of pets.

How To Clean Carpets When You Own Pets

This is a guide on how to keep your carpet clean and in top condition as a pet owner:

Step #1. Prepare The Carpet

This involves clearing the floor of all objects that may hinder cleaning proceedings. Clear off things such as pet and children’s toys, gadgets, small furniture, etc.

You need to ensure that blankets, curtains, and other pieces of fabric aren’t dragging on the floor. This includes electrical cords as well.

All this is to ensure that they are not in the vacuuming path where they could be sucked up by the vacuum brush roll.

Kids and pets should also be kept out of the room during this, This will make the cleaning process smoother for you.

Step #2. Vacuum

Vacuuming is usually recommended before you eventually begin deep cleaning.

The reason is that pet hair, and other debris caught up in the carpet can be removed.

Step #3. Pretreat Carpet Stains

Remember that I mentioned something about having pet supplies handy?

They come in useful at this moment. You might have on your hand any old, set-in stain on the carpet, or you just noticed one while vacuuming.

These stains might be greasy or oily stains, chocolate, red wine stains, etc. Simply spray on the area and prepare to carry out deep cleaning. 

Step #4. Deep Clean

This is the big dog of carpet cleaning. This step is always effective but a culmination of other steps.

When you plug in your cleaner, make a slow, forward, and backward pass over the entire cleaning area.

Repeat this movement but this time without the trigger pulled for rinsing.

You should repeat this process (without the trigger) until the cleaning water becomes clear.

Note: Vacuuming should be done in multi-directional motion. 

Since movement on the carpet by humans and pets is to and fro, it is only right to vacuum from different directions too to get debris and dirt out.

How Often Should You Clean Your Carpet With Pets?

How often you should clean your carpet as a pet owner is largely dependent on the type of pet or pets you own and the number.

By implication, an individual who owns 3 dogs needs to clean more frequently compared to an individual with just a cat.

It is, however, advised that you clean the carpets at least twice weekly.

Note: Vacuuming can however be done daily. You may wonder how often should you steam clean your carpet with pets. At least once or twice every 4-6 weeks.

Conclusion

Keeping the carpet clean always with pets is a herculean task.

This is why you may wonder how often you clean your carpet with pets?

With the knowledge from this article, the job becomes less stressful. You can also engage the services of a professional periodically.