Cleaning Week: Tips to get rid of those hard-to-remove stains from your carpet

Monday, February 13, 2017
Stretch Your Dollar: The best carpet cleaners
Patricia Lopez tests two store bought carpet cleaners and one DIY concoction on tough stains.

It's cleaning week on Stretch Your Dollar!

We are cleaning those pesky carpet stains and put several items to the test.

Some common carpet stains include pasta sauce, mustard, ketchup and wine.

We set our stains in a grid form, so you can see a side by side comparison.

For this test, we are going to leave the stains for a couple of minutes to see how well the products work.

The store bought cleaning products are Resolve and Stainmaster. In addition, to save money we are going to create a "do it yourself" cleaners.

The recipe:

  • 2 ounces of hydrogen peroxide
  • 1 ounce of Dawn dish washing liquid

Put that in a spray bottle and shake it up.

Right away we noticed the pasta sauce, the wine and ketchup came up easily with all three of our cleaners.

The mustard stain didn't seem to budge.

The worst mustard stain even after some scrubbing was the one cleaned with Resolve. Despite our best efforts, it left a deep yellow stain.

The other two cleaners fared better on the mustard, but overall Resolve didn't work as well as the two other products.

In our test, you can still see a little bit of ketchup, mustard, wine and pasta sauce.

At the end the test, the DIY product we concocted ourselves actually was the best one.

Before trying these products, it's best to test them on a spot that's not so obvious and follow the directions.