5 Ways You Can Protect a Persian Rug
Some things that we recommend to our clients to prolong the life of their rugs.
5 Tips to make your rugs live longer!
1. Remove filtration soil annually. Filtration soil is dust and soil that filters through the face yarns of your rug and is trapped by the woven backing. This soil acts as an abrasive that can break down the fibers of the woven backing. This can lead to all sorts of problems like loosing shape, face yarns not being held in place, bald areas, ect. The easiest way a homeowner can help with this is to flip the rug over once a year, turn your vacuum height setting to the highest, and run the vacuum across the back of the rug for a prolonged period of time. This uses the rotating brush head of your vacuum to gently vibrate the filtration soil out of the rug. You may be amazed with how much soil you remove from your hand woven rug.
2. Vacuum gently. When you vacuum the face of your rug, you should set the height setting on your vacuum so that the brush head makes some contact with the rug, but does not leave brush lines or feels like the vacuum is "pulling" on the rug. This will help to protect the face yarns from disintegrating and being pulled out altogether.
3. Keep them dry. Many hand woven rugs have cotton fibers in the backing. You want to avoid saturating these fibers because that can cause the fibers to shrink often giving a rug an "hour glass" appearance and hurting the structure of the backing. This is why it is important to have these cleaned by a professional that can dry the rugs quickly and correctly after the cleaning.
4. Rotate your rugs. To prevent traffic patterns on your Persian rugs, we recommend that you rotate your rugs occasionally. This can help the nap of the face yarns appear the same. Overuse of only one area of the rug can lead to appearance issues down the road.
5. Protect them from dyes. Most wool rugs are not protected from being dyed by many household dyes. The natural fibers don't have the same dye resistance as a man made product like your wall to wall carpeting. So we want to avoid cool aid, lipstick, markers, pens, tea and coffee, ect. You get the idea with this, so please avoid at all costs spilling these items on your heirloom rugs.
I hope these 5 simple tips to prolong the life of your heirloom Persian rugs help you do just that!
Feel free to contact us on the home page of this site if you have any questions.
