Toronto Carpet Inspector

I am surprised how it appears that no  one in Canada is aware that there has been a new standard for carpet installation released in the past year by the Carpet and Rug Institute.

Most carpet mills expect the carpet installers to install according to this standard.

If you haven’t seen it or reviewed it then please follow the following link:

http://www.carpet-rug.org/pdf_word_docs/CRI_Carpet_Installation_Standard_2011.pdf

I was up in Ottawa looking at a large commercial carpet claim last week.

The problems were numerous but a couple of the situations I encountered were quite different from those I usually encounter.

1) The carpet was being cleaned using a Tennant machine with Ready Space technology.

Now I had never encountered an inspection that used this cleaning technique before. I had to do some heavy research on the carpet and the cleaning system.

Anyways the Ready Space technology uses a machine that has rollers on it. These rollers are applied to the carpet and soil transfers onto them. The rollers are then cleaned by the carpet cleaning machine!! The idea is that there will be no chemical or water residues left on the carpet allowing to dry quickly and not to resoil quickly. The cleaners were using this system with no chemistry!

The problem as usual was no pre-vacuuming. I just don’t understand why people think that dry particulate soil will be released from a wet carpet? Because it won’t come out very easily.

2) The other issue with the carpeting was the complete absence of nosing along the cut edges of the carpet where it met the stone floors and boot scrapes. I know that in this case the manufacturer required that nosing be on the carpet for the first half inch of transition.  The end users were told by their designers that they had researched the product and were told that the edges could be just seam sealed.

Goes to show that you must read all the pertinent information available on the product, each and every time.

I am known to be a pretty smart guy when it comes to carpet. But even I must reread the specs for each product I inspect. The specs change soooooooo much!

Again this week I saw two situations of installers just not getting it when it comes to seam/edge sealing.

First one was from an installer who was repairing a seam that had a depression along it that was likely caused by too hot of a seaming iron.  The guys who had tried to fix the seam the first time had dismantled the seam, redid the seam and then left a tractor with the customer and asked her to run the tractor over the seam all weekend. Needless to say the customer was not impressed. The last installer went in there and said he could not match up the pattern. It was a high /low loop and the pattern was just less than an inch long. The installer said he could not powerstretch the carpet a half inch to help line up the patterns. I found this quite unbelieveable, especially when there were no elongated holes in the secondary backing that always exist when the carpet is adequately stretched. The same installer told me the seam he constructed was excellent and that he sealed the seams from the bottom with a glue gun!

Second one is from a delamination claim on a commercial install. There was more sealer on the concrete than on the seam. The old Standard said you could butter one cut edge and then butt the other edge into it. The new Standard states that you must seal both cut edges and then add a third bead of sealer to bind the two cut edges together. When I mentioned this to the retailer he was shocked that the new standard says that and that no manufacturer had told them of the new Standard For Carpet Installation.

I guess he has a point, who else would tell the retailers and installers that there is a new standard but the manufacturers? However is it the manufacturers responsibility to tell everyone of the new Standard? Of course it isn’t! I guess this is the tip of the iceberg for us inspectors over the next couple of years.