[Mike Halliday]

I’m sure we are all familiar with the concept of the ‘cleaning pie’ being 4 ingredients to clean a carpet,

 if you reduce one ingredient you need to compensate for the reduction by increasing the amount of one or more off the remaining 3. But which do you believe is the most important or do you rely on the most? From the recent posts a lot of people place a lot of importance to the prespray  & rinse agent,   so to them their preference is the chemical part of the pie.

I’m a big fan of heat and high flow, flushing the carpet with almost boiling water.

[Nobby]

Please forgive me,  I don’t want to come over a an awkward pedantic git but.....
Without chemical, I suggest agitation is of no use so chemical must be of more importance than agitation alone.
Without chemical I suggest time is of no relevance, if no pre spray is applied what are we waiting for? So chemical must be important than time alone.
Without flow then time, agitation,  chemical and temperature is of no use so logically flow is the only thing we can use to clean on its own so it must be the most important of all four but I don’t recommend using that as a method of cleaning!
To clean successfully we need a combination of all four. It’s true we can sometimes clean without dwell time, agitation or heat so I think the minimum we need is chemical and flow.  Apologies if I’ve missed the point of this poll,  but I can’t meaningfully vote.

[Mike Halliday]

A better way to look at it might be to give a percentage to each part of the pie. So each piece has 25%.

So if you reduce the percentage of one you must increase the percentage of the other. We all  might  use all 4 but with different percentages .

Personally I might use only 10% chemical,  I use 40% heat & 40% agitation 

[Nobby]

Yep, I’ll go along with that Mike.

[Ned Kelly]

How do you class "chemical" Mike? Do you mean how high the PH is?

[Mike Halliday]

‘Chemical’ is anything added to the water to aid cleaning whether it be an acid or alkali

Just to clarify this post I will give an example of percentages

1) I use a portable that get the water only warm so it’s only contributes 10% to the total

2). I use a rotary scrubber that’s really agitates the carpet well,  so that’s is 35%

(Now I have 55% still to find to make up the 100% needed to clean the carpet)

3) I’m in no rush so after scrubbing I chat to the housewife over a cup of coffee to give the carpet plenty of dwell time,  so the dwell time gives it’s full 25%

4). So I need to use an extra strong prespray that will give me 30%  to equal the 100% I need.

From this example you see I need to use more agitation and more chemical to make up for the limitation of having less heat.

[Raymondo]

All of the above are important on some carpets we wont use agitation at all and the carpets come up up perfect.

EOT are an example where they don't want to spend a lot.

Heat in my opinion is our best friend we clean a nightclub and we start with cold water from the TM  after a short time  hot water come though the hose can tell the difference with the clean.

This reminds me from years ago when we cleaned windows and stood in some cat poo and walked it up the ladder what a mess got the customers hosepipe and started to hose the ladder down not that successfully really she must have felt sorry for us as she came out with the kettle full of boiling water and it just dissolved it.

For a TM user heat is easy to get but for a portable user its a bit harder so many don't bovver or have to agitate the life out of the carpet.

[Stoots]

Just use them all and problem solved