A well designed rug, placed appropriately, can do wonders for your home décor. Similarly, a dirty or unkempt rug can ruin your décor in no time. If you are considering adding a rug to your room to improve its appearance, it is also important that you keep the rug clean to ensure that it adds to the attractiveness of the room, and not ruin it. Here are the top nine ways to keep your rug clean and attractive:

Carpet Vacuum Tips

1. Divide the carpet into areas depending on their usage. You will get high traffic areas that are used most  frequently, medium traffic areas and low traffic areas. High traffic areas need daily vacuuming, while medium traffic areas can do with vacuuming every other day. With low traffic areas, even biweekly vacuuming is sufficient.
2. Ensure that you vacuum your rugs with slow deliberate passes instead of a quick once-over. This will ensure that dirt and grit embedded deep into the rug are also removed.
3. .Ideally, use a vacuum cleaner with at least 80 cf/m (cubic feet of air per minute) suction power, to ensure that even the most abrasive grit is removed. You may also want to consider a dual-motor, upright vacuum with beater bar or double row of brushes with high suction.

Stain Removal Tips:

1. When removing a stain from a rug, always work from the outer edges of the stain to the center.

2. Never rub a spill on the rug. This will make the spill spread deeper and wider on the rug.

3. Before using any cleaning agent on a spill or a stain on the rug, ensure that it won’t damage or discolor the rug. Test the cleaning agent on a corner of the rug before using it on a spill or a stain.

4. After using a cleaning agent, it is important to blot out all the moisture on the rug to avoid bad odor. Place towels or paper napkins on the area and weigh it down with a heavy object to soak up the remaining moisture.

5. For dry spills, quickly vacuum the excess matter from the rug and scrape off any attached matter with a spoon. As far as wet spills are concerned, there are different techniques to deal with wet spills of different kinds. In fact, there are different ways of dealing with spills from hot liquids and cold liquids as well. Read up on all the different methods and keep a copy handy for easy reference.

6. If there is only moisture to be removed from the carpet, you may even consider using a standard hair dryer over the wet portion of the rug this works great on Persian rugs .