Dry carpet cleaning
A low-moisture carpet-cleaning method that spreads an absorbent cleaning compound across the carpet, agitates it into the fibers to bind with soil, and then vacuums the soil-loaded compound away.
Also known as: dry compound cleaning, low-moisture powder cleaning
Dry carpet cleaning uses a slightly moist absorbent compound — typically a mixture of organic material, detergent, and solvent — that is spread across the carpet and worked into the fibers with a counter-rotating brush. The compound binds with soil released from the fibers, and after a short dwell time the soil-loaded compound is thoroughly vacuumed out. Because so little water is used, carpet is walkable almost immediately after cleaning.
The method is best suited to routine appearance maintenance in commercial environments and to specific residential fibers that respond poorly to moisture. IICRC S100 recognizes dry compound methods as a legitimate cleaning approach with the same interim-versus-restorative framing that applies to bonnet and encapsulation cleaning: it maintains appearance between deeper wet-extraction cycles, not in place of them.
The main practical trade-off is that any absorbent compound the vacuum does not fully retrieve can accumulate at the base of the carpet fibers or migrate into the backing. Thorough vacuuming — often several passes in different directions — is what separates a good dry-clean result from a poor one. When the vacuum work is skipped, dry-cleaning residue behaves similarly to any other unrinsed cleaning residue.