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  4. Lifting Carpets

Lifting Carpets

Lifting the carpets refers to lifting them up, to access underneath or to let them drip-dry, but leaving them in the car.

You may often hear us talking about 'lifting carpets' because there are often large amounts of water underneath them. Stopping leaks is only a part of the problem with leaky cars, as the water needs to be removed and the car dried to prevent all the problems associated with leaks in cars.

Wet carpet
Sometimes, wet carpets are obvious and there is no need for electronic gizmos as can be seen here where there is a puddle on top of the rear carpet.

Therefore, it is essential to lift the carpets.

Initially, we may use a moisture tester to see if we think there is any water under the carpets, although sometimes it may be obvious because the carpets are wet. 

In order to get to the water underneath the carpet and remove it using an extractor, we will need to remove the seats and usually the trim along the bottoms of the doors.

Ideally, we, we would remove the entire carpet from the car, however, in order to do this we would need to strip much of the interior, including the centre console and possibly the dashboard. This would be extremely time-consuming and expensive.

The alternative is to lift the carpets and dry them while still in the car. The body of the car does need to be dried anyway, so it is a suitable compromise to do both at the same time.

The majority of cars have thick sponge underneath the carpets. This serves as sound deadening and also creates enough space to hide ridged box sections, wiring loom, speakers and electrical controllers. Unfortunately, this sponge is extremely effective at holding water and very difficult to dry quickly. 

Lifting the carpets
The carpets on this Lexus are quite thin by modern standard and contain no foam, however this woolly sound deadening material is difficult to dry. The carpets are lifted by using props and bungees while being left inside the car.

We will use bungees, clips and props to lift up the carpet. We can then use an extractor to suck the water out of the floor pans. The carpets will then drip-dry which will remove most of the water, and we will return every few hours to suck out water which has pooled underneath. All the while, we use heated industrial air movers and dehumidifiers to help the interior dry. On some cars, this can take 2-3 days.

Carpets fully removed for decontamination.
A flood damaged car cleaned in detail with carpets removed.

If we took the carpets out of the cars, and we sometimes do, they still need to drip-dry as they are moulded, shaped and often contain polystyrene blocks, so we couldn't run them through a mangle.

There are times where we will fully strip a car's interior and remove the carpets, but this is usually done in cases of severe contamination due to flooding.

Written by . Last updated 25/10/2023 17:39