Excess moisture in a carpet can be very bad. You’re risking all kinds of problems when you allow your carpeting to remain wet for any extended length of time. Whether it’s from a flood or a bad steam cleaning job performed by a poorly trained carpet cleaning service lexingtonsc, a wet carpet can pose a number of serious issues.

For starters, high levels of moisture trapped in a carpet are laying the groundwork for a breeding ground of bacteria and mold. If the latter develops in large amounts in and under the carpet, that can turn into a substantial health hazard for you and your family.

This isn’t even addressing the issue of damage that too much moisture can cause, to both your carpets and the floor and walls around the carpeting.

Should you be dealing with any type of excessive moisture, you need to take steps to dry wet carpet as quickly as you can. Here are four options you can try to do just that:

1. Eliminating Humidity

There are many factors that can cause a carpet to dry much slower than usual. One of the most common is too much humidity in the room. When the air is humid, there’s no place for the moisture in the carpet to go, so it remains there. That’s not good. So you need to dry out the air in the room.

In order to do that, you can turn on the air conditioner in the room to cool and dry the air in the room. If you don’t have air conditioning, try bringing in a dehumidifier to achieve the same result.

2. Air Flow

You want air flow to get through the fibers and into the backing material of the carpeting. Proper air flow and even air distribution are also imperative to ensuring that your carpet dries quickly. To do this, open all the windows in the room and place some fans in various locations around the carpet.

The more air that gets into the carpet, the faster you can dry it. Air disbursement is critical to a dry carpet.

3. Bring the Heat

Space heaters are also effective at drying your carpet faster. These are a good substitute in the event that you don’t have air conditioning or a dehumidifier at your disposal. However, you need to keep in mind that you are only using these to dry out the air in the room and NOT the carpet itself.

Pointing space heaters at a wet carpet is not going to make it dry any quicker, it will actually delay the drying time of the carpet instead. So be smart about where you locate your heaters and don’t use too many of them at once.

4. Baking Soda

Here’s a more unconventional method that really works. It’s pretty simple, just sprinkle a significant amount of baking soda over the length of the carpet and let it sit there for as long as 24 hours. Once that time has passed, vacuum the baking soda up and check the carpet.

You may need to do this along with space heaters or fans in the event the carpet isn’t completely dry after you vacuum. But this step will go a long way to taking most of the problem, if not all of it.