With your Challenger machine, you will be ideally positioned to participate profitably in a newly evolving area of carpet cleaning known as ENCAPSULATION, or "encap" for short. Encap differs from our cotton pad-based cleaning method in that you are not actually removing soil while you are operating the machine. What you are doing instead is scrubbing into the carpet a kind of cleaning agent which removes the soil from the carpet's fibers and ENCAPSULATES it in little invisible clumps in the residue of the cleaning agent.

The chemical design of the encap cleaner ensures its drying in a highly crystallized form which is kind of loosely attached to the newly clean carpet fiber. By crystallized is meant that this residue, composed of dried cleaning solution and carpet soil, will shatter to a fine powder and be vacuumed up the next time your customer vacuums the premises.

This process would definitely NOT WORK for the professional cleaner either if the results of his/her work were a still dirty looking carpet, OR if the cleaner was obliged to return to the premises the next day to vacuum up the residue. With encap, what is amazing is that carpet looks beautifully clean when you have finished your work. In fact, many professional cleaners are reporting that the encapped carpet actually looks BETTER than when they have cleaned it via whatever method they used previously.

One of the keys to performing encap effectively is the level of agitation involved in the process. Thorough agitation of the carpet fiber while it is still wet or damp with the cleaning agent results in the greatest possible amount of soil being separated from the carpet. The Challenger Machine operates at a rate of 1750 RPM. The standard rotary machine turns at just 175 RPM. The Challenger thereby generates TEN TIMES the level of agitation that can be achieved with a rotary.

While the cleaning agent used in encapsulation cannot be marketed as "all-natural", it is still quite safe as commercial cleaning products go. The only ingredient it contains that the government requires to be listed on what is called its MSDS (disclosure) sheet is isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol. In fact, the brand of encap cleaner we use contains Australian Tea Tree Oil, a natural product with long-recognized disinfectant capabilities.

Encap so far seems to be having its greatest degree of success in the commercial market: office areas; R&D spaces; hotels; etc. The professional cleaner using encapsulation in areas such as these is able to clean more carpet with less effort, and can therefore bid these jobs for less money than can the wet, or & "steam" cleaner. However, we and others have been testing its appropriateness in residential situations as well, and have so far been mostly pleased with both the results and the customer's reaction.