Thread: Wet carpets, detail or vacume

Depends how much they are saying is $$$.

If you vacuum, some won't deal with water and they die on you. alternatively you could probably hire a wet/dry one for an hour quite cheaply? (i'm not sure)

The thing is it won't take much water left and you'll have a smelly vehicle.

I have no idea how hard it is to take carpets out but if the detailer can do it maybe you should and just hang em on the line and give em a hose.

Xavier

Go and hire a carpet cleaner and clean the carpets. The run the car with the heaters on full with the windows open a tiny bit at the top. This will clean and dry the carpets . Best you can do with the carpets are in the car. That is what Land Rover dealers do to tidy up cars before selling them

then buy yourself a Defender.

Xav

To dry out the underlay you have to at least lift the carpet/underlay while drying them.
I know from experience. The floor could eventually rust if not dried out properly.

I agree with John D. Your Av appears to be a D2, im not sure about them but my old D1 had about 30mm of rubberised foam under the carpet. The carpet is nylon waterproof backing and is actually easy to clean, but when you go for a swim the rubber foam fills up with water. I ended up pulling the carpet (easy enough) and removing all the foam, weighed about 50kg as was full of water... I dont believe the foam will ever dry out if you dont remove it???? after swimming up the cape a few februarys in a row I just left the foam out... made it noisy and hot so the upgrade to the defender last year didnt seem too bad at all!

Steve

An ordinary vacuum cleaner will not cope with wet carpets and any muck that might be on them.

If you have a VAX (I swear I don't get any kickbacks from vax), you could first give it a very good vacuuming in wet mode, it should suck quite deep into the pile and remove water from the underlay. Once you've removed as much moisture as possible, use it to give the carpets a decent shampooing to remove all the mud and silt etc.

I've had some minor issues with wet carpets in my D2. I've had a water container let go a couple of times in the back and flood the whole rear section. That carpet is easy to take out although you'll have to remove the side pockets. I took it out and put it in the sun for a couple of days.

The foam is very thick and really hangs onto the water.

One of these leaks also ran under the carpet all the way to the front passenger footwell. Only got wet on the one side and it was clean water. The front carpet looks like a right pain to get out, maybe needs the seats removed (???). I lifted mine from the side and ran a flexible pipe taped to the heater and then under the carpet. Ran the heater for about 1 week on full.

I was lucky and it didn't smell.

Try removing all trim along doors etc that holds carpet down; Lift carpet and sponge rubber as high as you can and and poke bits of timber in there to hold it up of the floor.
Then aim a hairdryer or two ( whatever you have ) in under there. Leave for some time. Watch out how you position the dryer so it doesn't get blocked vents or overheat.
This works for me, but you sound like you have a major porblem, so may no be so effective. You'll need to do it over a few days. Best way is to remove the sponge rubber altogether.