We have all at some time in our lives had a painting accident. A dribble here, a bigger dribble there, and we get a damp cloth and blot it up, so we are not told off by the other half.

How would you feel if the accident was not your fault? We recently received a telephone call from a frantic customer. They had set up their mobile hoovering robot and decided to go shopping.

When they returned they were greeted by this.

The robot had knocked over a blue tin of emulsion paint and, as you can see made a bit of a mess.

The customer had attempted to clean the carpet themselves using white spirit and foam without any success.

After I had stopped smiling, I did a small patch area to determine which POG chemical to use. Some work better than others in different scenarios.

Being a synthetic carpet we could be quite brutal with our cleaning.

The first thing we did was to clean the carpet under pressure using just cold water. Doing this allows us to remove the customer’s ingredients on their cleaning attempt, but also ensure that nothing is sealed into the fibres and the paint colour is there for life.

As the customer had used a foam cleaner we needed to add an additive to our machine. This additive stops our machine from becoming soapy and helps protect the vacuums.

Once the carpet had been cleaned using only cold water, the Pog chemical was left to dwell for 20 minutes. What this does is it allows the chemical to break down the paint pigment. After the 20 minutes, we then relearned the carpet using heat and pressured water, and added a deodoriser as well.

The customer was having friends over that evening so I dried the carpet out for 30 minutes for them.

Here was the finished job