We often get asked to remove smoke odors from carpets caused by cigarette smoking. And we have been fairly successful at this, but there are a few things that you should know when dealing with cigarette smoke in your home.

What You Need To Know About Cigarette Smoke Removal

1. Yes, cigarette smoke odor can be removed from your carpet, but it is not as easy as you might think.

2. The cigarette smoke odor you are smelling is rarely just from the carpet. In fact, most of the odor probably is not even in the carpet. It is in the walls, upholstery, curtains, and about anything else it is has come into contact with.

3. "Normal" cleaning of the carpets is probably not going to remove the smoke particles in-bedded in your carpet.

Ok, Let's Take A Closer Look At Why Cigarette Smoke Odor Can Be So Hard To Eliminate From Your Carpet

A. The smoke molecules are small, really small. Usually much smaller than other particles of soil that are in your carpet. So removing these particles of smoke is usually not just a case of cleaning. 

Yes, cleaning is a large part of this but NOT REGULAR CLEANING - although just basic carpet cleaning can certainly help. 
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The first step in any type of odor removal is finding the source of the odor and, many times, people think that most of the cigarette smoke odor is coming from the carpets. But this is not true. Most of the odor, as mentioned earlier,  is coming from the upholstery, walls, curtains, and other structures in your home.
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So just cleaning the carpet can help, but total smoke odor removal is probably not going to happen with just carpet cleaning. But carpet cleaning should be a good starting point, or a major part of the smoke removal process.
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B. "Normal" carpet cleaning can actually make the odor worse if you have an issue with heavy cigarette smoke. When we say heavy we mean years and years of cigarette smoking in your home or place of business.
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Why is this?
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Because if there is a heavy build-up of smoke in your home, and carpet, it can be extremely difficult to remove with basic cleaning. And once that water hits the carpet, and the water starts to evaporate into the air the smoke molecules go with it and now your home could smell even worse. Obviously this is not a good thing and why cleaning your carpets the "normal" way is not the best way to go about eliminating the cigarette odor in your carpet.
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C. Special cleaning agents, and techniques, are needed to properly remove smoke from your carpet. Normal cleaning agents, which work great for regular cleaning, are not designed to work on smoke odors. Therefore you need special cleaning agents to effectively deal with smoke odor in your carpet. 
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These "special cleaning agents" are designed to not only clean, but to destroy odor molecules that are the root of the smoke odor you are smelling.
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D. When it comes to the techniques used to clean smoke odor from your carpet the main issue is removing as much source of the odor as possible, and this means really aggressive carpet cleaning. REALLY AGGRESSIVE!
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You might be surprised how much smoke can actually fall from the air and set into the carpet fibers. The amount can be huge, especially if the carpets have not been cleaned for a long time and there has been heavy smoking in the home or place of business.
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The source of the smoke must be removed and this means thorough flushing of the carpet. One of the advantages to using Lintons Carpet Cleaning is that we use aggressive, but safe, cleaning techniques that rinse your carpet much better than the standard carpet cleaning techniques that most cleaners use.
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You can see an example of this aggressive cleaning on our home page by clicking here and scrolling down towards the bottom of the page. In the two videos you will see the RV360 in use. This machine makes over 600 cleaning passes per minute and quickly eliminates soil in your carpet. The use of the RV360 is one of the reasons we have such good success removing smoke odor from carpets in the Vancouver, Washington area.
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In Conclusion: Cigarette smoke in carpets can be a huge problem and it can be hard to remove. Hiring a carpet cleaning company that knows how to deal with the smoke odor in your carpet is a good idea.